Zayo reviews

Lack of direction, mediocre compensation, poor management, unwillingness to take suggestions, disdain for customers, and arbitrary commission payments. Zayo could be a real powerhouse, but they are doing a great job alienating vendors, customers, and employees. The fault largely resides (IMO) in the executive suite, where there are people promoted well beyond their experience or ability, all answering to someone unwilling to consider ideas not generated from the top handful of executives. The line leaders either don't trust the executives (and their reports can see this) or the line leaders do trust the executives and parrot the talking points of the week, and the workers then don't trust the line leaders because they see that reality conflicts with what they are being told. Zayo executives speak about the entrepreneurial/start-up culture of Zayo, which is great, but the execution is solely lacking. Being flexible and willing to try something new is great, but it can’t work if there aren’t clear criteria for success, timely reviews, and support from management. Zayo certainly is willing to throw something up on the wall and see what sticks, but because they don’t really know what they want (other than lots of profit with no investment, immediately), it’s very hard to show success, especially with new or specialty products. Examples of this lack of focus include rolling out new, custom products with a 6-month sales cycle, and then cancelling the project after 3 months due to lack of sales and starting a new product line after a huge project win, hiring respected industry leaders to build a team, committing to funding the project, and then not coming through with the funding, changing the focus, and replacing experienced leaders with yes-men. Zayo is big on internal competition, but the way that they have the product groups in silos seems detrimental to long-term growth. Basically, each product group is a discrete P&L, which is fine, but they end up competing in ways that harm their customers. As an example, take a small company that starts off just buying DIA services. They are happy with the DIA, so then they order a couple of 1G Ethernet links to a couple 3rd party data centers. Still happy, still growing, but now that 1G links aren’t enough, and they want to buy a managed WDM service to connect their first office, the 2 new offices they’ve opened, and their 2 3rd party data centers. You would think it would be as simple as placing a large order for the new services, to replace their Ethernet services, but because these are different products, and under different P&Ls, the Ethernet team will take a churn event, so they won’t want the order, while the Waves team is seeing a huge win being stopped by the jerks in Ethernet (they aren’t jerks, that’s just how it seems to the Waves folks). The other issue with the internal competition is that managers/directors change groups fairly often. This seems like a good thing, especially for management employees desiring a broad view of the industry, but it’s very hard in an industry where a new product roll-out/feature enhancement may take months of planning, and then an additional year to actually deploy, and have 5 separate VPs running it from concept to completion. It’s even more frustrating when directors are about to switch silos, but they want to ensure the maximum bonus so they try and get installations ‘completed’ (on paper) so that they get credit for the revenue, even if it’s still weeks away from being turned over to the customer. (To be fair, I think this was largely the result of a few bad apples who are no longer at Zayo, but the time and effort it would take to get an account credit approved because some cowboy moved an account to billing 2 months before the service was turned up was a nightmare.) Compensation is always contentious, especially in a company with employees in dozens of different offices. Zayo compensation is probably better than average in low-cost areas, but it is below average in high-cost areas, especially for sales professionals. Zayo management doesn’t appear to feel this is a problem, and if you work in Tulsa or Butte or something, it’s probably not an issue; good luck getting what your peers at competitors get if you live in NYC or SF or LA though. To be fair, the equity can certainly make up for it if you were lucky enough to get a pre-IPO grant and stick it out until everything vests. I was certainly down 15-20% in my year-over-year compensation, but on aggregate well ahead because of equity. I would caution anyone looking at Zayo to be aware that there is a difference between the equity that employees have been given in the past and the RSU (restricted stock unit) plan that Zayo is pushing now. There is nothing wrong with RSUs, and the Zayo RSUs do have a reasonably short vesting period, but they are now pushing RSUs in lieu of cash compensation, and you won’t be able to convert them into cash for 15 months after they are issued, which is closer to 18 months from when you initially earned them. The latest plan I heard was that Zayo was pushing people to take a cut in salary and replace it with RSUs, and I know that they were pushing sales reps to take RSUs instead of cash for their commission bonus payments. Great, now just try convincing your bank to take a 15-month IOU for your mortgage payments. Customer focus is another place that I feel Zayo could improve greatly. Part of this is that Zayo grew as a collection of assets cobbled together largely in small markets, where there wasn’t much competition other than the RBOC, and you can be pretty bad and still be better than Verizon/CenturyLink/ATT. Another point is that Zayo started as a carrier’s carrier, and carriers will accept