Telecom’s M&A Wave: Building a Unified Corporate Culture with Joe Cecin of Ontivity

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Telecom’s M&A Wave: Building a Unified Corporate Culture with Joe Cecin of Ontivity

Thank you so much for joining me on the show where we talk tech, talent and all things telecom. I’m thrilled to have with me my guest, Joe Cecin. He is the CEO of Ontivity. Joe, thanks so much for joining me.

Carrie, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I can’t wait to get into this. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because I have so much respect for you as a leader. I want to hear more about your story. How did you get to your seat where you are?

I’ll give you a brief chronological background. I grew up in New York City in a working-class family. I am a grandson of immigrants. I graduated from a New York City public high school and was fortunate enough to get into West Point, which was a life-changing event for me. I was the first college graduate in my family so that was certainly a transformational experience.

I learned a lot about leadership and organizations at a young age. I did a few years on active duty in the US Army and learned from folks who had a lot more experience than I did. I learned that delicate balance of managing people who are more technically competent than you are. That has served me well throughout my career.

I got out of the Army after five years on active duty and went back to business school. That was the beginning of my business career. I spent two years getting my MBA and then after that, I had the great wisdom to leave Silicon Valley at the dawn of the internet to join a phone company. I often think, “What if,” but it’s been a great road nonetheless.

I started as an engineer at Bell Atlantic. That’s how old I am. I crossed my 30th year in telecom in 2022. I started as an engineer and learned about telecom from the inside out. We were initially designing wireless networks at what is known as Verizon. It’s a long time ago but it was a great foundation to learn about the telecom industry from the ground up.

I followed my boss at the time in the mid-‘90s to a series of entrepreneurial endeavors, building fiber initially in Latin America. I then co-founded a company to build fiber in the US in the Mid-Atlantic. I did a couple of entrepreneurial stints in the mid-2000s. I did a few years as a middle market telecom M&A banker so I learned about doing deals. I wanted to get back into operations so I followed a good friend of mine to RCN Corporation, which was a competitive cable TV over-builder. They had a residential cable business and a competitive fiber business as well. That business got acquired a lot of M&A in the telecom sector. That was a great result.

I did some individual consulting for private equity firms and family offices for a couple of years. I sat on a few boards. A couple of years ago, I entered the ENC or the contractor side of the business. I joined a company called Pinnacle Wireless. It was a subsidiary of UniTek out of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania that had a bunch of wireless and wireline engineering construction businesses and subsidiaries.

I then joined HYLAN out of the greater New York City area as COO in 2018 and then took the CEO job in 2019. It’s a similar story. It’s mostly a fiber and small-cell construction business across the country. I got recruited to come to Texas to take over as CEO of InterTech Holdings at the time. InterTech is the platform company of what’s known as Ontivity. It was founded by Eric Chase many years ago. Eric and I have worked hand-in-glove in the transition. I joined a few years ago here at Ontivity so the honeymoon’s over. It has been busy and I look forward to talking more about that. That’s how I ended up here.

Tell me about Ontivity.

Ontivity is a great family member company. We call our companies family member companies put together predominantly through acquisition. InterTech was a platform company founded by Eric Chase. They did several acquisitions. They were acquired by private equity back in 2016. They then sold the business to another private equity firm in 2019. We’ve done a couple of more acquisitions during their tenure. We have five operating divisions or family member companies across the country if you think about a big smile across the South from Florida through the Gulf States, Texas, Arizona and up to the Pacific Northwest. It is a big swath of the Southern part of the United States going up to the Pacific Northwest.

We’ve got about 1,000 employees. We do a ton of wireless infrastructure, building for all the major wireless carriers as well as a lot of the infrastructure providers and tower companies. It’s a great group of people. They’re very dedicated to what they do. Our core value is safety. We always lead with that. This can be an inherently dangerous business so we focus on safety a lot. It’s been a wonderful journey even in the quick year I spent here bringing these five companies together and telling the story of what Ontivity is overall while trying to preserve the local strengths that we have from a customer relationship standpoint in a local community standpoint. That’s Ontivity in a nutshell.

You have seen a lot in your 30 years. What are you seeing in the way of trends that are shaping our industry for the future?

