Carrie Charles (00:01.065)
Welcome to Let's Get Digital. I'm Keri Charles, your host, and I am absolutely thrilled that you are here with me today because we have a very special episode. I'd like to introduce to you Tom Maguire. He is the CEO of Bright Speed. He is a transformational leader. I've gotten to know him a little bit for the past few minutes before this podcast, and he is going to tell you his story, which is inspirational.
and you're gonna get to know more about BrightSpeed and the industry and all sorts of cool things. So stay tuned. Tom, thank you for joining me. Thank you for your tenacity and all of our technical difficulties to make this happen.
Tom Maguire (00:42.156)
Well, thank you for inviting me. And it was a little challenge this afternoon, but we figured it out. So I think together we could persevere and get this right where it needs to be. So very good to be here.
Carrie Charles (00:52.583)
Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. So Tom, your story is so inspirational from where you started and how you got to where you are today. Can you please share that with us and maybe just a little bit about some challenges that you faced that got you to your current seat?
Tom Maguire (01:13.07)
It's been an interesting journey. I've been in the industry now for, geez, I actually started working for New York Telephone back in the late 70s, believe it or not. So I was what they referred to at that time as a summer hire. So I started out in drafting, drawing pictures of things that I had no idea what they were. It turned out to be cable plaits. The next year I had an opportunity to go out and work as a service tech in Queens.
And I loved it. I was actually a science major. I had an idea about going to medical school. And for whatever reason, I decided that wasn't for me. But I love being a tech. So I worked as a tech in some of the rougher neighborhoods back during the crack wars of the 80s in South Jamaica, Queens. And it kind of gave me a new perspective of just life in general. So from there, I...
I kind of stuck with that company or subsequent companies, eventually Verizon, for 37 plus years. And I retired in 2017, which was kind of interesting because by that point in time, I was running National Ops support for the company. I spent most of my career on the operation side. So I lived through things like, you know, everything from 9-11 and Sandy and you name it, all manner of disasters, California wildfires.
At one point I had national responsibility. Hurricanes and lightning storms down in your neck of the woods where I think you're sitting. So it's been kind of an interesting journey. so we decided, I retired in 2017 from Verizon. There was a certain generation of us that we decided, you know, now it's time to go and do something different. So there were a handful of us that left the company at the time. And...
So I actually started working in my own little consulting business, who would be one of people I eventually partnered with to help stand up BrightSpeed. And so we were just having fun. We were amazed at the fact we actually went to go work in the finance industry for some banks and people like, well, you're telephone people. How does that translate? But I've had a lot of experience with regulators and just employee communications and you name it. One of the things that was interesting about my career is that I touched every facet of the business. So I was never bored.
Tom Maguire (03:34.286)
And I realized that I could put this to good work. So actually this other person, Bob Mudge, was approached by Apollo Global Management with this theory that if we found an under invested copper telecom and essentially did what we did at Verizon by rolling out its Fiber or Fios product, that we could turn around the fortunes of the company. So Bob reached out to me, reached out to another guy, Chris Krieger, and the three of us helped go through due diligence to
settle on a property that eventually became Brightspeed. And then the guys at Apollo asked, you know, if any one of us would be interested in sticking around. And our response was it was an all or nothing proposition. And so they decided to take all of us. And so we kind of divvied up different things. I had the operations job for the first year, year and a half in the company. And Bob was the CEO and Chris kind of ran all admin and transformational stuff. He kind of headed up the transition office.
And so after a while, Bob decided to kind of, you know, retreat over to a board position. And they said, well, you're the Chris had already left by that point in time. So I was the last man standing and here I am. So I took over this role in November of 23. So I've been in it for about a year and a half at this point. So.
Carrie Charles (04:54.091)
And Tom, Bright Speed launched in 2022, right? Was that it?
Tom Maguire (04:59.982)
Yep. So, yeah, BrightSpeed. So we originally going to launch in August of 22. We announced the deal in August of 21 and we wound up closing a couple of months later. And so we stood the company up. I think it was October 3rd or 4th of, because the way we kind of did this is we all scattered out to the field to make sure that we could carry the message out to all the employees. There are about 4,000 people that work for the company.
