From Nothing to a $10 Billion Rocket Ship with Jeff Buzzelli, Regional SVP at Comcast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jeff Buzzelli, Regional Senior Vice President at Comcast, about how he led Comcast Business from 0 to $10 billion and beyond. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) So I am curious about where your start was. Were you one of the first employees at Comcast Business? Were you an early hire? How did you get involved in Comcast Business side of things?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:00:28) Yeah, I was one of the early guys. So we started Comcast Business kind of end of 2006. I joined in '08, and I got recruited by Bill Stemper, who was our president of Comcast Business and really got everything started, an amazing leader. He was at a competing company on the commercial side, and they were looking to bring people over to help because there really wasn't the expertise within the company. We were really known as a residential player. So he kept working on me. He was very persistent. He provided an incredible vision of what this company could be, and it got me excited, quite frankly. So I kind of took a sideways detour of my career to come over to Comcast with the understanding it would be a great opportunity to grow with the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Well, you made the right move. It's now a $10 billion rocket ship. How did you—

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:01:28) I did make the right move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) —is the—

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:01:30) Good news for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) How did that happen? How did it go from basically just nothing to $10 billion?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:01:37) Well, we knew a couple things. One, we knew small businesses wanted a choice. The local phone companies weren't providing them the kind of dedicated Internet, fast Internet that they needed for their business. Back then, we had DSL speeds, and we had a lot of issues with small businesses especially not getting what they needed. So we knew the market was ripe. We knew we had a great network and product that we could leverage. We built everything on the commercial side separate to our residential infrastructure. So although we were able to leverage our expertise, we built a business class environment for these customers, and it just really took off. Once we got into the marketplace, we did a great job with sales and marketing and support and delivering the service, delivering a good experience, and the rest is kind of history. From there, we leveraged off small business to go into mid-market and then the enterprise space eventually. We didn't do that right away, but we built up our proficiency and then went into those larger business sales, which really was productive. I mean, it was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) And a lot of people, they see Comcast as a personal ISP. Right? A lot of people have that as their residential service. Tell me about the difference between Comcast Business and the residential service that most people have.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:02:55) Well, it really is a different product, and obviously it comes with different service level agreements. It comes with different capabilities. The products are slightly different. We do a lot of fiber kind of products on the commercial space. You can imagine since it was all built new, we were able to go into buildings and really put very high-capacity fiber into those buildings because we knew there were businesses. Maybe they're small today, but they were going to grow, and they were going to need more bandwidth, more advanced services, whether it be voice services over internet protocols or they needed advanced data security. There was a lot of upside to what we did. We got it right, though, out of the gate with a pretty simple offering. And then we layered in these additional value-added offers over time that the customers were able to take advantage of, and that allowed us to really get more wallet share.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) And so help me—I'm trying to build this mental model of you starting out at Comcast. What was the original role that you were hired for?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:04:06) So I didn't know anything about cable. So they offered me a role in California, and I said, "Look, I can't move. My son's in high school." So they offered me a role then in the Midwest out of Indianapolis. And I said, "Okay, I'll go do that." It was the best thing I ever did. I went into the field. I ran the Indiana region for Comcast Business. I learned all about cable, how our operations work, how our construction teams operate, how we leverage really all of the ancillary groups, whether it's HR, government affairs, et cetera. And it really gave me a good grounding of what to expect when I got into the space from a commercial perspective. I think if I would have went into a corporate role or something else, I don't think I would have been as well prepared. So I think getting into a region and really understanding the operations was a game changer for me. So a lot of folks thought I was crazy. They were like, "Wow, you've got a big role at another company, and you're running kind of the full country. Why would you go take something smaller and more regional in nature?" But it really worked out well. I think my career's played out exactly how it would have expected, and it's—I have nothing but great admiration for the company, and I'm not going anywhere. I love Comcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:29) What industry were you in before?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:05:31) Same industry, but on the telco side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:35) Got it.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:05:35) Telecom side, working for on business customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) And you just saw that this was the future. Yeah.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:05:42) I saw Comcast as uniquely positioned, I thought, to provide a different alternative to some of the carriers that were out there that were not as well funded. I mean, the beauty of Comcast was it was like joining a startup that is fully funded and never had any capital constraints. So I mean, a pretty good place to be in where they're asking you, "What could you do with more capital? If we invested more, could you go faster?" That was—you know, Neil Smit, our president, asked that question very often to us in the early days, and he gave us the money. So it was great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) That's a good question to get. Sometimes the answer is no.