Patrick Lawless's IT Journey: A Consultant's Tale

Shortly after New Year’s, I arranged a meeting with Patrick Lawless the Founder and President of Conectrix. Being one of his kin (#firstborns4life) it wasn’t too difficult to find the man. But Pat is a busy guy. It was hard to pin him down, jetting from one meeting to the other, all the while with his head phones on, having a second meeting concurrently with the physical one. I practically cornered him while he was in his backyard, chipping golf balls over an aging volleyball net. Of course he was on another conference call so I had to wait for that to conclude before I began our Q&A.

Question: Help me understand the backdrop to how you got into Telecommunications.

Answer: Growing up all my brothers and sisters had to get jobs early because my family was very poor. This was really a blessing because it taught me hard work from a young age and the basics of sales. I sold brooms door to door and I got a lot of doors slammed in my face. This never really bothered me because I knew that odds are, after I’d asked enough people, one of them was going to buy.

Patrick posing for his 8th grade basketball picture at Indian Creek Junior High.

When I got out of college a buddy of mine was living in Orange County, California, working for Sprint and recommended me as a hire. He was honestly lonely because all his friends were back in Kansas, but I made the move and took the position. It was in 1989 that I entered the telecom industry for Sprint in a direct sales role.

Question: What did you do while at Sprint?

Answer: As a direct sales rep I had to sell $5,000 per month in new sales. I was assigned to the territories of Buena Park, Cerritos, and La Mirada. Sales reps were assigned territories by cities in Orange County. That way sales reps would not be working on the same account and it would eliminate conflict.

My responsibilities were to acquire new business or get the 5k per month. If we did not make our 5k quota each month, we would be put on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). This was the way Human Resources could document legally when firing a sales rep who did not make quota. If a rep went three months in a row without making quota they would be fired.

Our products were Toll-Free Service and Long Distance Service.  We competed against AT&T as well as MCI, so really those were the only three long-distance carriers business could select to carry long distance calls.  Local phone calls could only be carried by the incumbent local phone company which was Pacific Bell at the time. The only competition in the telecom world in the US was the Long Distance Business.

About 1% market share of the long-distance market represented 1 billion dollars in revenue to the company carrying those calls.  Long Distance calls ranged from $1.00 per minute to 25 cents per minute at the low end in 1989. It was not unusual for sales reps to ask for a copy of the long-distance bill of a potential customer that was paying $2.50 per minute, therefore we could really help our clients save money on Long Distance calls.

The employee badge Patrick had while working at Sprint.

Question: What did an average day look like for you?

Answer: Each day we would drive to our territories on our own and knock on doors of all the businesses in our territories. We typically would ask to speak with the business owner and often times the receptionist would tell us to get lost. Or the receptionist would ask what is this regarding, and we were trained to say that this was a “personal business matter”. 

Once we got a copy of the long-distance bill, we would drive back to the Orange County Sales office and type up a proposal showing the cost savings per month, year and 36 months. The customer would not have to change their local phone lines, so no physical changes were made to the telephone lines, only an internal change was made at the Central Office of Pacific Bell where they would change the pic code to the Sprint Long Distance Network.

Question: Did you get promoted ever? Did you move on from the direct sales position?

Answer: After four years in my direct sales role, I was promoted to the Sprint Partner Sales Manager. The year would have been 1994. My job was to recruit independent sales agents, much like ourselves now at Conectrix, to contract with Sprint to sell our business products.

Our sales quota at that time went up to 15-20k per month in new sales, but I recruited eager independent salespeople that wanted to make money. I did that job until 2001, then started my own independent sales company.

Question: This independent sales company would then be Conectrix?

Answer: That’s right.

Question: The one I’m working part-time for? The group that you’re the boss-man of?

Answer: Right on both of those accounts.

Question: What were the early days of Conectrix like?

Answer: So after about 6 years of managing agents I realized the power of the partner channel. That’s why in 2001 I decided to go out on my own and basically hire myself as an independent agent contracting with multiple telecom suppliers so that I could offer my customers the best available service and solution.