And so we thought it was important to take every senior leader from director and up and make sure that they were out in the field because a lot of these locations hadn't seen anybody in a position of like director above in the company forever. So I spent the first couple of days of the company on the road in North Carolina and Virginia and visiting technicians and driving around and talking to people. So it was pretty exciting.
Carrie Charles (05:48.759)
I love that now in that time that short time Brightspeed has grown to the nation's third largest fiber builder in the US How did that happen? What what is your secret to success?
Tom Maguire (05:57.166)
Yeah. There's a lot that kind of went into this. We actually started planning probably a year or so before we ever thought about launching the company. We were smart enough to know that we couldn't just turn the key and off we go. We were effectively starting from scratch when it comes to building a fiber network. was a copper footprint with, I think about
Right now I think the FCC is pegging us at about 7.3 million households. So we sat down and talked to every one of the good things about working so long for Verizon. We developed a lot of contacts. We also brought in some ringers in the beginning, people that had a lot of familiarity with the industry. And so one of the lead tech people from technology people from Verizon, guy by the name of Lee Hicks, I dragged him into the fray.
Sherry Hessenthaler is another person who still works for the company as our chief development officer. brought her into the mix as well. And we went out and started talking to every manufacturer that we knew. And the thing is, we wanted to set up a network that we knew that there were some, bear in mind, this was all during the pandemic. So we wanted to make sure that we could set something up that we didn't, there were supply chain issues, so we wanted to mitigate those. There was...
Like a shortage of of line and splice talents. We wanted to take that into account It was kind of interesting. I was at another conference a few weeks ago and people kept asking like operators What are you gonna do this? There's a predicted shortage of spices for example fiber spices and what are you gonna do to address that and I you know the analogy that popped into my mind at that time is like that's like asking somebody how fast you're gonna change your flat tire if you hit that pothole well
from where I come from, the best thing to do is don't hit the pothole. So we sat down with the manufacturers, two in particular stepped up and, cause it's kind of weird. There's a handful of us walk into a shop that we haven't been in for quite some time. So we want to build at the time, 3.7 million households with fiber. And these, everybody took us very seriously and they, yeah, I'm surprised about that. I'm like, yeah, the three of us want to do this. You know, can you guys give me some fiber?
Tom Maguire (08:11.642)
And so we sat down with manufacturers and we redesigned the way we build the network. And so we've eliminated some pain points like fiber distribution hubs. The majority of our network is plug and play in the distribution portion of it. It's very traditional splicing and placement up until that point. But we did other things like standardize our cable sizes, standardize, try to minimize the number of SKUs that were involved. we also implemented a brand new
A GIS based engineering platform and that allowed us to not only speed things up, it eliminated about half of the splicing work that was required because of this equipment from that we you know the outside plan equipment we got from Corning. It all hangs via things known as P clamps as opposed to have need needing to be over lashed and so that made for an easier installation and you know we had we had some we hit some bumps learning curve issues.
in the first year or so, some permitting issues which are legendary. But again, our network was designed to minimize make ready work. When you take all of that into account, when you try to avoid all those potholes, you wind up with a product where we can crank out upwards of a thousand prems or locations per month, premises per month. We've just passed our two millionth home, which is pretty good. So from October of 22 to...
March of 25 to pass 2 million households. But when you compare us to the rest of the industry, there are two providers now that are much bigger than us that are building more, but a lot of other folks are just not, they've kind of tapped out. it was kind of interesting, I spoke to a small provider or a smaller provider on the West, and I told him that we can have upwards of 500 crews working in 20 states on any given day.
because we have just contractors building our network. didn't have any line personnel or splicers to rely on when we close the deal because everything was contracted out. So we kept that model and we have a very unique approach besides having a new design of the network. We've also sat down with our contractors and we shared with them right from the get-go everything that we were going to do and we started to assign work on a geographic basis.