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:06:20) Well, sometimes there's a lot of pressure on that question because you don't want to overstep your bounds and commit to too much. Right? And you don't want to overpromise and under-deliver. So there was some trepidation with that, but I think we had a good balance of, yes, we'll get the funding, and then we'll go make it happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:39) What was one of the earlier mistakes that you made when you got started?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:06:44) When I got started at Comcast, I mean, I guess the one thing that I was definitely in learning mode and so certainly trying to learn as much as I could and leverage the Comcast business model. One of the things I didn't appreciate quite as much is the synergies with residential and some of the other departments that were—I've now seen to be very beneficial, the synergies that we can get. Although we have different operations and different products, there's key learnings on the residential side as well as just things that can be learned that we've gone through on that side, being in the market for as many years as we have. So I probably would have told my new self at the company to get more in tune. Back then, we were very focused on the commercial side, rightfully so, because we were a small but mighty group of people. But I think I would have reached out more. I do a lot of that now. Obviously, I'm in a role where I'm running the entire region from a residential and a business perspective, and we definitely look at where we can leverage best practices across the two businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:53) So did you make any mistakes expanding too fast when you were at the Midwest region?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:08:00) Probably not expanding too fast, but I think in terms of hiring the right kind of people, I mean, there was definitely a vetting of who are the right people to come into a big company like this that can make it happen. So they had to be somewhat entrepreneurial, but they also had to be efficient in the way they communicate and how they operate within our entity. We've got a great culture at Comcast, but it's very definitive about working with others and being a good collaborator and team player. And we did hire some people early on that just couldn't master that. They had come from smaller companies, and I think they struggled with that. So, you know how it goes, Joel. If they don't fit in with the culture, they can be the smartest person in the world. They're not going to be effective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) And how do you filter for culture now that you have all this experience?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:08:51) Well, we have a pretty extensive interview process. We do panel interviews, but but most importantly, I think we're very upfront with what we expect of our people. So when we're doing interviews, we're very clear on what our expectations are, what the job is, whether it's a sales manager or my job. You know, here's what's expected. And I think that transparency is important. We have a playbook that we run, and we're pretty focused on making sure people follow the playbook. It doesn't have to be exact, but you have to—there's certain principles within the playbook that we expect everybody to operate. One of them is that collaboration. Another one is open and honest communication. Another one of them is we have a very well-defined budget process of explaining your business plan for the year and reading out on how you're doing to that business plan. I mentioned the company gives us a lot of resources, but there's expectations with that come with those resources, as always, as they should be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) Interesting. And what about taking risk? I remember in the prep call, we talked to something along the lines of that you look for people who are willing to take risk and think outside the box. How do you find those people in interviews?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:10:13) It's a lot of extra time in the interview asking for examples of when they have taken risks and what was that risk and really digging into kind of their background. Because a lot of people will say, "Yes, I'm a risk taker." We all know that people are kind of coached in interviews, but I'm looking for succinct examples of where they took the business in a different direction or to a new level through those kind of innovative—and they were bold in their thinking. We use the word bold, but essentially, it's the same thing. Being willing to take a risk, being able to deal with the consequences of that because sometimes they don't work out, but we always look at it as we're learning. If we're learning and getting better, that's a win. We know not to do that anymore, but we're going to go in a different direction. But to sit on our hands anymore, the market is so dynamic. There's so much competition today that it's not—you know, customers don't have just a choice of a linear choice of A or B. They might have four or five choices in the marketplace. So we've got to constantly be improving our product, our customer experience to stay one step ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) All right. I want to talk more about risk taking because that's a fun—I'm an entrepreneur. That's a fun subject for me.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:11:33) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:35) So how do you support—you're a huge mega corporation. How do you support people taking risk? Everyone's scared. Inherently, you're scared to take a risk, going to get in trouble, lose my job, look silly, look bad. How do you, as a leader, create an environment where people feel comfortable to take risk?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:11:53) Well, we, you know, number one, we view it as making good business decisions, data-driven decisions. So we're looking for folks that don't want to just take a risk based on a gut feeling or whatever, but we're looking for people that have good analytical thinking and strategic thinking on what they want to do, why they want to do it. And as long as we have the controls to kind of measure what's happening, we're pretty open to those kind of—we'll try different things. I mean, some people will say around here we try everything, and I'm sure we have over the years, but the reality is we're very good at kind of scorecarding our work and understanding, how did we do? Did this work out the way we wanted? Were there unintended consequences from this? But one thing we do, I think, to help alleviate—because you're right, a lot of folks do have trepidation around this. It makes them very nervous even when they're presenting an idea. Right? They'll be, you know, am I going to take a professional risk here if I bring this up with the CEO or with the president? And the answer is, you know, we'll give examples, and we do a lot of recognition of folks that do take risks and can show positive momentum by taking a risk. In some cases, it's the opposite. They took a risk, it didn't work out, but we learned something critically important about our business or about our customer base. That's equally valuable in my opinion because then we know what not to do or how to operate. Given our competitive environment, things are changing so rapidly. We've had to do things completely differently. I wouldn't say we've ripped up our playbook, but we've certainly taken pages out of our playbook and put in new pages on almost a weekly, monthly basis we've had to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:44) And is this a figurative playbook, or is it a physical—is it an actual playbook?