What we talked about
Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao:where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation at SimTech sharpened his checklist mindset, which he later brought to telecom operations: remember the flow, then back it up with a list so nothing mission-critical slips.
Show notes
Des Wynne started his telecom career being told to go knock on doors of customers who had already left, and who actively disliked the company he represented. That experience of selling when the word “no” is the starting point became the foundation of everything he built later as a CEO.
What we covered
- Starting as a door-to-door sales rep for Eircom in Ireland, where selling to churned customers taught him that rejection is just the beginning of objection handling. He carried that resilience through Telefonica/O2, then to Digicel across the British Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao, where on day one he was handed car keys, a laptop, and a Blackberry and told to find his own house.
- At Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des inherited an order-to-cash process that took ten days from contract signing to service activation. The board told him it should be two days, so he tore up the rulebook completely and rebuilt from scratch. Today, a customer who signs on a Tuesday has an engineer at their door by Thursday at five o’clock.
- His advice on 90-day plans: take them with a pinch of salt. He wrote a detailed 15-to-20-point plan before joining and later described it as “total rubbish.” The most important thing a new leader can do is follow the order-to-cash process end to end before touching anything else.
- On change resistance, he recounts an employee who told him they had seen CEOs come and go with big plans and nothing changed. Des’s response: “You’re either on the bus or you’re not on the bus, but the door swings both ways.” That same person became a strong contributor, but the conversation required a firm, clear line.
- From his time at SimTech Aviation, he brought the aviation checklist mentality to telecom: pilots use memory items and back them up with a written checklist to ensure nothing is missed. Des keeps a red book with him at all times and crosses off items as he goes, carrying unfinished tasks to the next week’s list.
- During a storm that hit Portugal, Des activated a full resilience protocol, proactive customer communication, color-coded network monitoring dashboards, and clear role assignments across the technical team, only for the storm to take a left turn and skip the country entirely. The preparation was still worth it: when a different storm hit without warning 18 months earlier, there had been casualties and real damage, much of it from poles falling on waterlogged ground.
About Des
Des Wynne is the CEO of Lazer Telecom in Portugal, where he owns the full P&L and day-to-day operations. He previously served as Group Sales Director at SimTech Aviation and spent seven years with Digicel across the Dutch Caribbean, building and leading multi-market operations.
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/des-wynne-557b4718
- Website: https://lazertelecom.com
Episode 76 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the PreVetted Podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we’re joined by Des Wynne, he’s the CEO of Lazer Telecom in Portugal, where he owns the overall P &L and the day-to-day operations. Before Lazer, Des served as Group Sales Director at SimTech Aviation in Dublin, experience that sharpened his process safety and commercial instincts.
Earlier, he spent seven years with Digicel across the Dutch Caribbean Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, leading business, GSM and ICT with full P &L responsibility. He also cut his teeth in Ireland with Telefonica, O2 and Erkom in business account leadership roles. So today we’re going to dig into building resilient last kilometer networks.
or last mile networks in the US, balancing growth with unit economics and leading multicultural teams all through the lens of a CEO who has operated on three continents and at every layer of the telecom stack. Des, welcome to the show.
Des Wynne (01:14) Thanks Federico, it’s great to be here.
Federico Ramallo (01:16) We’re honored to have you here today. So what’s the short version of your path to becoming a CEO and what experiences most prepare you to run an ISP end-to-end?
Des Wynne (01:27) Yeah, thanks for obviously the introduction first of all. So my career started off in telecoms and I was a door-to-door sales guy. I worked for Aircom and at the time Aircom wasn’t the most loved business in the world. It was a semi-state or formerly semi-state business that had been sold on and there was a…
They had churned a lot of customers as the market got deregulated. A lot of other licensed operators became available in the market. So our job was to go out knocking the doors of customers who left. And back then we didn’t have any GDPR compliance issues so we could get a list of leads that we’d go and we’d know the addresses of the people who had left and we’d go knock the door and convince them to move back. It’s not an easy job for various reasons.
Dorsal or selling is not easy at all. However, this job in particular was tricky because you weren’t liked as a business. Customers left you for someone else to make very, very little savings difference. And there was no technical advantage going to another operator because it was the same wholesale network that was resold. But it grew a turtle shell on your back.
the old saying of you start selling when you hear the word no. The fact that they’re saying no to you is a benefit. Then you can start object, you know, your objection handling process. So that was my core skill set that really sort of made, toughened me up to say the least. And after that, I went on to Telefonica, or O2 was at the time that it became Telefonica. It’s now three or Hutchinson three.
and I was doing senior account management roles there and that sort of refined me in terms of how to deal with the sort of corporate enterprise markets. I did that for a few years and my main job there was, you know, retain the existing base of customers that we had, but then also, you know, grow the revenues by upselling additional products and services into those clients. So I did that quite well. And then I was contacted by Digicel, who was one of my clients in Dublin, actually, who
eventually said, you come on board? I went off to Digicel and started off in the Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, then went down to Aruba and then into Curaçao and then promoted to a director level in Curaçao looking after multi-markets. And the funny thing at Digicel, the sort of DNA was, you know, sink or swim. So on the first day I joined there, I was given my car keys, my laptop and my mobile phone or Blackberry at the time.
and told to A, find a house to live in on your own, you put in hotel for a week, go find a house to live in and then fix it. And I was sort of coming from this corporate world going, God, you know, what’s our overall strategy here? And there was some, just, just fix it. So it was a bit of a pill to swallow and that really separated the men from the boys as such, so to speak.