There are a couple of things. Number one, we’ll talk about the people aspect in-depth in a minute. Certainly, there have been some significant changes in terms of the talent pool, recruiting and retaining your people. Overall, I’ve also seen a lot of consolidation on the contractor side in conversations with our customers. They tend to want to work with fewer, larger and more capable contractors across the country.

We’ve seen a lot of consolidation and M&A. You’ll continue to see that. We’ll talk more about M&A in a minute as well. There’s been a lot of consolidation in our space. We’ve seen a ton of demand. We don’t have to coach our audience on what 5G has done, especially in 2022. 2022 was a great year from a demand standpoint. We expect that to continue. There’ll be some ups and downs but the general trend is very favorable for building infrastructure in the wireless space.

I saw a headline. It was Recession Won’t Stop Telecom M&A in 2023. What factors do you see that are driving this activity?

The industry tends to be fairly recession-proof. Even in times of economic challenge, people don’t want to go backward in terms of their mobile devices or the amount of bandwidth they’re using to consume the different apps. That’s not going backward. Wireless carriers have to continue to provide high bandwidth services that are highly available everywhere. That’s not going to change if the economy takes a step backward in terms of recession.

In addition, from a company like Ontivity’s perspective, there is still a ton of building to be done. I don’t want to cast aspersions on marketing campaigns about nationwide 5G but we still have a little list to go. In terms of the 5G build, there are a lot of build-out requirements per FCC requirements by certain deadlines. We don’t see the macro-picture changing that much with or without a recession. It tends to be fairly recession-proof. Everybody is aware of the tens of billions of dollars that have been set aside by the government, whether it’s RDOF or the BEAD program for rural broadband and fiber projects. That hasn’t even started yet. We’ve got all of that to look forward to over the next few years as well.

Let’s talk a little bit more about M&A. How do you overcome the challenge of integrating multiple companies? Let’s look especially at the talent acquisition area.

When you do some acquisitions, you buy these businesses because they’re great businesses. They tend to have great leaders and good people. Otherwise, it’s not an attractive target. The first proposition is to make sure you do no harm. You’re buying these companies for a reason. Make sure you preserve what’s good about them. It’s important to listen and learn. Try to find out what’s working at that business and also what’s not working at that business and what could help them scale more quickly. Migrate those changes or implement those changes over time because a lot of sudden changes, especially at the front end of an integration process, can send shockwaves through the company.

We’re a people business. You don’t want your best people leaving if they see things are going sideways or in a different direction. Ultimately, it is important to bring those companies into the fold and have consistent messaging to the employees about the value of the overall platform. That’s part of why we do M&A. It’s all about, in the beginning, building credibility by showing them you’re willing to listen and over time, implementing changes.

Quite frankly, for some of the smaller businesses, as a larger platform, we can take some of the things off their plate that they don’t want to do but have to do as part of their business. I’m talking about a lot of shared services like finance, IT, insurance and bonding. We can do that much more effectively and on a centralized basis. Initially, that change seems dramatic but over time, they adopt it and say, “It’s working pretty well.” That’s the formula.

With respect to people, that’s one of the bigger challenges. How do you get a common culture across these businesses that have great local identities? That’s a delicate act. I go back to my point about building credibility, not making a change too quickly, communicating with them about where you want to go and eventually having them buy into that vision.

One of the biggest challenges that our industry is facing is finding, hiring, engaging and retaining field staff. I’d like to know what your secrets are. I want you to tell me all your secrets for finding the right people first or their strategies that are working for you with field techs and everyone in this world. Also, retention and anything that’s working for you in the area of retaining field staff specifically. 

We are a people business so the communication path to current employees and future employees is critical from a retention standpoint. It is important when you talk about that value chain of identifying, finding, recruiting, training and retaining. The upfront piece is important. If you want all the secrets or the formula, one thing we’re trying to do a better job is the upfront piece of filtering.

The communication path to current and future employees is critical from a retention standpoint.

For example, tower climbing can be scary to some people. It’s important to know that before they make it too far down in the hiring process. We’re trying to do a better job of making sure applicants are aware, especially the new folks. If you get an experienced tower hand, they already know about the business. Somebody who says, “I might like to do this,” we’re trying to do a better job of showing them and teaching them what that’s about.