missed dates, poor documentation, additional costs above the contracted price, etc, because carriers operate that way and are used to it. Large enterprise customers expect white-glove service, installation as promised, and a clear way to handle disputes. I personally saw my customers transition from choosing Zayo (and their predecessor companies) first to choosing Zayo as a backup or as a last resort if Zayo were the only non-RBOC carrier in their building. Another thing that really upset customers is lack of continuity with their sales team. Zayo took literally hundreds of accounts and moved them away from their local sales teams to a centralized order-taking center in a low cost-of-living area, thinking that they could continue the sales momentum with a sales team making 40% of what the previous team made. Oddly enough large enterprise customers, billing tens of thousands of dollars a month felt insulted when, rather than having a sales rep and an engineer who have managed the account for 5 years and know all of the issues, they are suddenly switched to a call center who has no idea who this customer is, what services they have, or even what WDM is trying to handle their accounts. If you were lucky enough to not get transitioned to a call-center sales team, your account team seemed to change every 9 months. Again, very large enterprises billing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month don’t really see the value in having to re-establish a relationship every 9 months, especially when they are spending 3 years developing their next network architecture and have worked with the legacy team the entire time. The most egregious failures at Zayo relate to sales compensation. There are many ways to set up a comp plan, and they all have advantages and flaws, but Zayo seems to have taken the worst bits from each and combined them into the Uber-Zayo-Not-Pay-The-Reps plan. As I understand it stands now (though this is second hand knowledge because I am an ex-employee and they change the plan several times a year) you are compensated on a combination of Net Installs (new sales minus churn) and NPV (net present value). The quota has a Net Sales number and an NPV number, which was supposed to allow reps to still get paid for selling high-revenue, low NPV deals (i.e. a complex network to a new customer with substantial build costs). At the end of the sales period (was monthly, now hearing it’s quarterly) they take the average of your Net Installs number and your NPV number and pay you on that. Sounds good so far, but renewals often result in a NEGATIVE payout (because the renewal is at a lower price, so that’s a negative and it’s a larger negative percentage of your Net Install quota than the NPV is a positive percentage of you NPV quota). It gets even worse if you do a complete replacement of a network (say a 6 year old network that has been completely paid off and only generating profit for 4 years), because then you have to take the Net Install hit, plus you have to account for the new network costs, which drives NPV down substantially. To exacerbate matters, there is a HUGE amount of “flexibility” in the plan, which basically means that if your management won’t go to bat for you, you can end up in a situation where an account it assigned to you for a short period, you can get saddled with all of the churn, and then the account goes to someone else for all the new business. I personally had a quarter where the 3 teams that I supported ended up being at about 125% of combined plan, 90% of combined plan, and 75% of combined plan, yet I got paid out at 6% of combined plan because my management wouldn’t get a HUGE churn event removed, even though the rep, the manager, and the VP all had it removed from their comp numbers (because customer turned down an old service after the new service was installed—AND ZAYO CHANGED THE COMP PLAN TO NOT PAY OUT ON THE NEW SERVICE). As if it’s not bad enough the new comp plan pays something like 25% of the commission in cash, with the remainder being RSUs which vest 15 months after they are awarded. OK, so it’s a long-game, except if you leave before the RSUs vest, you get nothing beyond the 25% in cash that they already paid you. There is an old saying in sales that ‘Compensation Drive Behavior’ and the only logical behavior that I can see this driving is encouraging sales reps to do as little as possible for the 15 months before they resign, because you aren’t going to be compensated for your work. I think Zayo has an unbelievable (and almost impossible to recreate) physical assets, a top customer base, and some very talented employees. I think they are trying to do the right thing on work/life balance. I think the vast majority of Zayo employees really try to do the right thing. However, unless and until they change their senior management structure (which could be as simple as separating external Investor Relations from day-to-day Operations), they are going to struggle to succeed. I will just close by saying that there have been a number of articles about how Sears is being destroyed by Ed Lampert, and I see a LOT of similarities. The following article specifies 5 major failures, and I think that current Zayo management is largely guilty of 4 of them. (Zayo has sold off assets that weren’t part of their core competency.) (Glassdoor does not allow URL links, so I suggest you search for an Forbes story written by Adam Hartung that describes how Ed Lampert destroyed Sears.) There is another article on the same CEO and company published in Salon that I actually saved when it was first published because it so strongly resembled what I was seeing at Zayo. (Search for Salon Ayn Rand CEO Empire Partner, because, again, URL links are blocked.)