But you know, had full autonomy and the people who survived that period did very, very well. But, you know, they didn’t care where you’re from or what age you were. You were given full responsibility when you landed in that country and you had to deliver the goods. So that really helped me as I suppose in my career, it set me up in terms of profit and loss, understanding a piano inside out and a balance sheet inside out.
I did seven years there and then went back to Ireland to work for SimTech Aviation. For two reasons, one, I wanted to get home. I’d been home for many years. I haven’t been home for many years. And then the second part was I wanted to broaden my CVU a little bit because it was too telecoms based. So I said, OK, let’s jump into a different industry. I had a keen interest in aviation anyway. So I got into the aviation industry.
And I did about three and a half years there and then got a call of the former owner of Digicel to come into a new business in Portugal where I became CEO.
Federico Ramallo (05:30) Wow, such a journey.
Des Wynne (05:33) They’d have pitied for
sure already,
A lot of air miles.
Federico Ramallo (05:34) So
what is the difference between selling door to door and selling on the ⁓ airplane industry?
Des Wynne (05:44) Yeah, well, the funny thing is in any type of sales, you have about 15 seconds for someone to like it. So, you know, if you’re at a conference and you meet someone, you’ve got a very, short window. And the funny thing is doors and door selling is the same. You’re on their door, you’re cold calling them. They better like you quickly, otherwise the door is going to be shut in your face. And it’s very similar to all types of sales, whether you’re doing consultancy based selling or, you know, transaction based selling. People buy off people.
So in aviation, the industry, it’s a sort of a strange one because it’s, you know, the grandfathers of aviation are still knocking around. So there’s been massive growth in aviation, you know, from say the mid nineties to today. And those people are still in power in those roles. So they’ve seen it all at this stage. you know, it’s, it wasn’t the easiest role in terms of getting people to
sign up to your service. The thing about aviation on the flip side is it’s a regulated industry, so they have to buy the services off someone. It’s just you have to make sure that you have the real unique selling point to choose ⁓ your business over someone else’s. In SimTech, their core philosophy is the quality of instruction. SimTech Aviation is an airline pilot training organization.
And so they train cadet pilots coming into flight schools before they join the airlines. Or they would do airline, know, wet leasing for, wet lease training for airlines themselves. So airlines would go to them, use their simulators, and we would provide the flight instruction to the first officers and captains for their recurrent training or type grading training. Very, very specialist training. But like that, the airline had to choose someone.
because it’s driven by regulation.
So, but at the end of the day, people buy off people, so.
Federico Ramallo (07:33) Right.
There is a similarity with setting door to door where people eventually they also need the service, right? having the need then it’s about, right, right, yeah. And the differentiation is more about the relationship than necessarily the service, right?
Des Wynne (07:45) Yeah, In utility-based businesses, yeah.
It’s very similar in the aviation, it’s relationship based as well. An element of, okay, how easy is it to get to your country or your training center? Thankfully Dublin is very well connected. know, multiple countries and different continents could fly in. So Arnhem was a good location and the warm Irish welcome also made a big benefit for the flight crews coming in. They enjoyed being there. And then also the business was very, very good.
hand-holding the pilots. they used to, their philosophy was, look, don’t worry about everything else. We’ll arrange where you’re to be staying. We’ll ferry you to and from the training organization. You just book your flights and get there and we’ll take care of everything else. And they were really, really good at that. But again, was, had to be because there was a lot of competitors in the industry. So the Irishness became a key selling point. And today, to this day, still is a key selling point for that business.
Federico Ramallo (08:48) Right, right, interesting, yeah. I love the book “To Sell Is Human” from Daniel Pink where he talks about this concept of buoyancy, of don’t let the rejection to pull you down in a way, right? Yes.
Des Wynne (08:55) Yep.
Don’t let it grind you down. No, no, absolutely not.
Let it motivate you if anything. It’s the fact that what it used to kill me is getting no answer because you didn’t know where you were. You’re in limbo. And I was felt as a failure because you obviously didn’t explain the product or service or the benefits well enough or understood the customer’s needs well enough for them to make a hard yes or a hard no. You’re just to the left there in limbo. you know, it’s, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (09:08) Yes, yes, and…
Des Wynne (09:30) It’s numbers game at the end of the day. You need to do the leg work and you’ll get the results. And I hammered this home with the sales director and his team here. said, Tony, get as many doors knocked a day. Even for poor sales guys who are poor closers, it’s a volume game. All they need to do is hit more doors. Eventually they’ll get someone who sticks.
Federico Ramallo (09:53) Right,
right. kind of when you were talking about, when people say, that’s an opportunity, ⁓ I was thinking about this book, right? And that change of mindset, it’s impressive how much you can do after that, right? Because then you can become resilient of rejection, right?
Des Wynne (10:00) Mm.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (10:14) So when you stepped into Lazer Telecom, what were your first 90 days priorities and how did you pick them up?
Des Wynne (10:22) It’s funny, I actually had the notes. So in advance of joining the business, was sitting at home and I started making this 100 day plan and 90 day plan. And I realized it was total rubbish that what I had written. So I had like 15 or 20 points, what I’m going to in the first week, two weeks, three weeks, and quite a lot of detail. And was sort of half impressed with myself that I got into so much detail. I’m 41 now and I was 36 at time, a bit too young to become a CEO.
