Looking back over his 15 years as head of Cox Communications' cable operation in Hampton Roads, Va., Franklin R. Bowers is proud of his accomplishments, including the doubling of his subscriber base ? to its current 410,000 households ? and the awards he has won for running the most profitable Cox system.
But the 56-year-old Bowers really gets pumped when he talks about his relations with customers like Langley Air Force Base, on Virginia's Tidewater peninsula. That's one of the accounts in Bowers's burgeoning commercial broadband operation, an area of the cable business that Bowers has pioneered within Cox.
?Two years ago,? says Bowers, ?the base moved all of its 16,000 phone lines over to us ? that's all their phone traffic.?
Phone business from the military explains in part how Bowers managed to turn a positive cash flow in his Cox Business Services within seven months of the unit's 1995 launch. The Business Services operation employs 250 of Bowers's 1,600 employees and ranks as the fourth-largest local phone carrier in Virginia, according to Bowers.
?There's been an incredible transformation of that operation,? says Claus Kroger, Cox's SVP of operations, adding that Hampton Roads generates in excess of $100 million in cash flow for Cox each year.
Cable boosters delight in touting the capability of their broadband pipe to deliver phone services that compete with the monopolies of the regional Baby Bells. Many operators, however, flinch at jumping into the market, intimidated by the logistical challenges of 911 service and legendary obstructionism by incumbent carriers. ?This is not to say it isn't difficult, because it is,? says Bowers of his success in the phone market. ?The state corporations commission and the Federal Communications Commission have tight regulations, even more so than cable, and I thought cable was strict.?
Frank Holman, VP of finance at the Hampton Roads unit, says, ?That was a real leap of faith and a gutsy move that Frank spearheaded.?
The key to picking up commercial customers, says Bowers, is to package the trio of broadband services ? voice, video and data ? and market them relentlessly. It's a strategy that has bowled over Bowers's colleagues at corporate headquarters. ?It's by far the largest commercial operation we have at Cox,? says Kroger. ?It's just orders of magnitude larger than any other Cox market on the commercial or business side, and Frank ensured that those folks were well integrated.?
Perhaps Bowers learned the importance of being No. 1 from Jack Welch, who supervised Bowers at the plastics division of General Electric in the late 1970s. But it was another one of Bowers's GE colleagues, Bob Wright, the current president of NBC, who pulled him into the cable business. After Wright moved from GE to the top spot at Cox, he called on Bowers to manage a cable system of 100,000 subscribers in Jefferson Parish, La. Bowers stuck around for five years before taking charge of the Hampton Roads operation in 1986.
Twenty years of service at Cox has made Bowers a bona fide company man quick to attribute his own success to the larger enterprise. ?When it comes to Cox,? says Bowers, ?integrity probably says it all. We focus as much as we can on the customer and the employees.?
His commitment to the company is reflected in his attitude toward his customers. ?Our working relationship with Cox is excellent. If there's a problem, we just call one of Frank's associates, and we get satisfaction,? says Butch Blanks, cable liaison for the city of Newport News. Blanks says his office receives ?very few? complaints about Bowers's operation.
In Bowers's world, the lines between customers and employees are sometimes blurred. The Hampton Roads operation, for instance, is testing VOD services in the homes of its employees. ?We took 200 employees and told them to order as many movies as they can,? says Bowers, who hopes to start providing the option to the viewing public next year. The employee trials, says Bowers, turned up a number of errors in the company's VOD menu. In one snafu, the menu date was set wrong ?and all of a sudden no one could get a VOD movie,? says Bowers.
If problems of that nature arise in the rollout next year, Bowers is intent on ensuring that they don't affect too many customers. ?You've got to take it a little bit at a time,? says Bowers.
When Bowers contemplates the future, he dreams not of taking a cushy chair at corporate or scoring a nice retirement package. Rather, he harps on all the projects awaiting completion in his Tidewater unit. ?We're building a 200,000-square-foot office complex and a new call center with 500 seats,? says Bowers. ?It has been astounding for me to watch the cable industry grow into the broadband industry.?
HAMPTON ROADS
(OPERATION IN VIRGINIA COVERS NORFOLK, VIRGINIA BEACH, CHESAPEAKE, NEWPORT NEWS, HAMPTON, WILLIAMSBURG, JAMES CITY COUNTY AND YORK COUNTY)
OWNERSHIP: Cox Communications
HOMES PASSED: 700,000
SUBSCRIBERS: 410,000
DIGITAL SUBSCRIBERS: Data not available
MILES OF PLANT: 7,500
BASIC CABLE RATE: $34.15
DIGITAL CABLE: $10.95
HIGH-SPEED INTERNET RATE: $34.95
AD SALES FORCE: 50-plus; 48 channels have local advertising.
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