Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 9)

After Microsoft, Maggie moved to her current role as CEO of Citizen Communications. Here she explains the reasons for her move and provides some background information about Citizen. The consumer business of Citizen is done under the Frontier brand.

SM: After Microsoft you switched to Citizen? MW: I did. I was enjoying the job I was doing at Microsoft, but I was very proactive in continuing to tell Bill and Steve that if the right opportunity came along I would like to go back to run another public company. I received a call from Citizen Communications, because I was knowledgeable about the company. I had sat on the board of directors of one of their public subsidiaries called Electric Lightwave, which was a competitive local exchange carrier headquartered right outside of Portland. I was on that board for a number of years, and because Citizen had owned 80% of the company with the balance being public, I had the opportunity to get to know several members of the board of directors of Citizen who also sat on the Electric Lightwave board of directors.

It was the fall of 2004 when I received the call. I think as you know it was a time the telephone industry was really making strides and taking steps towards convergence of voice, video and data. I basically saw this as an opportunity to take my background in cable, which is the video side, and wireless and technology with a great focus on customers and building businesses, and kind of pull it all together and bring that with me to a great company.

Citizens already had terrific markets, great employees and a great network infrastructure.

SM: Can you please describe the CZN business in more detail? MW: We are the second largest rural telephone company in the US. We serve about 2.6 million customers nation wide, and we are in 28 states and 285 counties. The majority of all of our locations are rural with the exception of Rochester NY.

We offer both local and long distance voice services. We also offer high speed internet, and we reach over 80% of all of our households with broadband today. We are continuing to build out our network to reach into the low 90’s over the next three to five years. In addition to that we have a strategic partnership with Dish Network, so we offer the triple play with voice, video and data. We do all the ordering, customer service, and billing on behalf of Dish.

For our customers it is the Frontier product set. That has gone very well for us in the marketplace since we went with Dish a couple of years ago. Additionally we are now starting to build out wireless networks. We have installed our first municipal wi-fi network in Elko, Nevada, and we have 10 more municipalities we will be building out over the next 6-9 months. We are also working with individual “anchor tenants” in these markets which are colleges, universities, and hospitals. We are able to provide them with their own wireless networks on the wi-fi mesh platform. We are very excited about the opportunity and the capability we are delivering in our market places.

[to be continued]

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]
[Part 7]
[Part 8]

This segment is part 9 in the series : Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter
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