Cell-ing the Future

Cell-ing the Future

Executive Session by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

T3 Communications, a Fort Myers-based telecommunications company, is growing at a rapid pace as it continues to add new business customers. Enter Adam Sewall, the company's new president and CEO.

Sewall comes with impressive telecom credentials. Most recently, he was senior vice president of business development and operations for Fastmobile, a mobile-phone messaging provider. Previously, he was a venture partner at Comventures, a leading venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, chief executive officer of Spectrum Wireless, and director of sales and strategic planning for Omnipoint, a cellular phone company that T-Mobile bought in 1999 for $11.6 billion.

T3 Communications offers voice and data telecommunication services exclusively to business customers. The company provides services that include local and long-distance calling, toll-free lines, messaging, Internet and e-mail.

The Review recently spoke with Sewall about his personal interests and his strategy for T3 Communications.

PERSONAL

Age: 46

Family: Married with three children, two dogs.

Hometown: New York City.

Education: Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. State University of New York, Purchase. "I actually left to go and play music. I was a working musician for a number of years." Later completed undergraduate studies at SUNY in New York City and completed graduate studies at Columbia University.

Your favorite telecom gadget?

Palm Treo by Verizon.

What do you have on your iPod?

My son's rock band, For Pete's Sake. I also have AFI, Flogging Mollies, Lenny Kravitz, Handel's Messiah, Paganini.

What was your first paying job?

"I was 11 years old and I worked for a grocer in Brooklyn, N.Y. I stocked shelves, took out the trash, bagged groceries. And I did it before school and after school. I earned $1.65 an hour. I was paid in cash."

PROFESSIONAL

Tell us about your previous experience.

"At Fastmobile, I ran business development, operations and sales. It's a great company. Their software is on all these phones. What they do is they enable the mobile messaging experience from your desktop to occur directly on your phone."

How did you get into this business?

"I was in the construction industry almost 20 years ago. I owned a general contracting firm and we were doing lots of bank work. The banking industry had a downturn and I was looking to get out of it. I kind of skated by and said I think this telecom thing is pretty cool and I think it's going to explode. So I made a concerted effort to look for opportunities there.

"I got a call from a recruiter and my wife was giving my son a bath and she hung up on the recruiter. It turned out it was a recruiter for Nynex Mobile. I thought I was going in for a relatively low position and they slotted me into an executive path with education and training and a pretty fast track through the company. I found that I just loved it. I worked on the merger between Nynex Mobile and Bell Atlantic, which became Verizon. I spent seven years at the combined companies and then I had the chance to start Omnipoint Communications."

The Position

What's your biggest challenge in the year ahead?

"The challenge right now is how to automate our internal processes to keep up with growth. We are growing at an unprecedented rate. What we're doing now is putting in some relatively advanced systems in order to take the point of entry to the point of execution. It's faster, it lowers our operating expense, it increases our margins, it gives our customers a faster time to service, it lets us work with our vendors better and it lets us grow. The big challenge is how do we integrate that and how do we do it quickly."

What's your long-term strategy?

"We will be in other states in the Southeast. We are focused on Tier 3 and Tier 2 markets. Those are markets that are outside your football cities. It's real simple. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to be in Tampa. We're never going to compete in Atlanta; Too much competition, too many players with lower margins. We want to be the local guys with the local presence. We can lower our costs because we operate efficiently and focus like a laser on customers.

"In addition, we'll be looking at acquisitions. [T3 Chairman Steve Jones] already brought a couple to the table. I didn't expect it to happen so fast. If we can take some company that is struggling, that might have put a tremendous amount of time and money into it to build a base but hasn't quite connected the dots, then that's a perfect marriage. Some are larger and some are smaller.

What other Florida markets look good?

"We're looking closely outside of Jacksonville and outside of Gainesville. Basically, we follow the demographics. When we see a concentration of small and medium sized enterprises, then that's where we want to be. We're building a model that we can replicate in those markets."