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:13:49) It's both. I mean, in certain elements, I would say it's a real playbook where we can document. In other cases, it's a looser set of kind of principles that we've agreed to as a team that we're going to follow. But it's a pretty well-defined playbook when we get everybody kind of aligned. This is how we're going to go to market. So we don't want to have—you know, we have 13 regions across the country. The Florida region, which I lead, is one of those 13. It happens to be the largest in the country, by the way. But we don't want 13 ways of doing things. We want one really good way of doing things to keep a consistent customer experience. We don't want people to feel like in Florida, when they own a home in Florida, it's a different experience when they're with their home in Connecticut or in California or wherever else they may live or have lived.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) And so there's 13 other Jeffs essentially in the country.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:14:48) 12 other. Yeah. There's 12. 12 other Jeffs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) Yeah. 12 other Jeffs in the country. And so how do you connect with them? Do you get together quarterly? Are you always working with them? How does that work?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:14:59) Yeah. I work very closely with them. So we have a formal quarterly meeting where we go to Philly. We meet with our president and CEO, Dave Watson and Steve Croninny, and we have sessions with the headquarters team. We give feedback. They listen. They obviously ask things of us and give us direction, but it's a very good two-way dialogue. We do that for a couple days, you know, three, four times a year. We also have a monthly forum where the 13 of us get together. We talk about items. We invite folks to those calls. Those are Teams calls, not in person. So we're regularly talking. And then there's the third element where I'm actually talking to some of my peers very regularly. The one example recently I would give you is I was talking to our Houston team lead.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:15:45) We were talking about multicultural marketing, which is very important in Houston, very important in South Florida, obviously, for obvious reasons. And so we were talking about how we're leveraging soccer and some of the other multicultural opportunities that we have. We both have World Cup games coming to our cities in '26 and activation events around that. So yes, I'm talking to them regularly, and we're sharing best practices. I won't tell you we're not competitive.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:16:15) We all want to be number one on the power rankings of regions, but we're very collaborative in terms of—you know, we're also stockholders, so we look at it as if all the regions are successful, our stock will be successful, our company will be successful. So from my perspective, it's a win-win when we work together, but I've gotten some of my best ideas from my peers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) Who's number one right now?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:16:40) Well, it depends what metrics you look at, but Florida's number one in a lot of categories. The one I'm most proud of is employee engagement. We have the highest employee engagement scores in the country, which is interesting because Florida was not known for that. And so we've really turned that around, and I'm a huge believer in employee engagement. Employee experience is super critical to the success of any organization.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:17:07) If you don't have the team in the locker room behind you, you're in trouble.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:11) And is it HR that comes up with those types of measurements?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:17:15) It's really the leadership team, myself and the leadership team. We have a set survey process. We use NPS, the survey process, but we come up with the strategies around how we want to make sure that we are engaging our employees effectively, recognizing our employees. How are we listening to them, for lack of a better word, so that we're getting good ideas right from the field, right from the front line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) What's the most—if you're going to summarize up employee engagement and the single most effective thing you've seen as a leader for engaging employees, what would it be?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:17:54) Listen. So it's getting in front of my employees and listening. We do these roadshows with my whole senior leadership team and myself, and we go out once a year in front of every employee. We answer questions for forty-five minutes. Anything's fair game.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:18:12) And we don't obviously wait till we do that once a year. We have an ongoing monthly call with the employees. So we're constantly soliciting feedback from them. We're giving them feedback on the feedback or updates on their feedback. So I think that's critically important.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:18:29) They need to understand their view is important. We're hearing them. That doesn't mean I can say yes to everything. Obviously, there's always requirements.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:18:40) Yeah. There's always restraints. But a lot of things—and I'll give you just an easy example. You know, we heard from our techs. It's pretty hot in Florida, right, in the summer.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:18:51) We heard from them they wanted tinted windows on their trucks. Now there's some rules in Florida about how you can tint your vehicles. You can't do the super dark tint. It's actually illegal. But we worked out a solution, and we tinted all of our trucks, and they're very happy with that.