The sale of Hekimian Laboratories, Inc. to Spirent was announced in November, 2000 and finalized the next month. January 2001 began the process of actually beginning to integrate Hekimian into Spirent’s operations.
Spirent was a British-based company with a nearly 60-year history starting in electrical supplies. It had been on the London Stock Exchange since 1955 and by the time we came across them Spirent was one of the largest public companies in the United Kingdom, a member of the FTSE 100. Starting in the mid-1990’s, Spirent made a strategic shift into telecommunications testing by acquiring a number of smaller independent companies and product lines. They first acquired Telecom Analysis Systems based in Eatontown, New Jersey in 1995, followed in 1997 by Adtech in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 1999 they bought Netcom Systems of Calabasas, California and DLS based in Ottawa, Canada. The acquisition of Hekimian was Spirent’s largest addition and ostensibly its jewel in the crown, though the folks at Netcom might have had different opinions.
A key architect of much of Spirent’s telecommunications activities was a fellow named My Chung. He had been the VP of Sales for TTC (renamed Acterna), a telecom test company that was one of Hekimian’s biggest competitors. I’m not exactly sure when My left TTC and found his way into Spirent’s orbit, but he was President of Spirent’s telecom operations by the time of our acquisition. It happened that TTC was located in Germantown, MD, just a few miles from Hekimian and My still lived in the area even though Spirent had no other holdings closer than New Jersey. He took over one of the offices in our Rockville building and Des Wilson became Chief Operating Officer for the Hekimian Division. Rockville became the de facto headquarters for Spirent’s telecom activities in North America, to some consternation of the Netcom people in Calabasas.
At the time we were acquired, each of these companies operated more or less independently with their own corporate identities, loosely under the label of Spirent. With the acquisition of Hekimian and a goal to list Spirent on the New York Stock Exchange, in addition to the London exchange, it became a priority to build a more unified brand. I quickly became involved in discussions over branding and integration, shuttling between conference calls and meetings, some at our offices in Rockville and some at Spirent’s headquarters in London — actually, Crawley, a working class suburb south of town.
The trips to London seemed like they would be fun, but we were stuck in either a hotel near Crawley or in Spirent’s industrial office building. There were few restaurants or anything interesting within walking distance and no good transportation options into the city. One memorable evening was spent at the manor home of Spirent’s CEO, Nicholas Brookes, where he kept a pet goose (Goosey) as a watchdog. We had a nice catered dinner, met his wife who seemed pained by the whole affair, had a tour of the manor and grounds which were shabby elegant in a 19th century sort of way, minding all the while to stay out of the way of Goosey. The only other memory I have of the London trips, other than many late nights in the Spirent offices, was repeatedly sitting in traffic hoping we would make it to Heathrow in time for our flights home; leaving out of Gatwick which was right near Crawley never seemed to be an option.
One of the first discussions was brand identity. We were able to agree that we wanted to create a unified Spirent identity rather than the old individual company names. Rather than invest a great deal of time and money cooking up a whole new thing (we’d already had experience with that at Hekimian and it wasn’t pretty), we quickly settled on slapping the word “Communications” under the Spirent and calling ourselves Spirent Communications. Done. The more difficult decisions about what to call each of our operating units and product lines came a little later and yielded much more convoluted results.
Listing Spirent on the New York Stock Exchange was a prestige move that was supposed to make it easier to draw the interest of US institutional investors during frenzied boom of the telecom bubble (part of the dot-com or tech bubble that crested in 2000). Only a handful of companies were listed on both the London and New York exchanges. To get the NYSE listing, we had to file lengthy disclosure documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I became responsible for a lot of the narrative in these documents, generating the corporate history and market statements, and proofing everything else. The documents had to go through rounds of reviews with our lawyers and investment bankers as well, so there were marathon rounds of revisions and tweaks, all leading up to a hard deadline for our listing in June 2001. It became obnoxious quickly and then I learned it had to be done annually, with quarterly updates. I can’t find the original 2001 filing but here is our 2002 SEC filing, if you want to entertain yourself.
