[rant article] Imagine my surprise today when I opened my Business 2.0 magazine and started reading and was met with an Arch Enemy. About 3/4’s of the way through, I quickly got a very large headache caused by a story about Earthlink. Staring at me, in a picture that reminded me of a mugshot (face front *click*, face right *click*), is the supposed man that’s going to save Earthlink from itself… The story headline really got me going as well: “The ISP is Dead, Long Live The ISP” – why in the world would they choose Earthlink for this and not some ma & pa ISP that has managed to hang on throughout the years?
The story goes on to praise Gary Betty for leading “the company through one crisis after another, from near bankruptcy his first year to explosive growth during the dotcom boom to a tricky merger with rival MindSpring in 1999…” The article also quotes a friend that states that Gary is a very smart and “a balanced genius”. Later on, it goes on to group Charles Brewer, the founder of MindSpring, into the same group as an employee spouting L Ron Hubbard aphorisms as well as tag Charles as, what my wife even described, “a music loving hippie”. My wife has heard me talk about Charles, she was even there when I got an email from him and had to deal with the week-long excitement of the whole thing.
The real Gary Betty, from an employee perspective, is not a nice person, by any means. Let me tell you the real story around the Merger and Gary’s attention towards the innards of the company. I’ll also throw information out that the article completely ignores or fails to mention.
The Beginning
In 1998, MindSpring was profitable, Earthlink was not – period. Earthlink was even on the brink of bankruptcy as well. MindSpring had a goal of 1 million customers by 2000. Well, a merger with NetCom caused “1 by 2″ to turn into “1 by Tuesday” in early 1999 (announced by Charles Brewer during a company Conf Call).
I’ll go a little bit into company culture as well since that would give a better background on the companies, before and after, the merger.
- The CV&B’s where read every morning, at every team meeting.
- The CV&B’s where read at every company conference call, every week.
- The CV&B’s where used to make spot business decisions all the time.
- If you had a problem, you better come with a solution as well, and that solution better line up with the CV&B’s.
- The company maintained 14 Deadly Sins and seriously frowned on going against them. We where constantly getting in trouble for one of them: “Joke about how dumb the customers are.” while on breaks.
- There was complete and utter ownership of calls. If some customer called in and there was a complicated problem or 1 phone line (supporting dialup) – you stuck with them till they where fixed – period.
- ALL the top brass where required to take 5 hours of calls a year to get in touch with the customer and reps working the front lines. 5 hours doesn’t sound like much, but it helps get to know your customers.
- The very top brass was known for showing up at a call center, just to talk, complete open door policy. An email would come out saying “Chow with Chuck (Charles Brewer) – come on down!”
- Reps where so dedicated (and stupid), that they would continue taking calls after fire alarms had gone off, writing down phone numbers as fast as they could so they could clear out our Q’s that way some poor customer wasn’t waiting on hold for a half hour.
- Many reps, including myself, would turn into workaholics, coming in during bad times, just to help out the Q’s and get them under control.
- The company was so frugal, that a marketing rep was chastised for being late to a meeting because she was busy picking up the plastic sheets for an old school overhead projector. Charles had to tell everyone that he didn’t mind spending money on things that could help increase productivity and soon a regular projector was installed.
During this phase, our stock shot up to a phenomenal $140+ a share. Rumors of Dell buying us out circulated day and night (later, they turned out to be true), but Charles did something most people wouldn’t. He held out for $150 a share explaining that it would help the reps more. It also had business sense, but thats a different story. It was also a running rumor that MindSpring had been trying to buy out MSN and that each time we talked to MicroSoft, they thought a little harder each time about the offer.
The Call Q’s remained between 1 and 5 minutes, unless some serious network outage caused problems, punching the call time up to 20 minutes. Anything after 5 minutes was called Diamond Time. Our call boards turned red, they beeped every 2 minutes, diamonds floated across the screen, coaches went up and down the isles trying to provide help to anyone stuck on a really long call. If you where on a longer call, they stood with you and read over your notes to try to help out. While sometimes painful, this whole way of life helped the customers and made us better reps. We would even hold off on lunches and breaks, usually voluntarily for diamond time, trying to get the Q down to a manageable time. We also maintained web pages for all of us to watch, showing each reps current call time, their call time average for the day, amount of calls, etc. This brought out the competition in us, trying to get the most amount of calls with the least amount of overall time. This sounds bad from a quality perspective, but we had surveys sent out on us all the time and the coaches went over them with us on a monthly basis – yet another thing they publicly announced to the team to help competition between us.
Outsourcing was looked at, and even trialed. I say that because the outsourcing firm just couldn’t maintain our quality. MindSpring even sent reps and supervisors on location to try to help, only to find that the reports coming back stated that the environment in the call center was ultimately causing quality issues on the customer side. It seemed that the “get’er’done” attitude of the outsourcing company was so ingrained that MindSpring couldn’t teach the management to back off and let their reps handle the individual situations on their own. They lasted about 5 months and the contract was canceled. After that, we had a few reps that emailed support and their contacts inside MindSpring. They where both happy and upset since they had never seen support from a quality standpoint. They where upset because they had to go back to the old way of life of pounding out calls for other companies.