When I actually deconstructed it, and I’d say this to people who are taking senior leadership roles, take 90 day plans with a pinch of salt. It’s because for the sum of reason that you don’t have a clue about the business you’re going into. You might know the industry, but you don’t know the actual business. And one thing I thought about after reading my notes through the day in preparation for this interview.
was the customer journey. So really, really understand the customer journey end to end and follow the path of how leads get generated, how the salespeople go in the door, how does the contract process look, how does the terms and conditions, are they valid for 2025, when was the last time they were reviewed, did they make any sense? And then
how does the order to cash process look like? So once the contract’s signed, where does it go? How does the back office team deal with it? How does it go back into the engineering department and then find the installation? We had a really convoluted process and we had a really poor order to cash time. So it was like 10 days, which is really poor for the following reason.
RU101 says, get the contract signed, get the money in quick. We were waiting half a month to get the money in, but it started even generating revenue. So my board turned around to me one day, we were in Portugal, they said, it’s two weeks, it should be two days. And I just sat there scratching my head going, yeah, I got it down to two weeks, and now we need to start improving this by multiples of that.
So we said, right, let’s tear up the rule book completely and start from scratch. And when we did that and we started deconstructing all the elements of the business and the operations side, today is two days. So if you sign off today is Tuesday. So he’s on a pinch that services or TV services with us now. Five o’clock on a Tuesday, by Thursday, five o’clock, our engineer will walk in your door, sometimes quicker, depending on permissions and whatever it is.
And I think that’s best in class, but we had to deconstruct the whole business and rip it all apart and rip up the playbook to get there. going back to your question about the 90 day plans, the 100 day plans, I think that don’t make them too complex like I did. Actually just work out, understand the order of the cash process completely, and then refine everything else from there. Because if you don’t have that set,
and start focusing on commercial strategies and all that, you’re actually not dealing with the elephant in the room, which is getting the money in quickly. So I probably messed up at the time by sort of thinking to myself, let’s fix the commercial strategy. But actually I didn’t deal with the defunding the cash thing quick enough. It took me a few months to realize it. And now, thankfully, it’s a well-oiled ship. Sorry, well-oiled machine, should I say. But yeah.
focus on how the money gets in.
Federico Ramallo (13:51) One thing I notice when the organization grows is that the structure of the organization kind of gets frozen or it’s more resistant to change. I believe there are multiple factors for that. One is that middle management are afraid to change because they’re risk adverse.
You also have people involved that are a small cog on a big machine, so they kind of lose the contact that, know, when I’m working on a small, on a step in a process, we kind of lose the perception that we’re also, we have a customer on the other side, right? So once,
Once you’re able to see that and convey that to the team, then it’s where you can start making those changes happen. As you said, you had to start all over again. And sometimes we get to a point where people do things because they’ve been told to do this way, but they don’t know the whys and the whys and the whys.
Those type of things stagnate and make the whole process slower, make the whole adapting to change is harder. I’ve seen happening that with bigger organizations.
Des Wynne (15:10) It doesn’t have to be a big organization. I’ve had it in every business I’ve worked in. I suppose most recently, I’d say in this business here, we’ve had the most change over, I’m in the business for four and half years, so we’ve had the most change from say year two and three. And I remember someone coming to me and saying, I’ve seen CEOs come and go. They’ve had these plans, big and small.
and they think they can change the world and you just can’t change this world. And I remember going, God, I’m going to have to be fairly firm back to this person here because at the end of the day, it’s my head in the chopping block. CEOs are ten a penny. That’s probably the easiest role to get rid of because there’s no direct output of a CEO. They’re not responsible for anything in particular in terms of specific…
vertical in the business. They’re the general strategic approach, but also the MPL and all the rest. But anyone can do it. Anyone can be in and do that role. It’s not a very specialist role in terms of technical ability, whatever. So said, I better be firm back. And I sort of thought to myself, I paused for a few seconds before responding to the person. I just said, you’re either on the bus or you’re not on the bus, but the door swings both ways.
And the bus is, this is the direction the bus is going. So speak now or forever hold your peace. So, you know, I think they got the question, I got the answer. And I’m using, you know, I’m fairly directed people, but I have to be particularly firm in this case. But change management, no one likes change. I’ve gone through change myself and it’s upsetting them in all sorts.
Federico Ramallo (16:46) Ha ha.
Des Wynne (17:02) especially when you’re not in control of it. But if you’re not in control, you just have to blow with the punches. And if you don’t like it, you’ll jump off somewhere else. There’s always casualties.
Federico Ramallo (17:08) Right.
there is a comfort on the, you know, we’re doing the things because this is how it has been done, right? And that resistance, you know, adds up to the business, right?
Des Wynne (17:17) Yeah.
It does, but there’s an element of leadership as well in it that you have to win. Not everyone can be won over on day one or day 30. You have to won to people. And if they’ve been upset by various changes in the organization that didn’t necessarily materialize in a positive way, you have to prove yourself to that person that this strategy is going to work. But the funny thing is that person is actually here now.
and a very positive contributor to the business. So eventually, you know, won the person over, which was great. But it wasn’t easy at the beginning. And there was other people as well, and there has been casualties with the change, but so be it. The bus is in that direction. Let’s go.
