The new CEO of Primus Telecommunications Canada has overhauled the carrier’s executive team to achieve his goal of increasing the company’s sales to small and medium businesses.
“I’m looking for tremendous growth in that segment, CEO Michael Nowlan said in an interview this morning. He estimated that 35 per cent of the company’s revenue comes from sales of telecom services to organizations, which he’d like to boost to 40 per cent or more in 12 months.
“Frankly, we haven’t done as good a job as we could do on the sales and marketing of what we have. We have a phenomenal hosted PBX solution that is just perfect for a small or medium business … and combine that with our great access solutions its a tremendous value proposition.”
Primus Canada is one of the country’s largest independent residential Internet service providers, with about 200,000 customers. which also sells enterprise IP voice, PBX, data access and IP connectivity solutions.
The new executives include:
–Tamara Flemington, vice-president of information services and project management, who came from financially-troubled startup Mobilicity;
–Walter Andri, formerly vice-president of small and medium business at Telus and VP of channels at its Koodo Mobile division, who will be senior vice-president of sales;
–Bradley Fisher, former senior vice-president of strategy and marketing at Hawaiian Telecom who has also worked at Bell Canada and CIBC, who is now Primus’ senior vice-president of marketing and product;
–Peter Garland, former executive at Sigma Systems and vice-president of program management and strategic initiatives at Rogers Communications, who is now Primus’ senior vice president of client experience.
Primus Canada tried to get into the data centre business, creating a unit called BlackIron with eight data centres in five cities. However last year it sold them to Rogers Communications.
Nowlan pointed out that was done by the previous owner, Primus Telecommunications Group. Data centres are a very capital-intensive business, he pointed out, and different from telecom services.
Nowlan was appointed CEO in January from newswire and social media service Marketwired by owner York Capital Management. York bought the retail telecom division of parent Primus Telecommunications Group of Virginia in 2013 for US$129 million.  Primus Group still has an international network it sells wholesale connectivity.
