From Lineman to CEO
Rutledge Played Integral Role in Building Today’s Modern MSO
By Amy Maclean
Tom Rutledge spent 50 years in cable before he decided to ease off his duties by turning over the role of Charter president and moving to Executive Chairman. But it could have gone a different way.
Fresh out of high school, Rutledge wanted to see the world. He spent time hitchhiking all over Europe. College wasn’t in his immediate plans. But when his father got sick, he came home. His dad had spent his career in insurance and his company was insuring a new startup cable company in Pittsburgh called Eastern Telecom, which hired the younger Rutledge as a technician. “It was just accidental… He knew somebody there, and I was literally hired as one of the first people to work there,” he recalls.
Rutledge said his first role was actually “grunt” or “ground man.” “What a ground man does is throw tools to a lineman. Within a few weeks, I was a lineman. So actually, my first summer I was working at putting up the physical cable system, splicing the electronics and cable taps into the network,” he says.
He would continue to work for Eastern Telecom as he pursued a B.A. in economics from California University of Pennsylvania. “I got to build a cable system from the ground up. I was unskilled labor, and I learned some things. But I didn’t go to college to be a cable operator,” he explains. “It just happened that when I graduated I saw an advertisement for a manager of a cable system. And I thought, ‘Gee, you know, now that I’m an economist—I just had an undergraduate degree—I thought maybe I could do the two things together.”
And so in 1977, he joined American Television and Communications, a predecessor of Time Warner Cable, as a manager trainee where he served in a series of progressively larger leadership roles, eventually becoming President of Time Warner Cable in 2001. His mentors include Time Warner Cable President James Doolittle and CEO Joe Collins. “I thought they were the best operators, and I think they had a lot of impact on the way I approached the value of running a business for the consumer, and the creation of customer relationships, as opposed to financial engineering.”
From TWC, he joined Cablevision as COO, overseeing the cable/broadband business as well as Rainbow Media, which housed a portfolio of cable nets including AMC, IFC and WE tv, Clearview Cinemas and Newsday.
He oversaw the first cable-footprint wide rollout of VoIP phone service, helped build out its public WiFi network and launched the industry’s first remote storage DVR.
“Tom has a rare combination of technological vision and operational excellence, which made him an exceptional and well-respected leader. Throughout his career, Tom was at the forefront of innovation in the cable industry, not only driving business results but also shaping its future, and his contributions are considerable,” says Jim Dolan, Executive Chairman and CEO, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, who was President and CEO of Cablevision while Rutledge was its COO.
Rutledge brought along John Bickham from his Time Warner days to serve as president of Cablevision’s cable business, with Bickham and many other Cablevision senior leaders to later follow Rutledge to Charter. “We had the highest penetration of any company in the country at every service level and the highest revenue for home passed. That happened on our watch by the way we packaged in price and ran the Optimum service operation,” he says (fun fact: Bickham named his boat “Triple Play”). “The people that have worked with me before and since, a lot of them know that if we run the company like we can, we can be really successful. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about people that have success together wanting to do it again together.”
Cablevision’s success got Rutledge noticed, especially by entrepreneurs who were helping Charter complete its restructuring and emerge from bankruptcy in 2011.
Crestview Partners had seen its investment in Charter go from virtually worthless to quite profitable by the time the restructure was complete “My partners came to me and said, ‘Boy, we’ve done so well on this investment, we not only have our money back, we have multiples of our money back, so we need to sell and move on to the next fund,’” Crestview Vice Chairman and Marcus Cable founder Jeff Marcus said in a Cable Center Oral History interview. “I said, ‘Fellows: we’re just getting started here.’ We were recruiting Tom Rutledge to come in and be the CEO and I would say, ‘The best is yet to come.’”
Rutledge got to work immediately, bringing over a cadre of execs who had worked with him at Cablevision and Charter. “It was a mess. It was a diamond in the rough,” Rutledge says. “Because it had gone through bankruptcy, because it had starved itself in certain cases because of the bankruptcy process. Essentially, the assets of Charter were purchased at too high a price and had too much debt on it. And it didn’t grow fast enough to cover that debt. That’s why it went bankrupt. But I still thought the fundamentals of the business in terms of creating future value were great.”
The team quickly began transforming the operator into a growth leader. “If you do the right things, you can create a great company with a great value and use that value to grow even further,” Rutledge explains. That opportunity came in 2016 when Charter completed a $60 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, creating the second-largest cable operator in the U.S.
It was a combination Rutledge had long been dreaming of. “When I was at Cablevision, I wanted to put Time Warner Cable together in Cablevision. I believed in the cable industry’s potential as a scale player,” he says. “The potential of the industry is still great because there are lots of people that don’t subscribe to all the services we have and we’ve built this really high-capacity infrastructure.” He dismisses the notion that there was some personal satisfaction in acquiring the company that passed over him for CEO of the cable business following the acquisition of AOL. “It wasn’t a payback kind of notion to me. It was really about what was the best way to make the cable business work.”
He also acknowledges that not everything has been a success, expressing disappointment that video on demand didn’t pay off in the long term. “It brought [value] to the edge player—the Microsofts, the Googles of the world, Apple, Netflix, the companies that were created as a result of the internet, as opposed to the cable industry. Even though we created a legal infrastructure for video on demand,” says Rutledge. “I think that the industry is going to be reformed the way the record music and music business was reborn. But there’s more sort of damage to come before that happens.”
When Rutledge reflects on his five decades in cable, some of his most memorable recollections aren’t those that drew the biggest headlines. “One of the stressful things is when people vote on you. In a way, a CEO gets voted on by shareholders and by the board. But when you’re doing municipal franchising, the municipalities vote on whether they’re going to give you the franchise,” he says. “Those are the things, the wins of those and union elections—anytime where you get a public judgment for your results, good or bad—that I find most memorable.”