Federico Ramallo (18:07) Yeah, it becomes this immovable object that we’re going to into this direction. Yes, I can see that. It’s quite a balance because…
Des Wynne (18:18) like pushing molasses up a hill.
Federico Ramallo (18:30) You need to have the sensitivity to listen to everybody, but also the, well, I call it stubbornness. That’s probably not the best word, but the stubbornness to push towards your vision, right? No matter what, right?
Des Wynne (18:41) Mm-hmm. Yep.
Federico Ramallo (18:44) It’s interesting, and then the complexity of the changes. There’s also an inertia for that, right? When we studied systems design, we talk about the complexity of the notes, right? That adds more complexity and inertia to a system, right?
Yeah, so when you add a highway to a city, then more traffic is going to go through and then eventually you’re going to have more bottlenecks there, right? It’s counterintuitive to what we think is going to happen, right?
Des Wynne (19:13) I just look over my shoulder and have Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek make it so. Sometimes that is the best approach for dealing with people who don’t want to necessarily follow your vision. It’s sort of an internal joke. All our offices here have funny slogans and stuff. My CTO has in binary code his
Federico Ramallo (19:27) Right.
Des Wynne (19:36) the word “eventually”. Where are we on this, this and this? He said, it’ll be eventually done once we get this, this and this done. So as a joke, I got them in binary, a mural made and it’s stuck onto the wall with ones and zeros and it translates to eventually in binary, which him being a techie guy, he thinks is quite funny.
Federico Ramallo (19:58) So funny that you mentioned your sign on the wall, it says, make it so by Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I love it. I love his stoic leadership, where his number one and the captain, they just look at each other and with zero drama, they just know what they have to do, right?
Des Wynne (20:20) Yeah,
Yeah… businesses aren’t a complex thing. People overcomplicate them. We want to get as much money on the P &L as possible in the shortest period of time. That’s why businesses are around.
Federico Ramallo (20:26) Right.
Right, right. Yeah, I’m.
I’ve been trying to follow Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s leadership style. Yeah. So as a P &L owner, how do you balance growth, building new things, marketing with discipline unit economics in fiber?
Des Wynne (20:50) Yeah, so I suppose the first thing we do is a business case on everything. So we’ve sort of firm rules in the business with regards to monetary spending and anything over 100 euros will require like a purchase order process. It goes through various levels and we sign off accordingly. That’s more for sort of financial control elements, okay?
The second element of it is investment. So fiber networks aren’t cheap and the risk associated, the commercial risks associated not to deliver on the plan can be significant sometimes purely for the fact of the volume of money you’re putting down either in the ground or on poles. So the general rule of thumb we would use is we would take a very prudent business case. So let’s say we’re investing 100,000 euros.
We take a prudent business casing about how many subscribers will we get, new customers will we add every single month for the next 36 months, how many we’ve owned at churn, what our net position is, what’s the ARPU of those customers going to be, so the average revenue per user, and therefore what’s the revenue and EBITDA of that project going to be. We then validate that by sending the teams out and knocking all the doors to make sure there’s expressions of interest.
If the expressions of interest are in line with our business case expectations in month one to six, we’ll then present it to our board and say, is what we’re spending the money on. And then they say yes or no. Thankfully, we have a very good relationship with them. And we don’t have to wait for a board meeting to continue with plans. We’re an agile team. So we just pick up the phone and say, look, here’s the business case. We’re going to do this. We think it’s the right thing for the company.
and it’s going to make us X amount of money and therefore it’s going to spit out X amount of cash after months wide. And we’re very, very confident in this and you know, they might ask us for an update on previous business cases that we’ve done and they’re always been very successful. we have the trust there. So rule number one is just if it makes sense on Excel, it’ll make sense in practicality generally if you take a prudent.
outlook. So we take a very, very prudent outlook on the spreadsheet approach first in the business case and then just validate it with some practical door knocking or whatever.
Federico Ramallo (23:08) Right, I think that this balance of growth and safety becomes important when I have every new employee that I bring to a company the way that I think it is. He’s putting their lives in my hands as CEO of the company, right? So I have the…
moral responsibility to take care of the financial security of that person. So I can dream of all the things I would like to do, but also I have my foot on the ground to make sure that we have the financial security to pay to everybody in the company.
Yeah, it’s, know, my business is bootstrapped, it’s been, you know, I’ve been growing the business with my resources, right? So it’s probably different than, you know, a telecom where you can have more, you know, resources, but at the end of the day, it’s the basics and principles, right?
Des Wynne (24:12) Yeah, yeah, it’s if you can get the banks to back you, that’s the key thing. If you can get grow the business to a healthy EBITDA level where the banks started getting attracted to you and you can raise the capital from, know, raise the capital at an affordable rate, then you know, then you can start going to the moon or you get other backers, private equity or whatever it is backers to invest into your business to help you grow. Thankfully,
Federico Ramallo (24:38) Right.
Des Wynne (24:39) Our banks support us. We have a very healthy EBITDA, well into the 40%. So we generate good cash and we can pay back our loans. So the banks are very happy to support us here.