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:19:09) It solved a problem where they were literally getting into their truck. It was 110 degrees in their truck after a job. Maybe they're crawling through crawl spaces that are even hotter than that, and then they're coming back to their truck. And so, you know, that was a good example of the field team telling us we've got a problem. We think we've got a solution.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:19:31) Can we do something about it? That obviously involved spending some money, but we thought it was the right thing to do, and it's worked out great. We've gotten great feedback from our employees. Is it perfect? By no means, no.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:19:42) But it made a huge step in the right direction. So that kind of engagement with the team, I think, is super critical. That listening and engagement to me is the difference between really high performing organizations and ones that perform at a good, you know, mid-level kind of performance level. You've got to constantly be knowing what's happening in the front line, and folks have to have that autonomy that they know they can have the conversation without being fearful of that. You mentioned people being fearful of risks.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:20:18) Well, sometimes it's seen as a risk to speak up. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) Oh, yeah. Definitely. Now how did you get the tint thing? Did you call up Ron DeSantis and just say, hey, we need an exemption for these tints, or did you just tint as much as you legally could?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:20:32) No. We tinted as much as we legally could. We also offered some other solutions on top of the tinting. We bought Xfinity—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:42) Sunshades?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:20:44) Sunshades that you put inside. So the combination of that really has made a big difference, and we got really good feedback from our techs. So, you know, some of the best ideas are the simplest ideas. Right? It doesn't have to be some elaborate thing, and we just made a business decision that said, we didn't budget for this.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:21:02) We'll find a way in the—to cover the dollars here. It's the right thing to do for our techs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:09) And so that came about because of these meetings and listening to people. When you're doing these, is it an all-hands, everyone at the company, or do you do them by division? How does that roll out?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:21:20) Yeah. So in Florida, the way I do them, it's everybody in my organization. So I have about 3,000 employees, and so we literally go to—it ends up being about 11 or 12 different venues. So we go to South Florida, North Florida, Orlando, Tallahassee, the Panhandle, and we have these sessions. And it's all employees, including the techs.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:21:41) So we do it early in the morning so we can accommodate them. They can still get on with their day after. But they generally start about 7:30, and they run till about 9:30, 10:00. And then they're off on the rest of their day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:54) Nice. Kind of finishing up on this talent section here, just to—

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:21:59) For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:00) —sort of summarize it out, what's your top tip for hiring the right talent?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:22:05) Well, I think, you know, for me is set very clear expectations with your leaders on what are kind of non-negotiables for us. It's things like we want folks that are transparent and highly ethical kind of candidates. We want folks that obviously understand the rigors of the job. These are hard jobs. Our sales guys are out in Florida knocking doors in, you know, 98-degree heat with 80% humidity.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:22:35) So we're very clear with folks about what the job is, what it isn't. This is not a remote work kind of thing where you're at home or in an air-conditioned office all the time. Some of our jobs are obviously in the office, but a lot of our jobs are in the field working with our customers every day. So we're clear about that. And then I think the third thing for me is always about, you know, are we getting folks that want to have a career with Comcast, or are they looking just for a job with benefits?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:23:07) We obviously opt for folks that really want to build a career. I regularly, when we do those meetings I was talking about, we recognize folks. I was just at a meeting a couple weeks ago. We recognized somebody that had been here forty years. I mean, that's incredible.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:23:22) I mean, I think about that. I was like, I was in junior high—I'm like, that almost doesn't compute. Forty years ago. Think about technology forty years ago from now. That was, you know, 1985. So it just—to me, when you think about that, it's amazing.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:23:39) We're very fortunate to have folks that really were the ones that forged this great company for us, and we honor them intensely. But I think about that, not that we want or expect everybody to be here forty years, but, you know, we want folks that want a career because there's a lot of opportunity at Comcast. We've got the connectivity and platforms group that we're a part of that I run, but we also have NBC Universal, so our content group. That's everything from the parks in Orlando and LA and China to the Universal movie studios to NBC, the broadcaster out of New York. And so we've got a wide array of opportunities for folks that, you know, join Comcast that they can go into, and we see that where somebody may start in technical operations, but they go into sales.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:24:34) Or I have one that recently went into HR from technical operations. So we're looking for folks that are looking for that kind of career opportunity. They want to, you know, better themselves. They have a learning aptitude to do that kind of thing. So to me, that's really important.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:24:50) When I'm interviewing a leader, especially, I'm looking for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) Right. Watch that technical person going to HR. They're going to ChatGPT the whole department.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:25:00) You're right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:01) Yeah. That's what you want too. All right. But we won't go deep down that rabbit hole. I like those stories, and I always forget how big Comcast is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) But you are mainly Comcast Business for Florida. Is that right? So you don't—