One of the fun things we did and you might have seen it in one of the trade shows is we came up with a virtual reality tower climb. Using a pair of virtual reality glasses, we put together a virtual tower climb, which is pretty realistic. You either need to be hanging onto something or sitting down when you do it. It gives people a feel of what it’s like to be up a couple of hundred feet on a tower. Those upfront filtering things are important. Our observation is that you have fairly high turnover with new employees but if you can get them past the 6 to 12-month mark, they tend to stay. What can we do better on the front end of the process?

In terms of retention, you hit on it in your question, which is engagement. I’m certainly no scholar of human capital strategies but I’ve read several studies that say engaged employees tend to stay on longer, work more safely and are more productive. What can we do to engage our employees better to impact retention? I come back to communication, making them feel like they’re a part of something important and telling our story that gives purpose to their work. Everybody wants to do purposeful work and important work. I do believe the work we’re doing is very important in the context of what’s going on in the industry and society. It’s not being shy about writing about the importance of our work.

Another thing is to talk about the total compensation package. Many of our employees are hourly workers. One of the tough things is to talk about compensation, not just X dollars per hour. We have great benefitting programs like 401(k) and the culture. All of those things taken together is an important story to tell your folks when it comes to engagement and retention.

You’re so right about that. We focus so much on that hourly rate. They focus on that too. When you show them the whole picture along with that career pathing like, “This is your future,” and help them to see that vision, it must make an enormous difference.

It certainly does. With respect to career pathing also, this is not something smaller companies tend to be able to do. First of all, identify the next layer of leadership. It’s like, “Who’s going to run this company in five years?” We all have strengths and weaknesses. How do we develop those folks and make sure that they have the skillset they’ll need to be successful? The other thing is we do a pretty good job of promoting from within. That’s important for people to see that as part of a larger platform, there is that career path to more responsibility and compensation. Several folks are promoted from within. We love to do that whenever possible.

Let’s talk about the culture of Ontivity. Is there a common theme across all the families of companies? How has that culture evolved with the M&A?

With culture, we should put a sign out that says, “Under Construction.” Culture is always evolving and hopefully, getting better. The trick for us was to take five different cultures and try to come up with the best of all a common culture without losing what made those companies great. Our tagline on Ontivity is, “Local connections, national solutions.” We believe that. It’s the folks at the local level who have those important customer relationships that lead to recurring work and happy customers.

I want the best of both worlds. I want to be perceived as the national player that we are without losing that local feel. That’s a delicate thing to do but we talk about that all the time. Culture is not a light switch that you can turn on and have this great new culture. It’s bringing people along, having a common vision and communicating frequently. It’s always a work in progress. The other thing we deal with is our geographical diversity presents some challenges too. Arkansas is not like the Seattle area. We’ve got local variations there. We don’t want to homogenize that because it’s not possible. What you want to do is leverage what’s best locally but also tell a consistent national story.

Culture is not a light switch that you can turn on.

You invest in marketing and it’s important to you. I saw that at South Wireless Summit when everyone was dressed in Ontivity shirts. Everyone was like, “Did you see Ontivity?” It was great. It was the talk of the show. What role does marketing play in talent attraction and retention?

It’s huge. Thank you for the kudos. I have to give credit where credit’s due. Monica Vink is our Director of Marketing. She does a terrific job. You mentioned the rebranding. We did rebrand the company in 2022. I’m giving credit where it’s due. It was under the direction of Jim Tracy who’s a Senior Advisor to Ontivity. He did a masterful job in taking five separate companies with a confusing holding company name, which was similar to an operating company and turning it into Ontivity.

We invested a ton of money in that rebranding in 2022. We did increase our marketing budget. It is great we rebranded but unless we are consistent and follow through, all of that value will be lost. We upped our marketing game. To answer your question, marketing, talent acquisition and HR has got to be locked in at the hip. You have to have consistent messaging internally and externally. It doesn’t matter to those folks who might be thinking about where they want to take the next career step.

Consistent theming is very important. We have increased our marketing spend and it’s fun. You mentioned that show. The joke among some people is we’re perceived as the cool kids on the contractor spot. That’s a great thing to be perceived as. People want to become part of something interesting and growing. It’s cool. Marketing has to be tied to the human capital element.

