Good housekeeping

One of the great things about trade shows is being able to catch up with your friends in the industry, both old and new, whom you might not otherwise see very often because they live in different parts of the country.

If you get to enough shows and conferences, you may see these friends 10 or 12 times a year, which is as often as some of us visit with our own relatives. It is also frequent enough to tend to the threads of commonality that brought us together in the first place.

These events are business happenings, of course, but when you see the same people often enough, you realize there is a time to be business-like and a time to be sociable, and that one is certainly more fun than the other.

So in the days before Supercomm, I was sorry to hear from two new friends of mine, both of whom work for new carriers that launched operations within the last 18 months, that they would not be able to come down to Atlanta.

Both of them had the same story about why they weren't coming: Their respective companies' operations had grown so much in recent months that they were forced to make fairly urgent arrangements to move into new facilities. As fate would have it, both were moving during the week of Supercomm.

Although I missed the chance to get to know these people better, I'm sure I will have other chances. And when you realize the helter-skelter manner in which many new carrier operations exist right now, it is hardly surprising that they couldn't make it to the industry's biggest show of the year.

We've probably all heard a few stories about exactly how manic this business existence is. One story I heard recently came from a product manager who visited the office of a small new carrier offering IP voice and fax services to medium-sized businesses.

The product manager had offered to assess new product needs for the carrier, and was shocked at some of the things he saw in the carrier's small offices. Among his recollections were a stack of IP voice gateway equipment sitting in a cubicle being kept cool by a large fan, a pile of loose checks sitting out in the open on an unattended desk, boxes of service orders and other contract forms stacked waist-high along the hallway.

Such is the disheveled exuberance with which new businesses are run. You have to start with less, whether that means less equipment, less people, less space or all of the above. However, it is among the blessings of the current state of the industry that these companies have an opportunity to grow extremely fast if their competitive edge resonates with the purchasing public.

That means many things in terms of new carriers' networks-gearing up their investments in highly scalable technology and capable management systems is the most important duty in dealing with this growth. However, they must also address this growth from a very fundamental point of view of day-to-day business operation.

Because of their status as new businesses, we can accept some level of operational disorganization for a while. Both industry watchers and the carriers themselves can write off such craziness as part of a professional initiation that is always expected, often amusing and mostly painless in the long-term view.

What can be painful, however, is the inability of a company to find its organizational mind-set after those early days have passed. In terms of day-to-day business management, new companies have to keep a close eye on their environmental and resource needs. When is the right time to buy more office equipment, hire more staff or move to a larger space? New carriers must frequently ask themselves these questions and should have strategies in place for dealing with the answers to all of them.

Being organized about keeping a tidy company will help carriers be more confident in eventually addressing network growth. If they keep their houses in order, they also will not miss important learning experiences, such as industry trade shows and conferences, events that might be good ways for them to find their social footing and develop new professional contacts.

As competitive upstarts, these aggressive new companies are wildly pursuing success, but the most successful companies in any industry are the ones that have matured by acquiring method to match their madness.