Federico Ramallo (24:49) Right, right. And if you over-leverage, then you could get into trouble and it’s the same issue. ⁓
Des Wynne (24:55) Yeah, it’s balancing
act between your ambition, growth ambition, but also your ability to pay back in the case that there’s a downturn in the economy. We’re obviously controlled by the European Central Bank rates, so the probability of them increasing at the moment, it’s generally in the rates for us are in a favorable direction.
But if the rate change, can we still afford to pay it back? And we do those stress tests and we’re still pretty healthy.
Federico Ramallo (25:25) Right, Yeah, I usually try to plan for the worst, hope for the best. And then basically that gives us peace of mind, you know, because, yeah. The way that I see it is, I have this analogy of, if you want to…
Des Wynne (25:31) Yeah, yeah, it’s It’s Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:45) land a plane, right? If you put it in the right balance, basically it lands by itself. In general aviation, smaller planes do that, right? But if you’re like, there is this concept of…
pilot-induced feedback where you kind of over-correct, over-correct, over-correct, and then every wave you have to correct more and more, and then you’re fighting with the plane rather than just letting it settle towards this balance. So I tried to run the business with this balance concept where if we put everything right, then everything’s going to happen organically. If we’re trying to push
Des Wynne (26:09) Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And
Federico Ramallo (26:21) over leverage.
Des Wynne (26:22) don’t be afraid of having a sleep on it as well. That’s a good thing, clearing your head. You know, if you’re under pressure and trying to make decisions, you probably make the wrong decision. So have a sleep or go for a run or something, or go for a cycle and clear your head. I find that helps.
Federico Ramallo (26:38) Right, right, yeah. Because the more stressed you are when you’re making the decision, you’re probably going to make a worse decision, right? ⁓
Des Wynne (26:45) yeah, absolutely, you get ton of vision.
Federico Ramallo (26:47) So what is the hardest last kilometer challenge you faced in Portugal and how did you unblock it?
Des Wynne (26:54) Yeah, I suppose it’s going back to the change management and comments. So, you know, I was, I think, for CEO in five or six years had come into this business. as I said, everyone was sort of different idea. And it was really just down to getting people to believe your vision. And we tried everything. So someone had an idea about whatever product or service. I was like, well, let’s try it.
And if we can get something that sticks, and we’ve made so many mistakes, countless mistakes, and you you have to just respect the mistake and celebrate it, but just don’t make it again. And I’m probably responsible for more mistakes in this business than anyone else. Because when you come in, you have all this ambition and you’re excited, you know, you have this passion to drive the business on. And there’s only a certain window of that because…
afterwards you start settling down. But when you join a new company, you’re you’re totally pumped and you let all the noise in to try to help you accelerate things. But yeah, the change management is always the hardest bit. And the only way to do it is just, know, try to get people to believe in your plans. And then the ones that don’t believe, you you have to sort of just park them aside or move them on.
and you’re as good as the people around you. So we had to make some changes, but I think it’s worked for the business.
Federico Ramallo (28:23) Interesting, yeah. So you’ve led teams across Ireland, the Caribbean, Portugal. What leadership habits travel well and what must be localized?
Des Wynne (28:34) Yeah, so accountability is the big thing. So when you have a regional role and you’re looking after multiple markets or even satellite offices, if you’re not there driving that message of what we’re trying to achieve every hour, eventually what will happen is you get, thank God he’s gone, I just, so I’d fly into an island and no country and.
You know, we’d sit with them for two or three days and we’d say, right, here’s our H2 plan and this what we’re going to do. Here’s the customers we’re going to target and here’s the products we’re going to launch. And everyone’s like firing on all cylinders. And then a day or two later, they’re also exhausted from this foreign energy coming in on top of them to try to get them going. they’re just going, thank God he’s gone. You know, it’s a balance of running a really lean organization.
Federico Ramallo (29:24) you
Des Wynne (29:29) where you might have say a flat management structure or a regional management structure with know, you’ve person A’s managing country A, B and C and then you’ve direct reports in each one of those countries that could be non-management roles. So the only way to actually get it is to have some kind of a team leader or manager in each market who truly understands your vision and is heavily rewarded for the success of your vision.
And so if you can get that right, he can then cascade the same thoughts that his or her team to drive the business forward. you know, it’s different, like it’s not easy to get people on the same page, especially when you have different cultures and you have different backgrounds of people. So you’re trying to be a chameleon as such to how to manage people in different ways. You’re one leadership style of
whatever, whether it’s, you know, warm and fuzzy or autocratic approach or whatever it is, it doesn’t necessarily what works. You have to adapt to the culture of the person or the country that you’re doing business in. And, you know, that takes experience. You’re not going to get that on day one.
Federico Ramallo (30:42) Right, right. So you mentioned a little bit about the aviation industry, can you expand a little bit on what bring you to the…
What would you bring from the aviation industry into the telecom operations?