Tom Maguire (10:30.968)
So instead of RFPing every single job that we came across or every project that we wanted to work, the contractors knew what the work, they knew the amount of work that they were gonna get. They could staff up appropriately. We pay things differently. People hit certain milestones along the way. And this is all automated through that engineering platform, but we pay them along the way so they can keep everybody happy. Contractors are very happy if they're busy and paid. Aside from that, everything else is cool. And so,
But when you pull all this together, it just comes out with a more of what I consider to be a more efficient build. And our cost per print pass now is in 2024, we hovered somewhere around 618 bucks, which is probably, well, you could see what the other guys have been talking about, but they're, they're a lot higher than that.
Carrie Charles (11:17.385)
Wow. Now the platform you were talking about, is that the new app that's powered by Calix or is that something even newer?
Tom Maguire (11:25.774)
Well, so a couple of different things. So our outside plant is all corning, right? So our fiber cables are all corning. And we use a certain size for underground feed. We use another size for distribution. And we decided to nail everything up from the optical line terminal that's in the central office, which is Calix, all the way out to the serving terminal in front of the customer's house. So we have a dedicated fiber to every single household in our footprint. Now,
So when we went back to the manufacturers for the electronics, and the reason we went with Corning is because they have a product line that's just all plug and play, which we thought was a lot easier because it's so lightweight. You don't have to like drill, put through bolts and poles. You don't have to over-lash. It makes for life much simpler. When we went to the electronics manufacturers and we told them what we were going to do, again, during the pandemic, a few of them like, we can't help you.
And so we sat down with the folks from Calix and I'm a big Calix fan because not only do I think that they're, so we're using an XGS Pond or a 10 gig symmetrical pond network. And because I like their equipment, I like the interoperability about their equipment. They're a very good team in terms of support, but then they also have these apps like the Calix cloud and it's sliced in a couple of different ways. You have service, you have marketing.
And so it's these apps not only make it easier for us to deal like we stood up, we were offering one gig services up until roughly the summer of last year. And we decided to move up to a two gig product and we were able to launch that in 30 days. And one of the reasons we were able to do that is because it, because of the Calix platform that we ride, very good team to work with in terms of partnerships. we don't, I tend to think of the people that help us do things, not as like contractors that I hire.
or OEMs that just spew out equipment. think of these guys as partners. So we have a lot of conversations with them. We connect the dots on a bunch of different ones. I've spoken at their customer conferences. had Michael Bleening, who is the person who runs Calix came in and spoke to our kickoff. The Corning people have been there before. It's just this like ecosystem that we've built that not only makes it easier for us, but the Calix platform or the Calix app that you referred to actually makes it easier for customers. And the interesting thing is I'm
Tom Maguire (13:48.65)
I am in, I am not in bright speed territory today. I am using some another providers fiber connection, but my entire house is wired up on a Calix platform. And so, and it's just because of the ease of use and, and, know, the fact that I'm talking to you from a room off the side of my house up here that everything is working very well. I've never had any sort of problem. If I, I did have an issue, we were having some renovation work done.
And I went on the app, I could figure out exactly what's going on. Had it rectified pretty quickly, so good stuff.
Carrie Charles (14:22.027)
Hmm, good stuff, good stuff. Tom, let's talk about bead funding. Everybody's talking about bead. We'd love to know, actually I read that BrightSpeed's been granted 240 million in bead funding. And I just wanna know your thoughts on bead. I mean, do you see delays? Is it happening? Current state? What do you think?
Tom Maguire (14:43.67)
It's kind of interesting, because I'm going to talk about two different things. I'm going to morph into a network modernization conversation at some point. I think, is an excellent opportunity. It's a fantastic opportunity. Like I said, I've been around a long time. I've never seen anything like this pop up. And so the monies that you mentioned are not only BID, but there some other grants that we've won on the state level too. So BID is just it.
B took a long time to get to where it is. are a bunch of states, like Louisiana was the first one that came out. so states are moving along. I know there's a lot of discussion about like, you know, using a little, taking a more liberal approach to what sort of technology falls under B. Originally it was very focused on fiber. And so, but the thing, interesting thing is I've talked to a lot of other providers and sometimes it's just really.
