Vanguard Award for Cable Operations Management

In recent years, Bresnan Communications has provided a notable exception to the subscriber losses many operators have suffered in smaller markets. Since 2006, the operator has been adding basic subscribers and racking up even more impressive gains with its bundled services.

“Currently, 54% of our customers are have a bundle of two or more services and 27% have the triple play,” Bresnan executive vice president of operations Steven Brookstein said. “Our phone penetration is 16% of homes passed. With the exception of Cablevision [Systems] and Cox [Communications], which have been selling phone service for years, that is higher than almost anyone in the industry.”

Bresnan also seems on target for more growth in 2008 and beyond. After adding about 6,400 basic subscribers in 2007, a year when many operators lost subscribers, Brookstein said, in 2008 “we are already 63% ahead of where we were in the same period last year.”

Those operational statistics make Brookstein a well deserving recipient of a Vanguard award this year, said Bresnan president Jeffrey DeMond. “Steve has led the talented operations team [that has] delivered results that are the envy of our industry,” DeMond said.

With characteristic modesty, however, Brookstein gives credit to the whole management team. “Bill [Bresnan, the operator’s chairman and CEO] has always had a great philosophy, which is that to be competitive you have to make investments,” Brookstein said. “I’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by visionaries like [Bresnan] and [DeMond] who have given me and my team the beacon and then let us run with it.”

Brookstein traces some of his interest in business and his dedication to providing the best possible customer service back to his family. Growing up in Philadelphia, he worked in a small clothing store that was owned by his grandfather and then passed on to his father.

“The neighborhood was going into hard times, but my father survived for many years by developing loyal repeat customers and offering them a personal touch and great service,” he said.

During his undergraduate work at Temple University, he worked at a local television station. “I was the producer of a live Bozo the Clown [show] that every day had a race with three gerbils,” he recalls. “One of my jobs was to feed the gerbils and get them ready for the daily race.”

The station also aired the original Batman series with Adam West. So, one of Brookstein’s other early TV jobs was to dress like Robin and attend promotional events.

“I had gone to Temple with the idea of getting into broadcasting but somewhere along the line I got interested in advertising,” Brookstein said. Because he wanted to work on the business side, managing accounts, he completed his MBA at Wharton and moved to New York City to work for a series of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather.

In 1979, he was hired at HBO as a manager of multichannel pay marketing. After working on the management team that came up with the idea for Cinemax, Brookstein returned to advertising before being hired at Comcast in 1990 as senior vice president of marketing.

In mid-1994, Tom Baxter, then president of Comcast, called Brookstein into his office and said he wanted to put him in charge of systems in California, Colorado and Connecticut. “I told him 'I’d love to do that but you know that I don’t have any operational experience’ ” Brookstein said. “And he replied, 'Yeah, I know that.’ Tom saw satellite competition on the horizon and he wanted to infuse more of a marketing perspective into their operations.”

Over the next few years, Brookstein also cut his teeth on newer technologies. The southern California systems he managed were the first Comcast systems to launch digital TV and the high-speed data service, Comcast@Home.

In 1999, as the Internet boom heated up, he joined @Home and he eventually became @Home’s general manager of the residential business. But the dot.com bust pushed @Home out of business and then claimed Brookstein’s next employer, the pioneering video-on-demand firm Diva. “I knew Diva was on shaky ground but I was trying to stay in the San Francisco area where my family and I were then living,” Brookstein said.

But the dot.com bust that forced AT&T to sell its cable systems, opened up new opportunities for some entrepreneurs. When Comcast bought AT&T, the company’s executives decided that the smaller AT&T systems in the Mountain states didn’t fit into their urban cluster strategy. That allowed Bill Bresnan, who had been looking for new cable investments since selling his systems in 2000 to Charter, and a group of equity investors to acquire the systems.

“They closed on March 20, 2003, and I started in April 2003,” Brookstein said. “The systems were losing subscribers and had been neglected in terms of investments. So the first order of business was to upgrade the footprint” so Bresnan could roll out a triple-play package of video, voice and data service.

After completing the rebuild ahead of schedule and under budget, the company quickly moved to launch high-speed data, digital television, digital video recorders, phone and most recently high-definition programming. Currently, about 97% of Bresnan’s systems are 550 Megaherz or better and about three quarters of 750MHz or higher.

Brookstein and his team also moved to improve customer service. Bresnan consolidated its 29 customer service offices into a main call center in Billings, Mont., with a satellite operation in Cheyenne, Wyo.

Along with a series of management changes and the upgrade, which has allowed much improved services, Brookstein said the new call centers have helped Bresnan attain one of the highest levels of customer satisfaction in the cable industry.

The investments in the company’s plant are also allowing it to move quickly against satellite on the HD front. Many Bresnan subscribers already have nearly 30 HD channels and Brookstein says the company will offer 50 by the end of 2008, with plans to hit 100 in 2009.

Bresnan also continues to speed up its Internet offering and has been successfully expanding its commercial business. Recently, the company won a contract from Qwest Communications International to provide the data transport business for the Wyoming state government.