Des Wynne (31:04) Yeah, aviation is an interesting industry. People are always interested in because there’s an element of perceived glamour about the industry. But one thing, say from a leadership or management benefit that you take out of the industry is the checklist mentality. So flight crews go through checklists all the time. The rule of thumb is they use a thing called memory items.
going through a takeoff checklist, they’ll remember the procedure and the process and the flow. And then they back it up with a checklist to make sure they haven’t missed any bits. And in a role like a CEO or COO role, you’re dealing with multiple departments, multiple people at multiple times of the day. And it can be physically and mentally exhausting to switch from marketing in
at 10 o’clock to technique at 11 to sales at two to operations at three to finance at four. And as the day gets on, you get fatigued and there’s some days you’re not, you you’re not 100%. You can’t fire in all cylinders all the time. So I did bring that checklist mentality with me. was one thing I sort of learned from it was, okay, well, you know, for sales, what we want to do, know, what’s our active teams.
what training is required, know, do they have the right things to do the job, whatever it is, and if there’s any H or issues that we have to deal with. To make sure you don’t forget anything when you’re having this one on one with people is to write down what you want to do and take off the boxes. And if you can’t get everything done, make sure you bring it on to the next week’s checklist. So that was one thing that I would sort of live by. I my red book that I carry around with me the whole time and I cross on items. And sometimes I let items slip because of
there’s just too much on, you you don’t overload the person. there’s loads of boxes there that are still to be ticked. But yeah, the checklist approach gives you what they call an aviation fail safe scenario. See the backup plan.
Federico Ramallo (33:05) Right.
Right, interesting. Yeah, I haven’t thought about bringing checklists into the business side, but I think it makes sense. I I use something similar with tickets and where basically we can just go and follow up because I lose context of what we’re doing, right? When you’re switching from different teams, you kind of lose context. So for me, going back to the tickets and seeing what happened, what was going on,
we left that and what we had to do next. ⁓
Des Wynne (33:40) Yeah,
there’s one when I first came, we got a new software that we were using for some period of time, monday.com. That was a handy one because it was visually was very handy to run your checklists from. We don’t use it today, but at the time when I was going through this overload of information, it was the only way I could sort of administer myself nearly. And so yeah, use that as a visual. I know in marketing, for example, they use Trello as another software that marketing manager here uses for.
for her checklist as such. And it keeps, you know, makes for issues and forgets stuff. So it’s great, but that’s what the mentality is for organization, especially when you’re dealing with noise coming from various areas. It’s just good to keep things structured.
Federico Ramallo (34:25) Right, right. I learned about business process management notation system. It’s a mouthful, I know. But I tried to implement that on some of the processes, but I realized that it was too much bureaucracy.
But I like the concept of that. So we implemented some of those ideas into our processes. And basically being able to have tickets with workflows where we can see how the tickets are going. Similar to customer support, That’s more structured because that’s more transactional, right? I try to implement some of that on marketing, but on marketing the issue is that you have so many dependencies that the work in progress becomes huge, right?
That became an issue eventually, right? But still, it was comforting to go back to the board and see all the tickets and being able to see what has been going on on each, right? Yeah.
Des Wynne (35:17) Yeah,
no, it’s it’s, sometimes they’re good things and sometimes they’re bad things, tickets and technology are always a bit of a headache.
Federico Ramallo (35:22) you
Yes, yes. I mean, I love technology, but also, you know, get frustrated when it doesn’t work as we expect. Yeah.
Des Wynne (35:30) Every morning,
my day is as follows. I get to the office at half seven, eight o’clock and I get a report of our previous customer care calls and then I read through all the calls, every single one of them. I see what the issue is, just to understand the customer is a better and what they’re sort of facing. And you you could have a customer with a wifi problem and then you say, okay, has that been dealt with? Has it been resolved? And if it says no, then a ticket generated.
engineer call out and all that sort of stuff. So when I see loads of tickets, it’s a big problem that I’m going to have to be dealing with from a PO perspective. yeah, tickets and technology, the less the better.
Federico Ramallo (36:13) Yeah, yeah, mean, it’s frustrating, it’s also, you know, give us so much freedom and power to do things. yeah.
Des Wynne (36:21) It does, yeah.
does. Keeps you in a straight line.
Federico Ramallo (36:25) Yes, yes. There’s this concept of unstable stability. If you have the point of contact below the center of gravity in physical things, you’re having like this, you’re balancing it out, can keep it in balance, but it’s unstable by nature. And that’s something you can do with electronics.
that allow us to have safer cars, the channel hopping of Wi-Fi kind of comes from that idea of reliance, right? And the…
barcodes, have the digit, the checksum of the digit, you have the same on the QR codes and on Wi-Fi, you also have the same concept. I don’t remember how it’s called right now, but it’s basically the same thing. You have all this noise in the radio, in the air, and being able to have reliable Wi-Fi comes from that. I…
I appreciate it, but then when it fails, it fails catastrophically. Talking a little bit about resilience, what’s your playbook for resilience?
Des Wynne (37:24) Just…
I’ll give you an example today, there’s in Jamaica, there’s a really bad hurricane, Melissa, which is a category five hurricane. And when I was in DigiSat, we had a lot of training with regards to crisis management and what, you know, what to do in advance and what to do afterwards.
there’s only so much resilience training you can do, but it’s really just to keep people focused in terms of what to do and when to do it. So when it comes down to our side of things, with any sort of crisis, generally we’ll know in advance what’s gonna happen. So we get a lot of storms here, like the Caribbean. generally in the Algarve you get 300 days of sunshine, so we’re not in a storm area by any means.
We are an Atlantic, West Atlantic country, so you can get stuff that hits you. Our resilience playbook is effectively good communication, or really great communication in all aspects. So we had an issue here with a hurricane coming to Portugal recently. Obviously we don’t call them hurricanes here, they’re just called storms. Storm was what a name. I think it was Storm Aaron.
