Taking the retail view to telecom

New CEO Ed Mueller brings a unique perspective and a very different strategy to Qwest

His roots are in telecom as a veteran SBC Communications executive, but Ed Mueller is bringing something to his new job as CEO of Qwest Communications that most telecom chiefs don't have: retail experience.

Mueller spent three of the five years since his retirement from Ameritech, then part of SBC, as CEO of Williams-Sonoma, parent company to the Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma stores, and he admits the experience changed his perspective.

“In retail, it's all about the customer,” Mueller said in a recent interview at his Denver office. “You learn in a hurry. Unlike telecom, there is no recurring revenue in retail. You start every day with zero in the cash register.”

The challenge for a big retailer is to try to determine, a year ahead of time, what consumers are going to want, Mueller added. “There is great risk in that,” he said. “And you have to have the ability to handle failure. That calls upon a merchant's creativity. You have to be able to say, ‘I'm not wedded to this if it's not selling’ — even if you invested a lot in a given product.”

Mueller sees the telecom industry coming late to some of the Internet-based marketing that retailers have been doing for some time. At Williams-Sonoma, he oversaw an organization that operated brick and mortar stores but also used catalogs and the Internet to sell.

“There are very few retailers that do all three, and Williams-Sonoma was the largest and the best at it,” Mueller said. “It's not easy; there is a lot of non-intuitive information involved in deciding which products to sell in which venue, and which to overlap. The customers' behavior was different in each, and the products we sold were different.”

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