FutureOp 2001 Conference
In addition to this corporate integration work, I was up to my eyeballs in preparations for our biggest and most expensive showcase event to date, FutureOp 2001 set for July 22-25, 2001 at the Pebble Beach Resort in California. We had been planning this event within Hekimian for more than a year and the Spirent people were excited to see it go ahead after the acquisition. It was a top-level event for our current and prospective customers as well as for partner telecom equipment providers. After the acquisition, it also became our first big opportunity to demonstrate integration of various Spirent test products.
We wanted to showcase end-to-end testing, from fiber backbones to DSL services to subscriber homes, demonstrating that our equipment and systems could provide unprecedented levels of integration and automation. We actually built a working end-to-end telecom network with a fiber optic backbone, DSL drops to homes and broadband services to businesses, all within the ballroom at the Inn at Spanish Bay. This involved bringing in more than $1 million of loaned equipment from a variety of partners and getting it all operational, first in our test lab in Rockville and then moving the whole roomful of stuff and rebuilding it in Pebble Beach.
I helped choreograph the entire three-day conference down to the minute, overseeing all the presentations, speakers, food, entertainment and golf. It exhausts me just recalling the level of detail and effort involved. It was a real team effort — we had dozens of people involved in preparations and on-site. For example, Bayard Brewin, our marcom manager, did amazing things to deliver a whole new look and feel to all the literature and graphics and produced a demo DVD that we used afterwards in a roadshow version of the event, FutureOp Focus. The overall event was a huge effort, very expensive, and ultimately quite successful both in immediate feedback and resulting sales. Plus, I got to play several rounds of golf at Pebble Beach. So win-win.
We amortized some of the cost of the event through FutureOp Focus, a roadshow our sales people could put on themselves through the rest of the year at customer locations around the country. The sales team was able to use the DVD and demo contents successfully in a number of locations and it helped lead to additional significant contracts. Here’s an article featuring yours truly from around that time that tries to tell the end-to-end story from the Hekimian perspective. Here’s another blurb from mid-2001 discussing Qwest’s decision to select Spirent’s TestDSL system.
Organization Changes
While all these activities were playing out in the first half of 2001, there was an underlying game of corporate musical chairs to figure out the structure of a new, integrated organization and who would have what responsibilities. I knew these discussions were going on but I was fully wrapped up in FutureOp and promoting our family of products.
The first big organizational shoe dropped shortly after the success of FutureOp as Des Wilson decided to leave Spirent and return to Axel Johnson, the Swedish parent of Hekimian. Des had been instrumental in the growth and sale of Hekimian and had been my personal champion, elevating me to the executive team as VP of Marketing. It meant he was walking away from a guaranteed bonus and a boatload of stock options if he stayed two years (though the stock was already below our strike price and would head much further down…and I’m sure Axel Johnson made him a better offer). I’m not sure exactly when I learned that Des was leaving, but it was a blow to the Hekimian operation and our group’s political clout within the new organization, not to mention that it left my personal prospects a little bit in the lurch.
Shortly after FutureOp, I headed off on a long-planned cruise to Alaska with Barb and Allie. While on the cruise, where we had very limited connectivity only when we were in port, I got an email to call My Chung when I had a chance. I called him from Ketchikan and he offered me the new spot of VP of Marketing Communications, one of a handful of people reporting directly to him as corporate staff. Each of the operating divisions would have their own presidents and organizations.
It was a step up for me but a little bittersweet. The role would be sort of the propaganda minister for internal and external communications and brand management, coordinating and arbitrating between the different divisions. The position suited my talents to some extent but I could see it was something of a thankless role. Part of me wanted to be more closely connected to our actual products and customers but another part was eager for the chance to craft a unified corporate message and I was pleased to get the recognition and be selected. Truthfully, I would have been discouraged if someone else had gotten the job.
