Always On
Cox Communications Leads with a
Culture of Curiosity, Compassion and Change
By Amy Maclean
Sometimes a change in leadership can slow a company’s momentum, but Cox Communications hasn’t skipped a beat, rolling out mobile service, closing acquisitions and developing leading IoT solutions under President Mark Greatrex.
Greatrex, formerly Cox’s Chief Marketing & Sales Officer, took on the role in January 2022, succeeding Pat Esser who led the company for 15 years. Greatrex says Cox’s steady path is largely because he’s continuing the culture and legacy of a company that celebrates its 125th birthday in August. “It’s very much a culture of caring and being involved in our community. When we think about the very beginnings of our company, Governor James M. Cox talked about how as leaders we need to support, engage and care for our employees. And they will in turn take care of our customers. And if our customers are taken care of, business will take care of itself,” he says. “That philosophy sustains to this very day.”
Parent Cox Enterprises has launched the “34 by 34” ambition to help 34 million Americans live more prosperous, healthy and fulfilling lives by the year 2034. One pathway to achieving the goal is digital equity. “We’ve set ourselves a goal of growing access for at-need families more this year than any other year of our 20-year program,” Greatrex says.
The company is also focused on bridging the digital divide through expansion, committing more than $400 million dollars over the next three years to bring symmetrical gigabit broadband connectivity to more than 100,000 unserved and underserved households in communities across the country. It has active projects in Tahlequah, OK, Huachuca City, AZ, and Archer, FL.
A new market expansion team was created that reports to COO Colleen Langner, and with federal grant programs launching through BEAD they’re staying busy working with new state broadband offices. “We’ve got a large HFC network, so we’ll take that to DOCSIS 4.0. We’re in trials to see how things work. But also know that we’ve got a ton of fiber in our network,” says Langner. “We will also be very purposeful about where we build fiber, how we use it when we extend and when we use it in certain cases to enhance our capabilities.”
One area of Cox culture Greatrex has worked to amplify is equality opportunity. “Helping our teams see the career pathways that can take them, as I like to say, from frontline to C-suite… Right now we’re sort of making visible those big career highways for a field technician or a sales professional in one of our retail stores on what sort of career you could shape for yourself,” Greatrex says. “One of my expectations is that every single colleague at Cox Communications acts like an owner of their own company. If this were your company, would you be making this investment in operating expenses? If this were your company, would you be moving quicker or be more agile? What sort of entrepreneurial opportunities might be worth pursuing?”
The whole Cox team felt strongly about entering the mobile space, but things didn’t go quite as planned. The operator was slated to launch Cox Mobile in three markets in October 2021 through an arrangement with Verizon. But it had to slam on the brakes after T-Mobile was granted an injunction after filing a suit claiming Cox was obligated to pursue an MVNO with it given its past arrangement with Sprint.
“Everybody took a deep breath, and then we went right to work, determining how are we going to use this time. Besides dealing with our legal concerns, we wanted to make sure that we continued to move the effort forward,” explains Cox Mobile SVP Tony Krueck. “We ended up really not slowing down at all with respect to our development plans. We introduced more and more capability for our launch day than we would have had if we had launched back in October of the prior year.”
For example, Cox was planning on launching mobile without the ability for existing lines to add new devices. That was going to be a fast-follow capability, but the team used the pause to make it happen at launch. Cox also used the time to make sure its customer care and residential sales teams were trained to integrate Cox Mobile into their existing workloads. When the court gave Cox the go-ahead to launch an MVNO with Verizon in late May, that work helped it soft launch in three markets by August and to the entire footprint by early December. Cox Mobile was introduced with a splashy marketing campaign starring a CGI sheep named Annie with a lightning bolt “tattoo” on her wool. She’s meant to embody Cox’s commitment to providing a better, more individualized mobile experience.
“The growth rate has been very, very good. It takes a while to get that momentum going, but I would say we are right on plan for where we want it to be,” Krueck says of Cox Mobile, estimating that north of 80% of mobile traffic is riding on Cox’s own network. “The launch has been a huge positive for the company as a whole. It created and continues to create a ton of new energy and an excitement about being in this particular business. It’s culture impacting, I believe.”
Another culturally significant move has been Cox’s push into new businesses, including Segra, one of the largest privately-held fiber infrastructure providers in the U.S. Last month, Cox closed its acquisition of Unite Private Networks (UPN), which means it now operates commercial broadband fiber networks in more than 30 states. “We absolutely believe we have a right to win in the commercial services segment,” says Langner. “When you look at the customers we serve at Cox Business, when you look at those small and medium players, they also don’t have their own IT departments. They’re looking for a provider to solve problems for them, and that’s really what pushed us to get into the managed cloud services business.”
Thus, Cox purchased RapidScale four years ago and acquired professional and managed cloud services company Logicworks in February of this year. “We’re bringing them together. You’ve got fiber, you’ve got managed services. You have that bundle to go into these businesses and be their one-stop shop,” Langner says. “We’re passionate about commercial fiber; we’re passionate about Internet of Things.”
And that passion is paying off with cities like Las Vegas selecting Cox to deploy a private wireless network covering eight city blocks in the popular Fremont Street area for video cameras and real-time data analytics to improve safety and security, while providing the foundation for more smart city applications in the future.
Cox is the largest minority owner in smart property manager Level, with Greatrex noting the company will be moving toward Level’s smart management solutions. “We’re excited about what that could mean for multifamily units and properties and even mixed environments,” he says. “There are adjacencies that are very closely tied with connectivity, where we think our competencies and our customer base will allow us to thrive.”
As a pioneering company, look for Cox to take the lead in areas such as edge computing and AI. “I think there are big steps ahead of us with the application of advanced analytics and generative AI models. We’re embracing those new technologies, and I think it’s going to be pretty exciting for us as we think about ways in which we can deliver even better for our customers,” says Greatrex. “I like to call it intelligent assistance, IA, rather than AI because it’s all about providing support, enablement, information, real-time decisioning and suggestions to frontline who can then show up in a very human way and be very effective. If you think about it in terms of enabling what we only can do as human beings, it’s a little less scary and a lot more exciting.”