Approaching the Azores and hit the Azores with a pretty devastating impact and was heading towards mainland Portugal. So we sort of think to ourselves, okay, what’s the best approach here? said, first thing is let’s communicate with our customers. Let them know in advance that this is happening. Let them know in advance that if it does happen for them not to call us because they’re just going to start blocking up our call center.
we proactively look at our networks and we can see all the customers who are connected to our network and they’ll flash in a different color if they’re not connected to our network. And obviously if it’s storm damage related, they’re going to be a cluster of customers that are not connected. So we communicated that out to them. And then we had them assure us saying as soon as it’s safe to do so, should there be damage, we will be there guaranteed and we’ll provide daily updates via email. So they’ll eventually get a connection, whether it’s on GSM or hopefully through their…
their home Wi-Fi. The same communication trait goes on to our staff. So I dragged everyone into the room, it was like, right, because obviously European people are very relaxed with regards to storms because it’s only a storm, but they hadn’t seen what a hurricane can do. Unfortunately, I’ve been in countries where they’ve been totally flattened by hurricanes. you know, the crisis management element of that, people need to be really, really focused on what their role and responsibility is when it, when…
so to speak, the shit hits the fan. So we had everyone trained up. So everyone in various technical departments were responsible for one or two aspects of that catwalk. And we had staff that were in the west of the country that would get hit by the storm first. They were going to communicate with us in terms of how strong it was and all that, because you can’t necessarily rely on whether data’s been fed. You need to see what it really feels like. So everyone had their role and responsibility to do.
In the end, the storm took a left turn and skipped Portugal together. It actually was a really nice day there. But the great communication was already in place. So we’d already really well communicated with customers to advise, is what could happen. This is the impact and this is how we’re going to deal with it. And then the back office team and the technical aspects of the team, everyone knew their role and responsibility. that’s the only advice I’d give to people. Resilience for us is…
natural disaster resilience. It’s not financial resilience or whatever. It’s natural disaster. And at the end of the day, the common theme is really, really good and solid communication.
Federico Ramallo (41:08) Right, right, because you already have an operational plan to execute when that happens and you’re ready.
Des Wynne (41:15) Yeah, we have actually a fairly loose operational plan because, you know, we’re in a perfectly, we’re in a sunshine destination. And I probably overreact when I see storms because I’ve seen what they can do. And I think now with so much climate change, we’re getting a lot of storms in Europe that we didn’t get before. And, know, the operational impact when something does hit.
Well, it was technically a hurricane that hit about 18 months ago, and there was no warning from the government. It just turned and went for us. And we didn’t see it. There were people killed, with trees coming down because there was inadequate warning in advance. The crazy thing was when the storm passed, the actual network was OK. But there was so much flood damage. lot of our, in rural areas, a lot of the fibre optic cable is on poles. And the land got weak and the poles fell over.
and then took out aspects and areas of the network. you know, it’s not necessarily the storm, it’s, again, that came down to poor communication and it was poor in the Met Office here locally. Maybe they didn’t think it was going to turn the way it did, but you have to sort of, I think we learn, the staff learn from their experiences over the last two or three years. I’ve learned from my experiences over the last 12 years or so.
Federico Ramallo (42:33) Right, right. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, those things happen and it’s hard to be prepared, right? But those experiences allow you to be prepared better for the next time.
Des Wynne (42:44) They do,
yeah. Yeah, they do indeed.
Federico Ramallo (42:47) I had a group of friends, we go off-roading and we got caught by a hurricane. we were in the middle of nowhere with no communication, so we didn’t know. And eventually we got through, we had…
100 miles per hour wind and we were in a wooden area so we had trees falling over us from, you know, we couldn’t figure out which direction because you hear the crack and the echoes so you couldn’t figure it out. So it was hard, we got stuck five days there because we couldn’t get out, right. ⁓
Des Wynne (43:11) Wow.
Wow.
Federico Ramallo (43:24) And this affected the whole coast. So hundreds of towns were isolated. So emergency services were overrun. So we were a very low priority compared to everybody else, right? But it was an interesting experience. we were prepared. So we had water, we had food, we had everything.
Des Wynne (43:36) Yeah, yeah,
Federico Ramallo (43:45) and we had a spot GPS communicator that allowed us to communicate with the family. So we were overprepared for that situation. Yeah.
Des Wynne (43:56) There’s a saying in aviation,
it’s called the 7p rule. it’s prior preparation and planning prevents possible poor performance. yeah, you were, and the Irish guys would say prior preparation and planning prevents piss poor performance. So it’s, you were lucky. And I’ve actually put it on our, we were, my planning team sits outside my office and we have it as a, on the wall, the 7p rule. So all across the, the probably 10 meter office they have there. So.
Federico Ramallo (44:05) Hahaha
Amazing.
Des Wynne (44:26) It’s a good rule to live by. You would have been in big trouble if you didn’t have water that time.
Federico Ramallo (44:30) Yeah, yeah, mean, we had water, we had water filters that we didn’t have to use because I rather drink the water that we had than filtering water that we don’t know. There’s a risk associated with that, right? So yeah, and funny enough, my…
Des Wynne (44:45) Nice bit of
mezcal and some tequila and you have a party.
Federico Ramallo (44:49) Yeah, we even had fridges. we had, you know, yeah, we were like, I mean, we had a lot of accommodations, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had, we had my last beer. I saved it. My last beer. I gave it to a friend that came all the way around to rescue us on the other side. Right. So he picked up.