They're very expensive to get fiber out to some really remote locations. so, you know, if one people have asked me, what do you think if they start letting other technologies in for bead? In some cases, I think it's very appropriate. I do not think they are better than fiber. Now, granted I'm biased, but I think a fiber connection is better than anything else that's out there. I've used other technologies and sometimes you run into environmental issues. You don't have that with fiber. And so.
You know, I think if done appropriately, whatever people are talking about in DC nowadays aren't necessarily going to hurt the program. B to in and of itself is taking a long time from my perspective. It took quite a bit of time for the states to set up their broadband offices. Each one of the states has its own little, you know, nuanced application process, which, some of the requirements are a little bit legendary. I know that they've been discussed as of late as well.
So do I think there could have been a more streamlined process with BEAT? I think everybody would necessarily agree with that. But the thing is, even if you get through the application process, a lot of the smaller providers just don't have the capital to lay out upfront to be able to do things for the customers that live in their particular region. So that's a little bit of a weird thing. I know we've worked through letter of credit and the former NTIA leaders helped us get through some of those things.
Tom Maguire (17:00.994)
because those requirements were a little bit onerous upfront. let's say that you make it through the application process, you do have a capital to lay out everything upfront because it's a payback type program. But then you go and you file the applications, there's no guarantee that you're going to win all of the applications that you put in. And maybe wins, not the right word, but I'll use it for lack of a better word. So what happens is that you can go in, there are states that, I know there's one state in particular,
that we're looking at where, and I'm not sure that the winners have been announced as of yet, but I think we've gotten back 76 % of the applications. We won 76 % of the applications that we submitted. Just to level set, we have about 650,000 households that are bead eligible in our footprint. And we think that there's a one-for-one relationship between the bead eligible houses and additional houses that we would pull through, right? Because if we're here and the bead house is here,
If I build to there, I get to serve all the houses in between. So let's say there's 1.3 million households that are, you know, potentially deliverable by bead. We're not going to win all those places. And so we're going to continue to participate in the bead process because we think it's pretty good. But one of the other things, this is the morphing part. One of the other things that we're very focused on is the amount of money that we're spending on copper infrastructure. And as an industry, it had kind of occurred to me that
While everybody is focused on bead, the industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year maintaining a copper infrastructure that serves maybe no more than 10 % of the people that can get service from copper. It's probably a lot less. I think John Stanky at one point said it was 2 % in some of his territory. And so one of the things that we're very focused on is how do we get people off of copper? Because copper is, know, we took a very well known
very smart consumer advocate out on a fiber ride just to show what we were doing. And we happened to, all our fiber equipment was in our central offices. And when we got there, I said, you know, see that little bit of equipment that's sitting in the corner, that's our fiber network. The rest of this monstrous building and all of those batteries and all of those generators and all of these giant frames, that's for our copper customers. And I think that they understood the magnitude of like what was required.
Tom Maguire (19:25.984)
in order to keep a copper network up to serve a very few number of people. And so I think there's been some good rulings as of late coming out of the FCC. I think we're going to continue to see that. I read an article not too long ago about how they're shutting down the voice network in the UK, for example, and they're moving everybody over to an IP based network. they have a timeline saying, this is it, you have to do it. And then we're shutting it. If you don't, we're shutting everything down.
I think we need that sort of approach to things around here. What I think is kind of interesting, we started doing some of this at Verizon going back about 15 years ago. And back at those days, I caught a lot of grief from people about like, how dare I move people off of copper and onto fiber. And the thing I think is kind of ironic is many of those same people today are telling me that I'm not moving fast enough to roll out more fiber. you know, I think with the advances in things like Wi-Fi, we're up to Wi-Fi seven.
Carrie Charles (20:19.115)
Thank
Tom Maguire (20:25.55)
and you know, again, we're, Calix is actually, they showed me some of the first outdoor wifi antennas so they could light up an entire property, which I think is pretty cool. but if you look at wifi seven and you look at just, the different equipment that's out there and people could use, whether it's tablets or, you know, something like a Mac or a laptop, things are so simple these days that I think that people are really embracing the technology that we could bring to them with fiber.