The Merger Hits
One day, we came to work and had our morning team meetings just like normal. We got on the phones, and around 8am, our coach got a call. He panicked and got the whole team off their phones as quick as possible “Tell them you’ll call them right back if you have to! This is an emergency!”
After we all got off the phones, where where grouped into a private huddle and told that some news is going to hit very soon and that we would probably be fielding calls on the issue. We all excitedly mumbled that we finally got MSN. Before we where even told what it was, we where specifically told that we could not comment on the issue. All we could say was “I know this has just happened, but there is a conference call scheduled for later on this. Is there something that I could help you with on the Support side? ” Then they told us: MindSpring has merged with Earthlink and the new company would be called…Earthlink.
Some of us got excited, some of us where floored. Others cried. Some people quit within weeks due to religious reasons or because they understood that mergers and buyouts often caused job loss – ultimately, this last group of people where the smartest bunch.
Soon after the announcement, the MindSpring store, with all the MindSpring labeled goods, got hammered. Everything sold out in just a day, even the display models that where years old. Regretfully, I have just one last thing in my possession that still survives (my cups, mugs, crugs and glasses have died or have been lost through the moves) – I have a onesee that was signed by my whole team when I went from Temp to Perm.
Post Merger
Things got worse and worse as the MindSpring way of life was abandoned. Employees got depressed and outraged at some of the issues. The company soon let go of the CV&B’s – they stopped being read. The teleconferences completely disappeared deeming the company too big to think of such a thing (mind you, MindSpring did this with 5 call centers – 2 more wouldn’t break the back of the conference call).
There where also other changes. Everyone from upper management all the way down to the Supervisor of the small teams on the phones got a blackberry. If you where any type of manager in a call center, you got a company cell phone as well. Management structures where spread out across the country and business decisions where based on who wanted to keep their call center and job the longest. Servers where moved across the country, network latency sky rocketed as admins finger pointed at each other from across the country. Internal communications on how to fix things broke down and the company canned anyone that complained too loudly or brought up the CV&B’s. This incident was widely circulated internally between reps – it was a warning that bad things where coming. Unfortunately, the mentality of all the situations this rep was met with, like reporting hundreds of “bad PSP (Personal Start Page) forms to get the attention of the NOC (Network Operations Center). On a side note, the Bridge that is mentioned, was the MindSpring NOC. Earthlink moved the NOC into a completely controlled environment, away from the reps.
We also got Pay Bands, which made even more people quit. Then, it was announced, that there was trouble on the horizon. For some unknown reason, we where not making money. The Board was unhappy, as where our investors. The stock tanked lower and lower, as did the general attitude of the employees. The joke with the reps was that Toilet Paper was worth more than our Stock Options.
After awhile, the reps would answer a call and repeat the same phrase each time: “I’m sorry…” Call Q times went from 1-5 minutes pre-merger to upwards of an hour. The colors, beeping and diamonds where turned off. The reps started ignoring the call boards, barely looking at them between shifts – it was pitiful. The supervisors would barely blink at the call boards, but they where all over us on call times.
Earthlink did a study on call times. They figured out that the average person should be able to solve a customer problem in 10 minu…nope, 9…8 mi…7 minutes. The average changed so fast, the reps didn’t know what to do. There was no more call ownership. “But I only have 1 line” was met with “I’m sorry, you’ll need to call back if that doesn’t work”.
An Electronic Support department was created to handle all the electronic communications between employees. We (I was part of this dept) where hand-picked for being the best and brightest in the company. People who could take issues head-on and pound out emails as fast as humanly possible. Where where cross trained in all parts of the company. When I say that, I mean everything. If you got an E-Support rep over chat or email, they could handle anything you threw at them with a 1-stop shopping mentality. You could fix your credit card, solve a web support issue and setup your router, all in one chat session with the same rep. Naturally, since we where so cross trained, we became the cheapest dept. We where soon told that we needed 100 email a day as a requirement. If you’ve ever worked support, you know this can be unreasonable when you’re handling everything from Web Server issues to customer credits. 16 minutes per email looks great on paper, until you find out that rebuilding FrontPage extensions can take up to 5 minutes, checking DNS properly takes another 4 minutes, add the overhead of logging into each one of the different web servers and typing out a reply to the customer in a coherent fashion, you where quickly over your limit. Technical Support reps during this time where required to take 35-40 calls a day. Customer service’s requirement was twice that.
E-Support also caused problems throughout the company. We where setup in our own sections throughout the company so that we could take each others knowledge and build on it. What ended up happening was that most of the senior reps on the floor disappeared and we would get people that would walk up and ask a question about some weird problem, all while we worried about our 16 minutes per email rule. This caused general disgust among the reps, which added to the, already low, moral of the call center.