One of the first things I did in my new position was call a week of planning meetings with the marketing heads of the major divisions, including Cathi from Calabasas, Mike from Honolulu and Pat and Bayard from Rockville. We all gathered in Rockville to meet for the first time on the morning of September 11, 2001. We were just beginning to meet when word spread of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York. I recount more details in my 2001 Second Half post, but as far as this story’s concerned, the meetings were scrapped and Cathi and Mike had to spend a miserable week stranded in their Rockville hotel, far from home and families while the world stopped. As I write this I know it sounds like I was miffed that the terrorists interrupted my meeting. It’s not that at all, more a matter of the real world intruding on our little bubble of self-involvement. Integrating messaging for a unified Spirent Communications brand suddenly seemed so utterly irrelevant.
In the bigger picture, 9/11 dealt a further blow to the economy which was already on a downward trend. In terms of the stock market, the dot-com bubble peaked in March 2000 but the telecom sector still had legs into 2001 and even 2002 until the Worldcom bankruptcy pretty well killed it. But 9/11 shook everyone’s confidence and it took a while for everyone to figure out how to operate in a changed environment.
Everything closed down for the rest of that week, we hesitantly returned to work the following week though the gears really didn’t start turning for the rest of the month, as best as I recall. I didn’t try to reconvene the in-person planning meeting; we made do with conference calls for a while. I started traveling to the other divisions in October, putting up with the new TSA inspections at the airports. Air travel that seemed glamorous in my youth and a treat during much of my working life got a lot more tense and inconvenient.
On the plus side, seeing the Netcom office in Calabasas, California was eye-opening. Netcom had very nice, new buildings just off the Ventura Freeway (the 101) at 27349 Agoura Road. They were just over the hills from Malibu, with some very pricey real estate and beautiful views in between. Netcom ran itself more like a Silicon Valley outfit with top-notch facilities and a free cafe with an in-house chef producing all sorts of California cuisine goodies. It was a very West Coast operation compared to our more conservative East Coast group from Hekimian. That cultural split was echoed in our product lines — theirs were geared toward testing the networks of internet startups while ours were targeted very much toward the massive and conservative Bell Operating Companies.
Corporate Identity
The point of the merger was to somehow marry these cultures and technologies under an umbrella that would cover the whole waterfront. That was the theory, anyway. Our group got down to exciting tasks like cooking up unified templates and guidelines for marketing collateral to be used by all the divisions. Bayard and I had just been through this process with Hekimian over the previous couple of years, so we had a good idea of what needed to be done and how to do it. The trick was, we couldn’t just shove it down the throats of the other divisions. At least we shouldn’t have; we sort of went ahead and did.
This network architecture infographic was a culminating effort to tell our whole story in one (overwhelming) picture. I admit that I am the twisted mind behind the concept of cramming all this stuff into one incomprehensible slide. It made sense to me at the time. I suppose if I had an hour I might be able to explain it to you but your eyes would glaze over after the first minute.
We also tackled an integrated website for Spirent, with formats that could accommodate each of the divisions.
We put together internal communications and secure customer sites for different functions and the data management structures behind them.
Supercomm 2002
The calendar ticked toward some of the big trade shows that forced us to put together an integrated show booth that befitted the our aspirations as an industry leader. The biggest annual show for our industry was Supercomm held in June 2002 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. We bought a big space and cooked up an entirely new design, graphical look and a live theater performance featuring an actor we hired and scripted. Bayard put in a tremendous amount of work and I’ll defer to his description from his website, with the caveat that it was a team effort:
I developed the concept / layout and oversaw production / delivery of this 50×70 presence, including a single large three-room conference tower and two distinct demo areas: one for lab test (denoted by a flying silver cable rack with blue scrim) and one for network monitoring (nested flying network clouds with magenta scrim), featuring 13 stations in all. Primary messaging and look-and-feel — keyed to Spirent’s print and Web design system — carries through theatre, workstations, directional signage, gobo lighting, metalized mylar bags, and silver attire. Two rotating, highly interactive 15-minute theatre presentations feature “Dr. Network” explaining performance analysis and service assurance basics. Our booth won Best of Show among all large booths, besting Cisco, HP, Intel, Alcatel Lucent, Microsoft, and all direct competitors.