And so I think we're at a very important crossroads in the industry and you're going to see an accelerated retirement of fiber or copper rather. Actually, when I spoke at a conference and people asked me, well, why, you know, why did I come out of retirement? Well, I came out of retirement to get copper into retirement and so far so good.
Carrie Charles (21:07.787)
I love that. I love it. What new technologies, you were talking about technology, is there anything new on the horizon for BrightSpeed that you're developing or maybe partnerships that you're forming that's going to help you serve your clients better?
Tom Maguire (21:23.342)
So it's kind of interesting. This is also something we started working on quite some time ago. AT &T has had some success with this, I think, in particular. But we're talking to everybody about this. We struck a deal with Verizon. I think it was right before the end of last year. Time flies around this place. But we're going to leverage their wireless network and use it to deliver both voice and data services to customers.
And it's not, you know, right now it's not a retail offer. We're working on that. But the thing is, you know, we've taken our footprint, our copper footprint and divvied it up into three sections. The first section are fiber eligible customers. So those are people that can get fiber today. And so if people have a problem with their copper network, we'll just move them over to the fiber network. We came up with this nifty program called Fibers The Only Fix, which was really just more of an edict than a name. And so.
But we're using where we'll use so we'll use the fiber network take care of those customers The next up is fiber future customers people who live who live in a copper area that will eventually get fiber and then you have other customers who are fiber never customers and those folks won't get any because then it's just way too expensive to build fiber out to them eventually we may get to that point but again, if you look at the fiber future of the fiber never's
I'd really like to minimize the amount of money we spend on the copper infrastructure there. And so we could leverage the device that we have. We're kind of unique. We have a carrier agnostic double play device. So it does voice and data. And so that coupled with the Verizon network means that I could turn around and potentially use that device to serve customers. We're talking to the other providers as well because it's none of, no single provider covers our entire footprint because it's a very scattered, very rural footprint in some places.
So, but our goal is to try to leverage that device as much as possible to help deliver better service to the people and also reduce the cost that associated with delivering service to them.
Carrie Charles (23:29.155)
So I want to switch gears and talk about company culture and leadership. What is it like working at Bright Speed? Why do people come to work there and stay?
Tom Maguire (23:41.486)
When we first set this up, we spent a lot of time working as a team, executive leadership team, on what we thought were our core values. A lot of people do that sort of thing. But when we put them to paper, pen to paper, we wanted to do things a little bit differently. We're a less formal organization.
Even though I put on a college shirt for you today, but most of the time I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt because I live down in Florida, so I'm usually hanging out there. But if I'm in Charlotte, I get dressed up because I've got to set an example. But we try to be a little bit more real about things. so, you know, if I think about our core values, the first one is people matter, right? Everybody has a voice.
People get to say something, you know, the interesting thing is growing up as a tech in the business. I realized that some of the smartest people we have working for us are the ones that are in trucks driving around. And so whether it's a tech or a rap or somebody that is a customer facing person, I think it's important to listen to those folks because, know, they, they, if you sit and you talk to like, you know, I've seen instances where it guys will develop something or like, look at this wonderful thing. And then they give it to somebody that uses it and it turns into a Dilbert cartoon. So we're looking to avoid that.
So, you know, one of the big rules for us is that people matter. So everybody gets to gets their say. Now, the thing is at some point, there was a guy that I used to work with, Denny Strickland, Verizon. He used to have referred to something known as constructive dissent. And that just means that everybody gets to push back. But once you make a decision, that's it. We made a decision, we're moving forward. And sometimes that'll be a dictatorial decision. Sometimes it'll be a democratic decision. But whatever it may be, a decision is set and off we go.
The important thing about the people matter piece is that we don't tolerate any big egos, right? So I said jokingly at a conference once that would you know our if you look at all our rules that the big rules basically no assholes allowed and It was an outside plant group. I can get away with saying that but the funny the funny thing was after I spoke I left and
Carrie Charles (25:52.501)
Yes.