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:25:14) Oh, no. I'm residential too. So it's Comcast Business and Residential. So I have all of what I would call our connectivity group for the state of Florida, commercial and residential, on the broadband side. And obviously, they buy other products, voice.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:25:29) They buy video, you know, traditional video cable services. We've got a wide array. We've even got security products for the home, and then we have advanced services on the commercial side. So the product set has really exploded outward as we've grown. And to your point, we're just the connectivity group, and then there's a whole other large business group called the—that I'd call the entertainment and content group—that's the NBCs and Universals and all of that good stuff.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:26:04) They're the glamour side of Comcast. I'll just call it out—the talent side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:09) Yeah. Okay. Hurricane season. Coming from a Floridian over here.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:26:14) One of our favorite topics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) Do you get to sleep during hurricane season? How does that work?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:26:20) We do. We do. But we have—this is where our playbook really goes into play. So we have a very defined written playbook for hurricanes. Obviously, we start our planning service well in advance of even hurricane season.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:26:33) So we've already had several readiness calls for the team. When we see a weather event coming, we start to have regular meetings with the team. So we have an extended team that I'm kind of the incident command leader, and then we have team leads on different topics, whether it's technical or government, because there's a ton of collaboration that goes into—you can imagine with a hurricane approaching, we're talking to the state. We're talking to the county, the local government. We're readying our facilities.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:27:08) We're readying our employees, quite frankly. One of the most important things we learned is we've got to ready our employees. They've got to take care of their family. Are they going to have their family go north to be out of the zone? Are they going to hunker down, you know?

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:27:21) So all of those questions to make sure they're cared for so that post-storm, they can focus on helping us restore, and they're not worried about their own family. So there's a whole playbook around that, but, you know, it's a monumental effort. The whole company gets involved, quite frankly, when we have these things. When we had Helene and Milton, so those were the last kind of two big ones that ripped through Southwest Florida and then came through the state, came through the middle part of the state, and then went up to do a lot of damage in places like Georgia and North Carolina. We had a really good plan, and we were able to recover in record time.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:28:02) But, you know, some of those areas have been hit multiple times. So they're literally still digging out of one hurricane when another hurricane hits. So it's really tough, quite frankly. I was there in Southwest Florida for a good two and a half weeks, staying in a hotel, just meeting with my team and surveying damage and figuring out how we could move as quickly as possible. I mean, we have such an amazing team.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:28:28) We were able to get in both of those hurricanes within less than a week. We had 98% restoral rate of our customers, which was insane. So for a category four and five hurricane, that's pretty much unheard of, but it really was all that preparation and the great employees that we have. I'm always amazed at our employees. I mean, they're working post-hurricane sometimes, you know, twelve, fifteen-hour days just to do everything they can to help neighbors and the community recover.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:28:59) Because, you know, just even getting to our facilities is a challenge and a safety risk in many cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:08) The energy around that and utility people, linemen—when you see them all swarm to get a city back online, it is—it reminds me of the space race, right, of everyone just coming together to get something done.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:29:22) Yeah. It really is. I mean, I'll give you a quick story that just kind of encapsulates this. So one of the things we do, and we know we're going to get hit really hard or we anticipate that, we're able to mobilize folks from other regions. So back to the collaboration with the other 12 regions across the company, I had folks coming down from Minnesota, from the DC area, from Denver.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:29:45) They all kind of, you know, converged with trucks, with equipment, and they came and just started working and helping the Florida region. And I was eternally grateful for that. But back to your point about swarming a community, the team from our Beltway region, which is DC, sent us one night—we got this text from them, and they said, hey, we were at this restaurant, and the patrons—they recognized we were out there doing work in the community. They bought our dinner for us.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:30:20) So the patrons got together and said—and gave them a round of applause and basically said, you guys are amazing. You're working really hard. We can't tell you how much we appreciate you being here. And we got several pictures with them getting hugs from just literally people in the community thanking us for being on the job and not stopping until every customer was back up. So that, you know, kind of put a tear in the eye, and I was like, it doesn't get any better than that—that we're able to do that in the community.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:30:49) But it makes sense in the—when you think about it, it's similar to power or water. I mean, you can't live without the Internet. You can't function. So our customers literally are really grateful and really dependent on us to deliver that level of service. It's just, you know, what you're constantly battling is the safety of your employees with the restoration timeline.