Des Wynne (44:51) Chris?
This is like luxury off-roading.
Federico Ramallo (45:09) locals and bought access and bought chainsaws to open the road for us on the other side. when we met, I gave him my last beer to him as a celebration. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it was interesting and fun. Yeah. But yeah, there was a lot of risk.
Des Wynne (45:27) You wouldn’t do it again?
Federico Ramallo (45:29) Yeah, now we’re over preparing for that. If that happens again, we’re over preparing as well. But hopefully, we are not going to have that situation again.
Des Wynne (45:39) What’s always interesting in
these crisis scenarios is the human factor is different. The human nature and the human form is different to what people expect it to be. I was flown in on 2017, the British Virgin Islands was hit by Hurricane Irma, which was a category five hurricane. So at the time was the worst the Caribbean had ever seen, similar to what we’re seeing today in Hurricane Melissa. And the country was absolutely wiped out.
And the company said, look, anyone who’s worked there before has a geographic understanding of the lay of the land as such. know the North, South, East and West, and they know a bit about the network where sites are and stuff. we were all flown in this private jet. And it was my first time in a hurricane zone. I’d been in countries where we had prepared for hurricanes, but when they hit, they were very light. It was just like a normal day in Ireland, for example.
You know, after working in this place for like five, six days, you see, because it’s fight or flight, after about four days, you have this mentality of fight or flight. So people go into survival mode and the person that you know for a few years is not the person you see in that scenario. So their reaction and their decision making is totally, totally different to what you would expect them to have done.
you know, from an outsider’s perspective. Because of just, they needed to survive. And we’d seen things happen in those countries that, from people that you wouldn’t expect doing stuff that was shocking stuff.
There’s a saying, you’re only two dinners away from looting. So, and I’ll give you an example of this. We had a power cut.
Portugal and Spain had this really strange power code, think it was in May or June, and the whole country was taken off. And that’s including data centers had to shut down because no one could act, no one was using the data anyway. we even shut down our network because it was a waste of diesel and all our generators that were being used in our UPS backups and all that. We just shut it down because there’s no one actually connected to the network.
We couldn’t, we had no access to really television services because the mobile networks started being shut down because all their cell sites were running out of battery or they’re running out of diesel at the cell towers. So we had no communication from the outside world and all of a sudden you’re sitting there and you’ve no power. And it was a really strange thing. And I’m sitting to myself, thinking to myself going, okay, I have an electric car which has no battery in it, like 6%.
The next country available to me is Spain. It also has no power. So I can’t even go anywhere for shelter or rescue at home, but in darkness. And I was going, thinking back to my Caribbean times, after seeing what people started doing after 48 hours, after their second dinner that they missed, they start looting. Thankfully it didn’t happen. And the outage was like 12 or 13 hours. But I was properly terrified. What could have kicked off here, you know?
I mean, Portugal is this extremely safe country. I think it’s like the third safest country in the world. Nothing happens here. When you’re sitting in a place where everything just changed like that, what could happen?
Federico Ramallo (48:45) Yes.
Yeah, and people start behaving, because when they have the feeling of order, then they behave differently. But when they feel that, well, there’s nobody supervising what we do, and there’s no consequence, then, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it becomes this, know.
Des Wynne (49:05) Yeah.
There’s no control.
Federico Ramallo (49:16) What happens in the zombie movies where everybody goes against each other.
Des Wynne (49:18) Yeah, it was
strange, strange time.
Federico Ramallo (49:23) My, when this happened, I sent a message to friends. They had our position via GPS because of the GPS communicator. And eventually they called my wife, and everybody was freaked out. They’re stuck, they’re in danger. And my wife picked up the phone and she was like, okay.
and then she went to sleep again, right? And then everybody was like, but you don’t care about what happens to your husband. And she was like, well, if I freak out, now I’m adding to the problem rather than, you know, yeah. And there’s nothing I can do.
Des Wynne (49:54) Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it’s actually a good thing.
Yeah, it’s a good approach. know, unless you’re adding value to a situation, you don’t need to be there. That’s the reality in crisis scenarios. So otherwise it becomes noise and distraction. So the people in this room are the ones that are going to make the decisions, going to add the value and have a positive output.
Federico Ramallo (50:06) Right.
Des Wynne (50:17) anyone who’s in a panic scenario or bring the problems that don’t result in a positive outcome shouldn’t be there because they’re just useless to you. yeah, it was, and that’s what we were brought in because we’d come in with fresh eyes. We hadn’t gone through the trauma of, or the PTSD that these people had experienced. So there was a big team flown in just to guide them in the right way.
Federico Ramallo (50:42) Right, right. And if you’re not adding value, you subtracting value, right? You’re causing more noise or inconvenience, right? So get out of there. know. Yeah, yeah, amazing. So we’re running out of time, but I truly appreciate that you’ve been here today. We learned a lot. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Des Wynne (50:47) Exactly,
All good. Thanks for your time Federico. My first podcast I’ve ever done actually so I’m delighted to be here today and if you’re ever in Portugal, come on down. We’ll have a cold beer ready for you.
Federico Ramallo (51:11) you
Sounds amazing, looking forward to it. Thank you, Des, for joining us today.
Des Wynne (51:18) Okay, thank you very much.
Cheers. Bye bye.