Tom Maguire (25:57.44)
One of our folks was stayed at the conference and a number of people came over and said, hey, I really like that rule that he has. Can I come and work for you guys? Because there's no pretense. What you see is what you get. Other things that are like, we like delivering, we believe in delivering and big ideas. So I think the fiber infrastructure build is an example of that. We went from nothing to being one of the top in the country. You mentioned that we were number three. The thing that's interesting about that is that we're probably the fourth or fourth.
fourth or fifth largest I like depending on, know, because Frontier is still in the mix here. So being number three is pretty cool. Being number three when you're like the fifth largest or you're not in the top three is pretty significant. So I think that's that's an example of delivering big ideas. Now thinking like customers moving as fast as we can trying to be as real, making sure that we celebrate success, I think is all important stuff. And the fact that we've like kind of formalized this.
kind of makes it real for a lot of people. And so we still believe in getting out there. I don't get out to the field like I used to, but Manny San Pedro is our COO. Jeff Mitchell is his SVP that runs operations. Kim Johns is the person that runs the dispatch centers. They're always in the field. They're always talking to technicians. They're always trying to figure a way to do things. And then they're also acknowledging the contribution of these folks. And so, you know, when you put all this stuff together,
And, you know, don't ignore the fact that it might be on a poster and on a wall someplace, but this is just the way we kind of believe in the way we act. think that kind of keeps people around. Now, there are people that leave. You know, we work for a private equity company, and so there's a certain pace that's, you know, kind of associated with that. And, you know, that's just, you know, not everybody's particular favorite flavor. And so you do see people that will come in and leave.
I remember that when we first started, there was an IT guy and I called him up and I asked him for about 10 different things. And then, know, a week later I called up and they're like, yeah, he's not here anymore. So, you know, you're going to get things that was early on that doesn't really happen these days. But there is, you know, people realize there's, there's a, besides all like the stuff that's all nice. We have an area, we have an air of accountability in the place too. And if people don't deliver, you know, they're held accountable. Cause at the end of the day.
Tom Maguire (28:22.304)
It all comes down to taking the care of the customers and also taking care of the other 3,999 odd people that work for the company. So when I think about what I have to do, have to make sure that whatever decisions I make, they have to be for the greatest good for the greatest number.
Carrie Charles (28:40.383)
What about you, Tom? What are your core leadership principles? Who are you as a leader?
Tom Maguire (28:46.792)
I'm that's a good question. You know, don't I don't like you know, I think it's funny that that you know, people will sometimes people are so deferential to me just because I have a particular job and the amount of emails that I get and LinkedIn invitations is amazing. And I'm like the same person I was, you know, when I left Verizon, there's not there's not a lot of pretense, there's not a lot of formality.
You know, I've been known to use a bad word every now and again when I talk to people, depending on the audience. And, so, you know, I also like to think I lead by example. So I don't, I, I, I'm not one of those do as I say, not as I do type people. You could ask other members of the executive leadership team and they will tell you that's entirely true. and so I, you know, to me it's.
I think one of the biggest things is making sure that you're very clear in what it is, what your expectations are with people. But again, be willing to listen to their input. But I think people are looking for clear direction and people are looking for a clear vision. one of the things, people would call me a problem solver. A lot of the things that I've gotten involved with in the past, I remember I sat down after I retired, our former CEO took me to lunch and he's like,
Where did you come from? Every time that there was a disaster, you were there, but then what do you do? And so it's kind of interesting. had a very similar start in the company than I had. And so, but I think it's that, you you can't be the ivory tower person these days. Some people can't deal with that. And they, you know, because they, you know, somebody once said that they represented my office. I'm like, well, I don't have an office, so there's nothing for you to represent.
So when I go to the headquarters building, will camp out in an office if I'm making a bunch of calls, but I'll sit down on the floor, you know, do the same sort of thing. think Mike Bloomberg did some sort of stuff like that with his bullpen in New York at one point, but it's, it's not, I think the days of that, you know, aloofness or long gone. And I think it's important to, you know, be the type of person that will get in there and pick up a shovel and dig if you need to do that.
Tom Maguire (31:01.454)
Or, you know, if something, if somebody, my job is to, to like unblock things for people and make sure that, folks recognize the contributions of the team. And so, you know, I know to me, it's kind of interesting. I, hear about a lot about servant leaders. I don't particularly, I don't believe in that because, while I'm, while I have, my responsibility is to make life easier for the people that work for me. It's also my responsibility to lead them in the right direction.
