We are made wise not by the
recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
Professional Experience – In Depth
To find out more about my professional experience just click on any section below.
AT&T
After graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a BSEE I began my career with AT&T as an engineer in a 1 million square foot manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City where we were building state of the art telecommunication systems. It doesn’t take long for manufacturing to get in your blood. I love to make things, make them better, make them faster and make them more profitable.
While working full time as an engineer, I was also going to school and working on both an MBA at Oklahoma City University and a Masters in Electrical Engineering at Clemson University. AT&T had great education programs and I took full advantage of them.
Up until the divestiture in 1984, AT&T was largely a monopoly. By 1988 they were facing stiff competition in telecommunication services and decided to redeploy a significant portion of their work force into sales. I took that opportunity to broaden my skills and ended up selling network services and equipment on the American Airlines account team in Tulsa, OK. During those pre-internet days, American Airlines with their Sabre reservations system had the largest private data network in the world. We not only managed that network but also most of the traffic into their call centers around the country. In 1989 I attained 300% of my quota for equipment sales to American. It was fun and I learned a great deal but, as I mentioned, manufacturing was in my blood.
In 1991, I transferred with AT&T to their Power Systems Division in Mesquite, TX. Another sizeable manufacturing facility which had grown up primarily to provide power electronics to the other equipment divisions of AT&T. When I arrived, they had just really started the process of marketing themselves outside of AT&T and were struggling with those efforts. I had the opportunity there to work in product management, project management, systems engineering and marketing. In 1994 I was promoted to Director of Product Marketing. By now, the effort to move beyond the internal AT&T market was in full swing. In 1995, I authored a strategic plan to grow the business to $1B (more than 50% growth) by 1998 and helped to lay the groundwork for that plan. I left the company early in 1996 but by 1998 the company had surpassed the billion dollar mark according to plan.