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:31:17) And what I won't compromise on is putting any of our teammates at risk. And that's why one of the things we do is we follow those electrical FPL workers, and we're kind of a fast follower. But when they give us the all-clear, we go in, but not before because we're not going to lose somebody to an accident that's preventable. So, I mean, that's the only thing that we've also got to explain to customers. In some cases, you're dealing with water levels and open electrical wires.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:31:49) I mean, it gets pretty dicey. We've seen some pretty scary scenarios. We had tornadoes with those aforementioned hurricanes last year. I mean, it affected my neighborhood of all, if you could believe that. We had a tornado come through my neighborhood, and there were dumpsters on roofs and all kinds of damage done. And that's not something people are used to in Florida, like tornadoes.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:32:19) But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:20) No.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:32:21) We had tornadoes do real damage, you know, even before the hurricane got here. So it was like a double whammy of tornadoes and hurricanes to deal with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) Gotta love—we gotta love Florida.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:32:33) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) I've yet to find a place where there's nothing. There's always something, you know?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:32:38) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) We exchange hurricanes for tornadoes quite a bit up here in Nashville area. So—

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:32:45) That's right. And you get, every once in a while, you get the Snowmageddon or the ice storm, and it shuts the whole city down, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Yeah. There's snow about three to four—I've only been here for three, four years, but about three to four days a year, you get some snow and it's always random. And yeah, it is completely chaotic. But, you know, we just—

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:33:07) You do what you gotta do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) We gotta do. Yeah. Make it happen. From a human standpoint, right, is it at the point right now where you see so many hurricanes, everybody's just chill? Or is there still some chaos that you have to address?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:33:23) I would tell you there's still chaos you've got to address. I mean, it gets very personal when we hear a story of one of our techs and their home was destroyed or severely damaged. They don't have somewhere to go. One of the things we did for our techs in the last hurricane wave is we opened up a company store with food and incidentals and personal hygiene products. And it was free for every employee to come in and load up and get things for their family, whether it was water, food, like I said, hygiene products, diapers for the kids.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:34:01) So we did that in Sarasota and in Fort Myers. We had large stores that we just opened up. We also opened up showers. We had remote showers brought in. So if they didn't have water, they didn't have access to their home and needed a place to bring the family to shower or clean up, we provided that.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:34:19) We also have an employee fund where we actually help them with fixing their home and rebuilding. They can apply for funds through the HR team, and we had more than a few employees that took advantage of that. So the company is amazing on that front. We want to take care of the people that take care of our customers. And so there's a big focus on that—of making sure employees are squared away and their families are taken care of.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:34:50) And I'm really proud of that. I mean, it sounds a little bit, you know, old-fashioned, but it's super important that we focus on that first because we're not going to be effective if we don't have our teammates at their best. And if they're worried about, you know, where am I going to sleep tonight, or I have no running water in the home—that's not—we want to make sure we're helping them with that.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:35:15) And so there was a lot of pride. We had a new group of techs, and I'll never forget, one of the techs came up to me, and he's like, "Who do I pay for this food and diapers?" And he had a couple boxes. And I said, "Nobody. This is free. Take it home. Do whatever you need, and let us know if you need anything else." And he was literally in tears. I mean, he couldn't believe it.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:35:38) He's like, "I've never worked for a company that would do that." He's like, "I'm shocked. I thought you were going to give us stuff and it was discounted, but I had no idea this was free." And we're like, "Absolutely." So to me, that's what you need to do.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:35:54) And it's a small expense in the grand scheme of things—of aligning your team around what's important and showing them what's most important to our company, and that is our employees. So, you know, I think those are the things, Joel, I would hit on that have made a huge difference here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) And that's one of the things I've learned too as growing as an entrepreneur is, at first, or even in business, you want to just make a bunch of money. And then you realize really quickly it's a game of resource allocation.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:36:23) And it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) Like, oh, I have to be responsible, and I have to allocate these resources correctly in order to, you know, do the right thing and yield more resources and help us get to the next stage. And so when I hear you talking about that, it just makes complete sense. It's like you have to—when you're making your investments, yes, you have to invest in the infrastructure so your internet's super fast and everybody's super happy. You have to invest in your software, but you also have to invest in your people—like, the actual people themselves and what their experience is like working with your company. Because then you're just going to get better people.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:36:56) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) They're going to attract better people.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:36:59) Yeah. Yeah. They bring other people with them because they say it's great to work at Comcast. "My brother-in-law needs a job. He's interested."

