Q&A with Optimum’s Jennifer Yohe

Jennifer Yohe, SVP and Chief Procurement Officer at Optimum, was recognized with The WICT Network‘s Women of the Year–Media award. We spoke with her about why she chose a career in business and procurement, the turnaround efforts at Optimum and why WICT remains important today. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation.

What was your reaction when you found out you were being given this award?

Back in 2011 was the first time I saw somebody that I knew well get the Woman of the Year award. It was Nomi Bergman. I remember there was a whole series of things that happened. I got flowers delivered, and there was a note, and as I read the note, I just, I cried. I thought, ‘This is amazing, this is something I never expected.’ It’s such an honor. To have been years ago, watching people on the stage and saying, ‘Wow, that’s something I aspire to be,’ and then to be there, it’s pretty incredible. It’s still not really sunk in, to be honest.

What inspired you to go down this path of procurement and business in telecom?

It’s interesting, because my first job was not in cable. It was in sports. I worked for a former NFL team owner in Washington—that would’ve been Jack Kent Cooke—and so with him, I was hired to manage taking one stadium and move it into another. I saw lots of opportunities, and I’m like, ‘Well, who’s doing all the spending and the buying?’ So I got a little bit into what I would call pre-procurement stage, and then [Cooke] died, and a number of his friends reached out and said what are you going to do? Are you going to stay? … This opportunity came up on the high-speed data side at Roadrunner, which is part of Time Warner Cable at the time, and I was like, this is new and interesting, I’ll just go check this out. I got hired as a project manager, and I got there and in a traditional way, the high-speed data business—whether it was Comcast, Tom Warner, Charter, Cox—it was like a startup. I just looked around and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, the opportunities here without even thinking about procurement. Look at the opportunities here to go put good deals in place and save money.’ I always liken the ability to negotiate back to being a middle child, because I feel like I spent my life between my sisters negotiating, but it went from that to creating the role that I was in there, which just grew … I created the world and I loved it. Some days ard hard and some days are easier, and a lot of battles go back-and-forth across the table, but it really is all about the same reason that all of us are here in this industry: to do the right thing for the business, save the company money and build relationships.

What’s it like having been part of the team leading the turnaround at Optimum?

For me in particular, when I came in, there were a lot of very public issues around procurement, and so I had to come in and clean that up. But just to step back for a second, when I left the industry for a little while and I worked in NASCAR and a couple of other places, when [Altice USA Chairman/CEO Dennis Mathew] called me and said, ‘I need you to come. Can you come?’ It goes back to this industry, right? Why wouldn’t you go try to turn the business around? Why wouldn’t you go try to make an impact every day? So it was a no-brainer, really, but being part of it, it’s not just the company and where the company was, it’s the industry. The industry has changed so much, and just trying to anticipate what our customers need and want, adding fiber into the mix. There’s a lot, and I think we’re certainly turning around things in this company, but from an industry perspective, I think we’ve got a ways to go. So it goes back to being with the right people in the right place and being able to make the impact.

You’ve mentioned having worked at Time Warner, NASCAR and Jack Kent Cooke Inc. What lessons did you learn from those parts of your career that remain with you to this day?

I think back to, I think it was 2016, the Women in Technology Award. I sat on a panel and the moderator—there were four of us, I think Fox, ESPN and some others—and one of the questions the moderator asked was, ‘How much of your time do you spend on relationships?’ And I was last to answer, but one person said 10%, one said 20% and I said 100%. So if I could take one thing that has carried me through all these years, it’s those relationships. Literally, the cable industry is like one big family. You go to an event and you’ve worked with this person or they’ve been somewhere else. But it’s also who do you call on when you need something? To me, that is absolutely without question, the number one thing for me,

What are some of the issues facing your role, and the industry at large, right now?

Well, you know, if you think back to when there was COVID and then there was a supply chain shortage, and everybody panicked and ordered, you know, lots of materials a couple of years ahead of time, because the lead times were 24 months. So we kind of get through that phase of this, and there’s actually excess inventory. A lot of vendors have excess inventory because so much was ordered and then not as much as needed. Because I. Know, technology changes in 12 months time. And so you have old stuff that becomes new, right? And so I think that’s a trying to manage through that, you know, with our partners and with our vendors and even in our own space, you know, what? What are we? Do we stay with what we have? Or do we move to the next generation and and knowing that, you know, you sort of leave stuff on the table, right? … You look at some of the countries’ tariffs are just enormous, but I think it’s a matter of settling down and not knowing until we settle down. We’re in a 90-day period where things are a steady state, but I think we’ll get through that, and I think it won’t be as difficult as it seems today. But the market reacts to that. Costs go up. Our suppliers, it’s going to cost them more, so ultimately, it’s going to cost us more.

What do you think the role of an organization like The WICT Network is in today’s world?

I’ve been a WICT member for, we’ll just say 20+ years, and when I think back to the core of what WICT was, I think it’s, it’s the same now.  They have great programs, networking. I think the one thing that’s more critical now than before is, we lost some female leaders—not lost them physically, but during COVID, a lot of women stepped away and said, ‘You know what, I don’t want to go do this anymore. I’ve had enough of this.’ I think we as leaders have not focused enough on our middle-level women and getting them ready, basically. WICT has some incredible programs to do that. I think it also provides that networking, where if you’re a part of a chapter, you meet people from other companies and you get to engage. And it’s the support. It’s the functional support that they give and their mission. Their mission is to create women leaders. We were underrepresented in our space with women leaders, and I think we do have a gap between what I would call the manager director-level and the more senior, seasoned leaders. I think they fill some of those gaps.