Vanguard Award for Young Leadership

As a young man, Bret Perkins remembers finding relief in soccer from the stresses faced by most teens. “When I needed to think or was under stress, I would juggle a soccer ball for hours,” he recalled.

Today Perkins’ considerable soccer skills, which he displayed as team captain of Temple University’s soccer team, are still helping Comcast’s vice president of government affairs cope with the stresses of everyday life. “I brought a soccer ball into the office and find myself juggling more and more these days,” he said. “It still helps me think.”

Perkins’ skills in handling stressful regulatory issues and navigating an increasingly complex and contentious telecommunications landscape, also explains why the seven-year Comcast veteran is being honored with a Vanguard Award at the 2008 Cable Show.

Only a few months after Perkins joined Comcast in 2001, the cable operator announced its acquisition of AT&T Broadband. “It shook our world and flipped it upside down,” Perkins said. “Back then Comcast was in 22 states. Now we’re in 39. In 2001, government affairs had oversight of 1,800 local franchising authorities; we now deal with 6,400. Comcast had 23,000 employees. Now there are 90,000 plus.”

The nature of Comcast’s business also shifted. “In 2001, we fundamentally had one product, video,” Perkins said. “Prior to the AT&T deal, our broadband and voice businesses were still relatively small and we were No. 3 in the cable industry. Now, as the country’s largest cable operator, we face far more scrutiny on many levels. We are the largest residential high-speed online provider [the second overall], and the fourth-largest phone provider. That has added layers and layers of complexities to the policy issues at a time when the competitive environment is changing.”

Perkins success in reshaping Comcast’s government affairs to handle those changes can be traced to his first jobs in health care, where he acquired the ability of an emergency room worker to methodically face any crisis.

After growing up in Connecticut, Perkins moved to Philadelphia to attend Temple University so he could be closer to his father, who was working at Temple Hospital. He studied business law and human resources, with the idea of eventually going back to law school and becoming a labor lawyer. But when he graduated in 1991, the economy was terrible and job choices limited.

“I got a job doing human resources and labor relations at the North Philadelphia Health System,” Perkins said. “It was the poorest hospital in Pennsylvania, and I think it still owns that title. I had my first payless payday there. We couldn’t afford to pay benefits for employees for six months of my first year. I couldn’t order pencils. We had a bunch of college kids and one real professional. They just threw us together and told us to figure it out and try not to get killed in the process.”

For Perkins, it was invaluable. “This was my baptism by fire and a great first learning experience that set the basis for everything I’ve done,” he said.

Perkins then took a job in legislative affairs at the Medicaid managed care company now called Keystone Mercy/AmeriHealth Mercy Health Plan. Although he knew nothing about legislative affairs, he was impressed by his prospective boss and excited by the idea of learning a new area. “In a lot of ways, my career has been driven by the people I’ve worked for and worked with,” he said. “I always wanted to be in an environment where I could learn and grow and to be around people who would enable that.”

From here, Perkins moved to Mercy Health System’s corporate office, becoming vice president of system services and the assistant to the president. Once again, he developed a close relationship with his boss, who was grooming him for a larger operational role at one of the hospitals.

After spending nine months as the interim head of operations at a hospital, however, Perkins began to question his future in health care. “This was a very distressed hospital and it was an incredible experience,” he said. “I was practically sleeping there and learned so much. At the end of the experience, I knew I should be loving it. But I wasn’t.”

As Perkins reassessed his career options, he was contacted by a recruiter for Comcast. He talked with Sheila Willard, who is now his boss and the senior vice president of government relations at Comcast. They promised to stay in touch, and a year later, Perkins joined Comcast as director of government affairs.

The move from health care to cable was an unusual one, Perkins admits. But once again, he was attracted by the fact the new job offered an interesting environment and a lot of growth potential. He’d also been working on telemedicine projects, which had gotten him interested in broadband technology.

“I knew I’d have an opportunity to learn a lot,” he said. But he had no idea how quickly he’d be forced to digest the intricacies of the cable business.

The Comcast-AT&T Broadband deal began what Perkins calls his “second baptism by fire,” his background in project management in large healthcare systems proved invaluable. “You step out on the balcony, look at the big picture, figure out what needs to be done and put systems and processes in place to make certain it gets done.”

Since then — he was promoted to senior director of government affairs and now serves as vice president of government affairs — he’s applied the same philosophy to help the company take a much more active role in dealing with an increasingly challenging regulatory and competitive environment.

“We’ve developed what is now a full-blown advocacy program,” he said. “We realize that we can no longer just react to regulatory issues. The business is just too complex. We have to be out there advocating our positions and educating people. We have to make certain they understand the industry and the types of policies that will ensure we can compete on a level playing field and continue to grow.”

As part of that process, Perkins and his team have established much closer relationships with key inter-governmental associations such as the National Governor’s Association and the National League of Cities.

“We have some 250 people around the country [in government affairs] working on issues that affect us,” he said. “It is an incredible task to get them to work together in symphony, but it’s one that I think we’re doing incredibly well.”