End of the Line, For Me
Throughout 2002 I traveled regularly to Calabasas and there were eventually other meetings in New Jersey and one or two in Hawaii (not nearly enough in Hawaii), plus many, many conference calls between the different divisions. As time went on, however, I found myself getting more and more pigeonholed as the “corporate” guy trying to get people and divisions to work together. As evidence, for years my regular lunch buddies in Rockville were Bayard and Patrick but over the course of 2002 I was often not there and less welcome when I was. I found myself taking more and more solo lunch outings, often grabbing a sandwich and heading down to the Potomac River for some quiet time and solitude.
Meanwhile, each of the divisions were facing the reality that our markets and the general economy were contracting. It became more and more evident that the air was leaking out of the telecom boom, and what’s more, the Bell Operating Companies were losing the battle of delivering broadband services like DSL to home consumers. Cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner were able to bundle higher speed internet service along with television channels over their newly installed fiber backbones. Wireless networks were also growing quickly and while we had some products for them, they weren’t the core of our business. The Bell Operating companies weren’t going away, but they were no longer the center of the telecommunications world.
As 2002 wore on, the two-year anniversary of our acquisition in December loomed large. It marked the end of our “golden handcuffs” and payout of a bonus in my case equal to a full year’s salary. My own compensation was not tied to the performance of any single division but it was becoming clear that 2003 was going to be a rough year for what had been the Hekimian division in Rockville. Layoffs loomed and the atmosphere was tense.
I don’t think my own job was in jeopardy, but I was increasingly unhappy in my role. For several decades it had been fun (more or less) to come into work, be part of a good team and tackle the problems of the day. In 2002 things became decidedly less fun, and in fact I was often miserable, sleeping poorly, eating and drinking too much, and spending a lot of time on the road when I wanted to be home.
Then there was the matter of stress at home. Allie was in second grade and Barb was not happy with how she was doing at Centennial Lane. Allie would spend her day at school, then after-school at La Petite daycare, then one of us would pick her up at La Petite around 6pm or 7pm. I felt terrible that we too often saw Allie for only a couple of waking hours each day.
For several years both Barb and I were making enough that we both didn’t need to work full time. We had the discussion from time to time that one of us could take a step back and spend more time with Allie. It became clear after a while that Barb wasn’t going to be the one to do that. I started to seriously consider it in 2002. Eventually, I concocted a plan that once I got my bonus in early 2003, I would quit Spirent, take a few months off, then embark in a new direction as a financial planner (I’ll explain my rationale for that in another post). And that’s what I did.
My exit from Spirent was a low-key event, to the extent it was any event at all. I don’t recall any particular celebration. I felt like I was a rat leaving a sinking ship, but I tried to present it as more of a mid-life change of directions, the classic “leaving to spend more time with my family.” I doubt anyone was convinced but I didn’t really care at that point. I felt a tremendous weight lifted not having to commute into work or sit all day in meetings and conference calls. It was time for something new.
Epilogue for Spirent
In 2003, Spirent did indeed start downsizing. The Rockville workforce, my former Hekimian colleagues, went from around 600 people to 400 that year and eventually to under 200. They relocated to smaller offices in Gaithersburg and eventually to Frederick (across the street from one of our favorite restaurants, Manulu, so I get to see their logo from time to time). According to Linked In, there are a handful of names I recognize still working there, but I’m not in contact with any of them.
My Chung left Spirent in 2004 along with his strategies of integrating the divisions. If I had stayed that long, I likely would have been washed out with him since I was one of his only direct staff members. The same year one of our key colleagues, Dave Gellerman, died tragically in a car crash. Dave’s funeral was the last time I saw a roomful of Hekimian/Spirent folks, aside from an occasional Hekimian reunion dinner but I only attended one or two of those and haven’t heard of any in years.
I have no doubts or regrets about my decision to leave Spirent. I only regret that the final year did not turn out better. The cards of the economy were stacked against us (and we read some of them wrong), but I lost a bit of my soul staying there playing the corporate shill waiting for my two year anniversary bonus to arrive.
Next job: Planning Coach
Previous job: Hekimian Laboratories, Inc.
Work page: My Brilliant Careers
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