When E-Support didn’t seem to save the day, something happened. The brass came down and said “if we don’t make money, the Board says that we (meaning CEO, etc) have to leave.” We soon started outsourcing calls, email, chat – everything. Call quality went way down. Call times stayed the same for one very simple reason: the company had initiated a downsizing of call centers. Each call center, we later found out, was the company’s favorite and would not go away. Employees, including myself, where let go left and right for any type of rule violation, regardless of the intent of the employee. It started to become hit or miss if the customer would get an American support rep or outsourced. The customers constantly complained of the outsourced reps.
The MindSpring customers started abandoned the company in droves. They emailed and snail mailed in their cancellations in at an alarming rate. Each one was replied to that they would have to call, causing complete anger since they would need to wait on hold upwards of an hour. Later, E-Support was tasked with the snail mail as well because someone at HQ had literally been dumping the mail into a closet and walking away. We had to dig through mail that was over 6 months old on a normal basis.
After awhile, it became apparent that Gary Betty had every intent on chopping the company up as much as possible to save money. He and others would show up at a call center, shut it down and gather everyone around. The employees usually failed to noticed the bodyguards in the room while the news was given out that the company was closing their call center to save money. That sounds all interesting, until you find out that, at the same time, Gary got a $350,000 bonus. (Original Article gone – Archive.org used.) This was on top of the $621,000 salary he pulled in that year. There was also a memo distributed to the employees detailing what jobs would be going away.
Many employees publicly cried fowl at this situation and demanded a investigation. That investigation never came and Gary flat out ignored all employees that challenged his bonus with “I can’t feed myself anymore and you take a $350k bonus?” The company ignored these employees as well. Severance packages where made for employees, but they where lacking on all sides.
Oddly, when Earthlink shut down the call center, they took everything but the Core Values & Beliefs. They where still hanging on the wall of the empty building, 2 years later when some of us did a tour to see what was left for a possible business that competes directly with Earthlink.
Around this time, customers where placed even farther away from the thoughts of the company when the Customer Loyalty and Outreach program was canned. For some unknown reason, Earthlink even publicized this on an official internal mailing list.
In January, 2006, another memo was circulated stating that times where hard, things where going to get worse. This just pointed to more layoffs in the future.
MindSpring Now
Unfortunately, Earthlink needed a product name that they could use, but not spend any type of money licensing it nor needing to advertise it heavily. Heck, even the MindSpring domain came with the package deal. MindSpring is now another VOIP software package.
Now
Earthlink is a virtual empire in the ISP world. They are bodyless. Their call centers are located in places like India and other South Asian countries. The only call centers left, as far as I know are Atlanta and Pasadena. They are not really call centers, in the true sense of the word. They’re mainly company headquarters and a secondary management location. This is where all the monitoring of the company is based out of.
It also seems that Earthlink is still the lay off type of company. They laid off 30 of the IT workers (This included everything that was left of the NOC, desktop support, and client support) a few weeks ago, moving these jobs to an IT company in India that has a history of problems.
Earthlink has also sank a heck of a lot of money into a company called Helio.This company was created, in partnership with SK Telecom (South Korean), to allow Earthlink to move away from just an ISP based market and try to break into the Cell Phone market. The funny part is, Gary put Sky Dayton in charge of the company. This man has hardly any experience running a large company nor does he have cell phone industry experience other than being a customer. Remember when I said Earthlink was on the brink of Bankruptcy? Sky was in charge and, ultimately, caused that issue. I’ll go on to predict that Helio will crumble in a year or two. In the long run, Helio suffers the same issue, on the cell phone side, that Earthlink suffers on the ISP side – leased lines. It was something that both MindSpring and Earthlink complained about in the past.
If you look at Earthlink’s investment past, its downright dismal. They’ve had so many things they’ve invested in that have gone wrong that you’re better off staying away from anything they put their money into. Proof? Ricochet (now gone), Broadband over Power Line aka:BPL (plagued by problems centered around creating interference), 2-way satellite access (ask anyone thats had to support this and you’ll understand.), etc. Now, I’ll admit that 2 of the failures I just listed where on the MindSpring side, but they where kept alive all the way into Earthlink. Earthlink cut employees instead of sinking money into some nasty projects. I think that’s odd because MindSpring focused on quality and was profitable with regular, American, reps.
I also just found out that Gary has cancer and had to step down from the company on Nov 21st, 2006. While I wish him luck on his fight, it still doesn’t change my feelings towards the man. He originally started at MindSpring, something the article didn’t mention, and went to Earthlink and then, through a merger, made it back – yet another joke inside the company.
I would love to contact Charles again to ask a few detailed questions, but I know he’s busy and he probably wouldn’t answer the types of questions I have. I’m mainly interested in why Gary was left in the position of CEO instead of Charles. Charles had the better track record between the two – it just seemed like an odd, yet suicidal, move.
That said, I can’t complain too much because, if this man had not done what he did, I wouldn’t be in Europe, I wouldn’t have met my wife and I wouldn’t have my current job. If you would have caught me a few years ago and I where in the Atlanta area and, somehow, driving a sewage truck – I would have dumped it right on his house.