When we first started my biggest concern was that I wouldn’t be successful. The fear that my family would starve is what drove me. Intense I know, but I had three kids close in age to feed and clothe. Plus, I was worried I would lose my retirement that I had built up at Sprint because I had used my retirement to finance the business.

Anyone who wants to start a company runs the risk of failure. This got me fired up to pursue relationships and partnerships. Every conversation I tried to win the client over. I was desperate and hungry which made me motivated.

Patrick closing the business during the early years of Conectrix.

Question: Desperate and hungry like a starved animal that will become bolder and challenge larger animals in order to find food?

Answer: Sort of like that, yea.

Question: But without the crawling on all fours and eating raw meat?

Answer: Exactly.

Question: What was the first big deal that Conectrix landed?

Answer: Ameriquest. They are a mortgage company. They became such a major company that the Texas Ranger Stadium was named after them. We built a nationwide fiber network for them and that gave us a nice stream of revenue.

That deal was truly a feeling of satisfaction and relief. This one account could sustain me by itself so I knew I could do this long term. It made it so I could be even more aggressive in pursuing other deals and freed up even more time for me. 

Question: Where there any other major moments in the life of your business up until this point? What happened next that really transformed Conectrix?

Answer: In 2009, Conectrix, which at the time was just my wife and me, went to an industry conference in the desert. We listened to a panel of IT leaders including Evolve IP who was represented by the VP of Sales, Gary Coben. He said something that completely changed how we do business. He told us, agents, that about 80% of customers’ budgets were dedicated to computing and only 20% to telecom. Laptop and desktop computers, servers and software, and all the management they entail are what make up the cost of computing. Gary’s words really struck a cord when he said that if you don’t focus on this part of your customers’ business you won’t be able to compete with your competitors who are already talking about computing.

That’s when Conectrix started selling things like VDI / Virtual Desktop, infrastructure as a service, software as a service and other SaaS applications. Once we did that we really pivoted and started to grow as a company. Our customers’ needs were better met and our reach and possible room for expansion all got much larger. This shift to selling computing bore its fruit in 2015 when my boys were going off to college.

Bear in mind, this was a totally new venture for Conectrix and for me. The extent to which I understood computing was very limited. I did not fully appreciate the difference between premise-based computing and cloud computing. Selling Cloud Services surprisingly helped me understand how the computing world worked. I would ask my customers questions and then connect them with smart guys who knew the technology well, and sooner or later I became an expert on computing. There is this fear in every consultant’s mind that they have to thoroughly know a product or service inside and out before they try and sell. In the telecom and computing world where new technologies outpace old ones daily, you have to be bold and be in the mindset to learn on the fly.

Patrick and his wife Robin at a recent Channel Connect.

Question: What does Conectrix look like now? Where do you see it headed and where do you want to steer it?

Answer: Conectrix now is big and has grown by 30 or 40% because of the new technologies and opportunities we have for our clients. We have transformed the company into one that isn’t traditional telecom but rather focused on cloud computing. We now consider ourselves an independent sales organization, however, our focus is more on IT and cloud solutions over telecom and internet connectivity solutions. We sell both but we can have the biggest impact by leveraging the latest technology so that our customers are always at the top of their game.

Conectrix’s fundamental principle is doing what is best for our customers no matter the circumstance and always striving to create the best experience for them. This core belief won’t change today or in the future. What will be changing is how we help our clients compete because our industry is so fluid and modern technology is always outpacing itself.

Conectrix is headed in exciting directions come 2020. As I said before, I always want to steer my company in the direction that most helps customers meet their core business objectives. Expect to see more cloud computing technology, AI solutions, IOT (internet of things). I’m also really interested in where our latest partnering with Energy Professionals will take us.

Question: I think I got a nice amount of sun while doing this Q&A. Don’t you think?

Answer: Why do you think I’m always doing these calls outside? You can’t get Vitamin D while at a desk my boy.