Marketing is a passion of mine. I love that topic. I respect you as a leader. In the conversations that we’ve had, I’ve learned so much from you. Can you talk about who are you as a leader? What’s most important to you?

People who know me say, “He’s been using that for a while. It’s his old saw.” I talk about the three important Cs. It’s important when you talk about what’s important to you as a leader to be simple and crisp. I call it the three Cs. They’re Character, Competence and Commitment. On the Character side, it’s the foundation. It’s non-negotiable.

Your integrity is everything. It’s important that, as a leader, you maintain that integrity. You say what you do and do what you say. You treat people with respect. That’s super important. Part of that is also transparency. People are smart. If it’s perceived as a scheme, they’re going to see right through it. You have to be an authentic person and that starts with your character.

On the Competence side, it’s all about knowing and doing your job. Be a competent person. Know what you have to do and do it. Safety is at the front of mind at all times. A commitment to safety in your personal life and work life is very important. Also, customer care is part of Competence. They’re the reason we do what we do. They’re paying our salary so taking care of the customer is super important.

On the Commitment side, as a leader, I expect people in my organization to commit to the goals of the organization or get on another bus. That’s a little harsh but we’re trying to get something done here. It’s important for people to have some buy-in into that direction. That’s part of their commitment. Part of that’s also being a good teammate. It’s like, “He’s somebody that’s reliable and that people can trust.” Don’t be that person who’s the toxic coworker and that kind of thing. It’s Character, Competence and Commitment. Those are the things that I think about, try to communicate and try to live as I lead an organization.

How do you train leaders? Do you have a formal program? Is it mentorship? What’s your strategy there?

I go back to observing and learning. When I come in as a fresh leader, I try not to take other people’s opinions about folks in leadership positions in the organization. I try to form my opinion. It’s important to be a good listener and observer of what’s going on. As people start to demonstrate their capability, it’s important to delegate, let them run and see what they can do with it. Some famous person said, “Don’t tell people how to do something. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity.” It is important to give subsidiary leaders at-bats and see how they do. That’s how you can evaluate them over time.

The other important thing is coaching. Nobody is above coaching, even myself. I ask for feedback all the time. It’s important to provide that to your leadership team and provide that important feedback. I’ve done that several times even in the years since I’ve been here. People respond to it. Sometimes, they’re not even aware of either shortcomings or perceptions. It’s important to coach your leaders as well.

In your career, you’ve dealt with a lot of change as a leader in this role. How do you navigate and embrace that change within a rapidly growing organization?

The first thing is to come to terms that things are constantly changing. People change. Technology is changing extremely quickly. We live in an environment. If you’re a leader, you have to be comfortable that there’s going to be constant change. Some people get frustrated by that. I see it as an opportunity but it can be challenging. The important thing is to make sure you’re providing direction. You put together a clear and executable strategy for the company so everybody knows where you’re headed.

Through Character, Competence and Commitment, you’re communicating to people your expectations for performance. You’re also giving them a filter to make decisions about the business. If you act in the best interest of the business and expect your leaders to do that, they don’t have to come to you all the time and ask you a question. They can make judgments about what’s in the best interest of the business. It’s important in a changing environment that you set that compass heading and let people know what you’re all about and where you’re trying to go. Let them use that as a filter to make decisions going forward.

I love that you’ve alluded to communication so many times as well as transparency, letting people know what your goals are and getting people rowing in the same direction. That’s so important, that communication piece. Change is constant. We’re going through it all the time. It’s helping people to look at change powerfully and become comfortable with change. Speaking of that, telecom is always changing. It’s constant. What do telecom leaders need to be doing to thrive? A lot is coming. We’ve got RDOF. The BEAD is on its way. There’s more 5G to come. There’s a lot in our future. What do we need to be doing?

There’ll be 6G one day also.

There will also be 10G.

That’s right. To be successful, leaders need to embrace an attitude of continuous learning. Technology moves very quickly. Unless you’re a person who’s willing to continuously invest in learning, you will be left behind, in my opinion. You also have to be adaptable. Cultures shift. Perceptions shift. People change. If you’re set in stone, that’s not going to serve you well going forward, in my opinion.