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:37:08) Or, you know, "I know some people in the community we need to talk to." We get more referrals for new employees from our employees, and they tend to have the same values, and they're looking for that career. So it's hugely valuable to us that our employees understand we really do care and want to hear from them and want to help them when we have these kinds of circumstances. But that's really the first thing in any of these storms is taking care of our employees. And then we're laser focused on getting every customer restored as fast as we can and as safely as we can.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:37:41) But I won't tell you that there's not a lot of long days. And to your point, I'm sleeping in hotel rooms, and my whole team is. And we're doing a lot of work to get those customers back up. But there's a lot of satisfaction in the community, and the great thing is, for the most part, the communities recognize the work that's been done. I mean, some of those Southwest Florida communities, we've rebuilt multiple times—our entire network—because it's been destroyed.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:38:10) I mean, you know, everybody says, "Oh, it's great that the fiber lines are buried." Well, it is great until you're under six feet of water. You can't even get to those, and electronics don't work well underwater. So they generally are a problem. So, you know, in some cases, underground isn't better depending on if it's a low-lying area.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:38:31) So all of those factors—and one of the things that we've gotten some great ideas on is just building resiliency. And creativity of our employees has led to us building our facilities differently in certain areas and trying to anticipate the hurricane, similar to what FPL does with kind of the hurricane-proof poles. They put the concrete poles up versus the wood. We have our version of that in terms of how we do our network, and it's made a huge difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) Tell me about Comcast Xfinity X1. What's that?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:39:03) So X1 is our video platform. I actually have an X1 remote. So it's our video infrastructure. What I love about it is this little blue button here. You hit that, and you can tell the TV what channel to go to.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:39:18) If I want to watch the Chicago Bears–Minnesota Vikings game from last night, I literally just have to say "NFL football" or "Chicago Bears," and it will literally take me to the channel. So I don't have to go to some guide or know the number or anything. It also allows you to loop in all of your subscription streaming. So your Netflix account, your Hulu, whatever. If I say "Netflix" in there, it'll connect my TV through the X1 to Netflix and will plug in my password, connect me, and I can start watching Netflix or Peacock.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:39:55) Peacock's our branded streaming service, but it has the other streaming services like Apple, Netflix, Hulu, etc. And so I love it. I mean—I don't know about you, Joel, but, you know, I constantly am trying to find a program, and I always forget what—you know, is that Netflix? Is that on regular TV? You know, where do I find it?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:40:19) So this little button helps me figure out where to go. And so it uses, obviously, artificial intelligence and machine learning, so it gets used to your patterns and shows you shows that match up to your kind of preference of what you've watched in the past. It also—you know, it's so sophisticated. You can say the name of an actor, and it'll show you every movie that Denzel Washington's made that you want to watch. Or if you say the name of a title—you're not totally sure, you say a part of the title—it'll usually pop right up.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:40:55) And so it's really intuitive and easy to use. And so we sell a lot of that here in Florida. You can imagine we've got a lot of seniors, and you don't take away their video services. I mean, to some of them, it's probably more important than their internet because they'll tell you, "I don't need that fast internet. I just need some internet to check my email, but I better have my TV working because I want to watch my programs."

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:18) They don't understand it's all the same now.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:41:20) Yes. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:22) No. Our parents have it down in Florida, and we go down and watch the kids. That's how I get my updates now on what's—

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:41:28) going on—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:29) with Comcast. And, yeah, I got to see some of that where we could hook up the Netflix and we could hook up the different things. And I thought it was a really smart market share move, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:40) Because there are other different types of third-party devices. But if you're accepting that versus rejecting it, it's only going to make you more sticky and keep those people around.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:41:49) Yeah. And we're lucky. We have this thing called NBC. So, for example, we have the Winter Olympics coming up. There will be more hours of winter—I mean, you'll be able to see literally every competition and medal ceremony and game through, on the Winter Olympics, because there's, like—I don't know. I think there's, like, 12 or 20 channels that you can watch at different times with every event literally. And, you know, all through the X1 system, you can go in—just say "Olympics," and it shows you all the different things you can watch. We do things around, you know, the Super Bowl. NBC has the Super Bowl this year. There'll be some advanced things there.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:42:30) We have our multiview for college football and NFL where you can watch four games at one time through the X1. So you pick the channels, and you're watching all four college games simultaneously. I'm a big college football guy, so I'm usually doing that on Saturdays.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:47) Okay. Who's your team?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:42:49) Well, I grew up in the Midwest, so I'm a Big Ten guy. So my team is Ohio State. My dad went to Ohio State. So it was a pretty good year for us last year when they won the national championship.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:42:59) So it was good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:01) Very cool. And then I want to know from your perspective, you've been in this space for a while. You've watched it evolve. What's it going to look like for me to turn on my TV in ten years?