And so, you I don't consider that to be servant. I consider that to be leader. you know, so I, again, no pretense, but I'll go out and fight for the folks that work for me if they deserve it. If they don't, they will know that. I don't know. I don't think about it that much, actually. I just do what I do.
Carrie Charles (31:43.947)
That is...
I learned a lot of that actually, what you said, by the way, lots of wisdom there. Everyone needs to replay that and take notes. But I learned a lot, something similar in the Marines when I was in the military. And it feels very similar to that. boy, just lots and lots of gold nuggets there. Thank you for sharing. And one last thing. You talked about Bright Speed being able to execute on big ideas. What is the big vision?
Tom Maguire (32:07.886)
You're welcome.
Carrie Charles (32:18.26)
for Brightspeed.
Tom Maguire (32:18.67)
So we started out at 3.7 million households passed with fiber. And that was about 50 % of what we knew our footprint to be at that time. And our footprint's a little bigger, not from a geographic perspective, just because there's been growth in the area. Coming out of the pandemic, a lot of the rural places saw a lot more people moving into them. So again, we think we have about 7.3 million households. Last year, we bumped the 3.7 number up a little bit above four.
Now we're targeting five million households. And so we're going to get there through bead. We're going to get there. We think about a half a million households through bead out of the 1.3 I referenced earlier. We're to get there just through organic growth. The looking at at offices that were once too expensive to build or areas that were once too expensive to build.
Now that we have a line of sight on copper retirement, we realize that we can pick up some savings there. So that helps to defray some of the cost or offset some of the cost. just, you we're going, we think if we go deeper in a particular market that we're going to create a more effective or efficient marketing machine. So that helps us out. And so we're, and we're just learning a little bit more about how we can build and where we can build. And again, we get a lot of intelligence from the field and from our people.
And so our goal is to try to get over the course of the next couple of years up to 5 million households. You know, at some point it's no secret that Apollo is a, they don't hold businesses forever. They come in and they, you know, they put money into a business. They've been very generous with us, very kind with us. And so the expectation is we're going to create and stand up a fiber business that's going to be growing for some future. I think we all read about convergence.
Michael Weening said convergence is a fancy word for bundling, but I think you're going to see convergence with the wireless carriers. so, you've seen some of that already with Frontier and Verizon and also BCE and Ziply, for example. So I think you're going to see a little bit, it's kind of interesting when I started, I started at AT &T, the AT &T, and then I worked through Devestiture and...
Tom Maguire (34:30.958)
in the 80s and then we saw the R-Box that kind of recombined a little bit. So I think we're kind of heading back where there's not going to be a one dominant provider for services in the country, but I think you'll see at least from a wireline perspective, you're going to see a little bit of a consolidation. But our goal is to be as strong as possible with as many homes passed as possible because once we get the product out there, people love it. It's a hell of a lot better than copper is, that's for sure.
Carrie Charles (34:58.239)
Tom, I really could talk to you all day and I have been talking to you for quite some time now, so, and I love it. You're an inspiration. I knew this would be inspirational. What is, and I'm sure other people are inspired thinking, how can I work for Bright Speed? What is your website and do you have a jobs page there?
Tom Maguire (35:16.79)
yeah. So it's actually there's what I it was kind of interesting. We do have bright speed careers. You could find that bright speed.com. It's on the bottom of the page there. The other thing that we did, too, is because I've had like I said, I think I have 500 odd invitations on on LinkedIn that people are kind of it's interesting. People send me notices like, hey, I hear you're hiring a clerk in like, you know, in Indiana. Okay.
I don't know why. I want to say to these folks, is that part of my job as a CEO is to vet applicants for a clerk's job? I've also got a bunch of people that have reached out to ask how they could do business with us. We've doubled the number of outside plan contractors that we have working for us, more than doubled them. so people are constantly coming in saying, can I work with you, not as an individual, but as a company?