You need to diversify your skillset and also, as a business, diversify. You got to try things you’re not good at. You’ll fail once in a while. The old adage goes, “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” You got to be willing to take those chances and try something you’re not good at. I’ve stolen a lot of phrases from people I’ve worked with in the past. Years ago, a guy named Bill Tyson gave me a phrase. It is, “It’s a people business so be a person.” I use it all the time.

People have to find you relatable for you to be a successful leader. You got to find a way to relate to lots of different people. Going back to my early experience, the Army helped me do that. We had kids from the city and kids from the country. We had all kinds of cultural backgrounds. Being able to work with a very diverse workforce is going to be a key success factor going forward.

I assume that there is more M&A in Ontivity’s future. Describe the DNA of an Ontivity target company.

We’ll be and are in the M&A game. We have a pretty healthy pipeline of acquisition targets we’re looking at. I might be surprised if we didn’t do 1 or 2 in 2023 or more. Who knows? We’re trying to grow our geographical footprint and our business as well as diversify. It’s to broaden our scope of work and broaden the customer base we work with. Not always but oftentimes, M&A is the best way to accelerate those efforts.

We’re looking to do more on the DAS side, Distributed Antenna Systems. We have a great business and growing business in the DAS world but we’d love to do more of that. We’d love to do more fiber work as well. We do some of that but given the things we talked about in terms of the spending, you’ll see us probably be much more active on the fiber side as well. It’s not that we’re growing away from our wireless roots. We want to continue to grow that business as well while we add geographic diversity, customer diversity and what I call the scope of work diversity through M&A. We’ll be pretty active there.

In terms of targets, we’re looking at small to mid-size companies that are well-run. Typically, these are founder-operated businesses and they may want to be part of something larger. We’ve got a great story to tell there. Some of our acquisitions over the years or some of our best salesmen, in that regard, are talking to potential targets about their experience being acquired by Ontivity and what that’s been like.

We’re keeping our eyes open for quality businesses run by good people but they have to pass what we call Rule Number One. I’ll give you the PG version. It’s, “Life’s too short to work with jerks.” It’s important to us to find people who are going to fit culturally. We’re not going to do a deal that’s going to harm what we’re trying to build here, to state the obvious.

There are a lot of good businesses out there. You’ll see an uptick in M&A in 2023 because interest rates are going up. One of the economic peculiarities of our work is that you need a decent balance sheet to do work for the big guys, whether it’s getting the bills in on time or the payment terms for some of the larger carriers and infrastructure providers. Some of the little guys can’t float that for very long.

In a growing interest rate environment, that’s even more difficult. We’ll see some companies that have done well come to the market to be part of something larger and help them grow. That’s what we bring to the table. We’ve got a big balance sheet so we can allow them to take work that they probably would’ve passed on if they were still independent in financing it themselves.

That’s an important point that you said. Take notes. Joe, this has been fantastic. I enjoyed this conversation. I’m sure that some readers are thinking, “How do I learn more about Ontivity? How do I get a job with Ontivity? How do I work with the Ontivity family of companies?” Where can we go to learn more about you?

It’s very simple. Our website is Ontivity.com. If you go to the website, you’ll see more about us, our family member companies, our leadership team and also employment opportunities. If there are M&A targets that are interested in being a part of what we’re doing, I’m sure they can find me. I’m on LinkedIn as well or they could call you, Carrie.

Call me. You’re famous. You’ve been on the show. Thank you. It’s awesome. Thanks so much for coming. This has been fantastic. I will see you again soon. We’ve got Connect X right around the corner.

I look forward to seeing you there. I appreciate you having me on. Thanks so much.

Take care.

Important Links

• Ontivity
• LinkedIn – Joe Cecin

About Joe Cecin

With over 30 years of business leadership and Board experience, Joe Cecin has had a measurable impact on all stages of a company’s life cycle, from founding/start-up through growth and maturity, to successful exit/liquidity event. He has a combination of operating, finance and transaction experience across several business sectors. Joe is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Ontivity, a leading private-equity backed provider of telecom infrastructure services to carriers and infrastructure providers nationwide. With 20 branch offices in 13 states and over 1,000 employees, Ontivity’s five family member companies are the leading turnkey services providers in the wireless infrastructure space. Ontivity provides technology upgrades, structural engineering, macro tower builds, small cell, iDAS, oDAS, 5G installations, tower modifications, generator services, project management, civil services, microwave networks and more.