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:43:14) It's going to be real interesting. I mean, obviously, we'll see who wins the content wars, but I think, you know, I don't know that you'll turn on a TV. I mean, it'll be interesting to see—will we have TVs in rooms, or will there be, you know, screens that we have? I think one thing that's going to be universal is I want to be able to watch my content, whether recorded or live, anywhere, any place. That will be number one, including my mobile device.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:43:41) Number two, I think there's going to be a lot more interactive kind of components with content. You're already seeing some of that with different shows and whatnot where there's a, you know, an online component to the video component. So I think you're going to see more of that. And I think AI will continue to evolve where it's going to tell you what you want to watch before you even have to think about it. It's going to tell you, "Hey, you know, Josh," or, you know, "Joel, you're going to come home one day," and say, "Hey, Joel. Here's what's on tap for you to watch." You're going to go, "Okay. I want to watch this, this, and that, and record these two. I'll watch them later." I mean, it's literally going to be that kind of sophistication, and I think it's exciting, and technology is going to continue to evolve.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:44:30) I think it'll be interesting to me to just see how all the sports and entertainment stuff gets wrapped up into different packages. I heard somebody the other day—I heard a comedian talking about it, and he goes, "I have all these streaming services, and I'm paying all this money." And he goes, "It's interesting. They used to put these into packages. It was called cable."

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:44:52) Yeah. He's like, "I don't know what to do with all these, you know, subscription services. I'm paying, you know, $250 a month, and I've got all these different channels that I've got to figure out what app to find on my TV to plug it in and what's on what channel." And he said, you know, "So it'd be great. I got a great idea. Maybe somebody could put it all together, and it's called cable." So, you know, we may see more of that as there's more consolidation, but I think—what I do love about our X1 is we've got this platform that can actually bring things much easier together for folks because, you know, it's not just seniors that struggle with technology. Like I said, I'm busy. I don't have time to find stuff. I just give up after a little while.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:45:37) If I can't find the show I'm trying to find—if you don't know what, you know, streaming service it's on, it's kind of difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:45) Absolutely. No. I saw that comedian too. I can't remember who it was. It was definitely, like, maybe—I think it was Jim Gaffigan or somebody. It was a major comedian. Yeah. I laughed so hard when I saw that. Yeah.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:45:56) Yeah. All the Comcasters, I'm sure, got a chuckle out of that one because we were told, you know, "Video's dead." And I'm like, "I don't think it's dead," and the sports content's only getting, you know, more intense. I'll give you an example.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:46:09) We just launched this universal soccer package for $85 a month, and you get access to, like, a thousand games across Premier League and FIFA and all the big, you know, the U.S. leagues. You know, for somebody that's really into soccer, and we have a lot of them in the U.S., it's a great value, and they get to see all kinds of soccer, you know, in all different forms. And so, to me, you know, who's going to put all that together? If you look at it, it's, like, literally, like, 12 different channels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:42) Oh, yeah. Yeah. My grandfather, I bet he's a subscriber. That's how he got over to the U.S. He was in Greece, and they were putting together a soccer team for Miami—like, the first pro soccer team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:54) When he was in recruiting camp, he came up. Yeah. Yeah. As a goalie. Beautiful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Yeah. Then he got injured after a couple years of playing professionally, and then he was working at the docks—like, the boat docks in Miami.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:47:05) In Miami? Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) And then he got into boat racing, won the world championship of boat racing in '88 with Don Johnson, and then retired from that and built boats for the rest of his life at Wellcraft.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:47:16) Wow. And he still lives in Miami?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) He's in Sarasota.

(Jeff Bazeli at 00:47:19) Sarasota? Beautiful. Yeah. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:21) He's a customer. He's a customer of Comcast Florida. I love that.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:47:25) Well, yes, he did. We hear a lot of that because a lot of folks love Florida. But, you know, that's a great story, and, you know, that's why I think you're going to see more of that with people that have a specific, you know, whether it's football or soccer or entertainment kind of services that they want, that they prefer. We've got to have companies that could provide that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:47) Oh, absolutely. Well, now I'm going to text him after this call.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:47:51) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:52) You have that package? He's like, of course I have that package.

(Jeff Buzzelli at 00:47:55) I'm sure he does. Yeah, if he doesn't know about it, call me and we'll hook him up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Nice. Well, I'm watching the time. I want to make sure we get you out of here on time. Jeff, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:05) I love it. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:24) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.