And so I had the team put something up on, like if people wanted to do business with us, it's also available on the homepage where you could click in and then you could let us know what's what. Reaching out to individuals is not always the best way to do things because I rely on our sourcing team and I rely on our engineering team, example, for the build to make the best decisions with respect to equipment and contractors and stuff like that. So I think by kind of funneling this stuff into the best place, gets to...
It gets to the fixer faster, which is something I've spent my life trying to figure out how to do that. So everything's right there on the home page.
Carrie Charles (36:42.891)
spoken like a true leader. Tom, thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. This has been fantastic. It's really been nice getting to know you better.
Tom Maguire (36:50.626)
Thank you, Carrie. I really appreciate this. So I'm surprised you didn't ask me about my roulette wheel thing here.
Carrie Charles (36:56.115)
You know what, I've been looking at that and thinking, getting distracted a little bit, thinking what is it? So let's talk about it real quick.
Tom Maguire (37:02.346)
It's a carnival wheel that so this is actually was an outside. This house is 100 years old and we're having it redone, which is interesting because the best working thing in here is the Wi-Fi network. so but this is this is this was originally one of the outside walls of the house. There's a door over there and then you can see the little bit of a window out there. But this has been transformed into like a little bit of a sunroom. And so when we first got here.
My wife's not a big fan of that thing, so I just wanted to get it off the ground, so I hung it up behind me and there it sits. So, but people are always like, what is that thing? And I'm like, it's a carnival wheel. So.
Carrie Charles (37:41.223)
Yeah, so I'm glad that you mentioned it. just, I don't know, it really was good for the podcast. It actually lended itself to everything we're talking about because it feels like movement and time and numbers and, you know, things are happening and big things are happening in OSP, you know, in fiber. I mean, really big things and you're leading the way. So Tom, thank you. you. Yeah. You too. Take care.
Tom Maguire (37:47.896)
Thank you.
Tom Maguire (37:54.674)
yeah.
Tom Maguire (38:01.582)
Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity. All right, have a good one.
Carrie Charles (38:09.823)
Okay, stay on for just a minute and we will make sure we're fully downloaded. We're 75%. Do you have another, I don't know, three, two minutes? Okay, I think we did good. That was awesome. That was so, so good. You're such a good speaker and so authentic and it was just so from your heart. Wow. How did you feel?
Tom Maguire (38:11.128)
Yep.
Tom Maguire (38:17.835)
Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, I'm okay.
Tom Maguire (38:30.85)
I I made notes for myself and I'm like, Tom's story, once upon a time. that was the easy part because I lived it. So I kind of remembered all that stuff, but I thought it was good. think if you listen, if you think it's good, then I am happy with the way that turned out. So I'm not sure. Inspirational, I'm not too sure about, but it's I don't know.
Carrie Charles (38:46.859)
It was really, really good.
Carrie Charles (38:52.459)
I was very inspired just because of your authenticity and you know from a leadership standpoint everything you said was just so today and tomorrow with leadership and people need to hear that.
Tom Maguire (39:03.438)
It's it but the thing that's kind of interesting is that and I like One of the things that drives me absolutely there's a lot of things driving me crazy but one of the things that drives me really crazy is the other day I got an email from somebody and They said hey, you know my VP asked me to reach out to you to do something and Well in this case the other day was actually somebody sent me a note that their VP Typed up to send to me and they were selling something
And I thought to myself, why doesn't the VP just call me? It's not like I'm like, I think I'm pretty approachable. And, but the thing is it's like, you know, I get this a lot and I understand in some cases it might, I don't know, maybe it's the way that that particular company operates, but that just bothers the hell out of me that somebody's like, okay, you want to talk to me. So you delegate that to somebody to reach out to me to like, you know, send me an email.
Carrie Charles (39:39.828)
Yeah, right.
Tom Maguire (40:01.194)
You had to send an email to that person. So why didn't you just send it to me? I just those things automatically delete. but it is. So but that's it. But that's that's that's actually the reference about the office that was my we brought in because I didn't have an assistant for the longest time. So the CFO and I split one because.
Carrie Charles (40:05.951)
Yep. Yep. I agree.
All right, so.
