Twenty-nine years following the money behind rural networks

My mother ran the business office of the telephone cooperative in a wheat town in western Kansas, and on the first working day of each month she let me open the post. Most envelopes held members' payments of a few dollars. A few held support payments from programmes I could not have named, and they were much larger. I learnt early that a rural network is partly paid for by people who never use it, and that somebody has to account honestly for that money.

I studied agricultural economics at Medora State University, graduating in 1996, and stayed a further year for a Master of Accountancy so that I could sit the CPA examination; I was licensed in Kansas in 1999. In September 1997 I joined Pruett Halvorsen LLP, a regional accounting firm in Kansas City whose clients included telephone cooperatives, grain cooperatives and a few small cable systems. My formative audit came in 1999 at one of those cable systems. The billing file showed 4,100 customers. When we matched it against the technicians' connection records, about 3,600 homes were connected and paying; the rest were disconnected accounts nobody had closed, bulk units and staff lines. Nobody had lied. The count had simply stopped meaning what everyone assumed it meant, and I have distrusted unexamined customer counts ever since.

In 2002 I went back to western Kansas as controller of Quillan Valley Telephone Company, a family-owned carrier with twelve exchanges around Hays. Almost half our revenue came from universal service support and the access charges other carriers paid us to complete calls. My most important annual task was the cost study that set our support, and my most important lesson was that a business living on a formula is exposed to every change in the formula. When the family began building DSL, and then fibre to the home in two exchanges, I learnt how construction is financed when the customers are too few to pay for it alone.

In 2008 I moved to Omaha to lead financial planning at Merrimont Broadcasting Group, a Nasdaq-listed owner of fourteen local television stations. I arrived in September, weeks before the advertising market fell away, and my first large piece of work was the year-end impairment test that wrote down $212 million of broadcast licences and goodwill. Over the next five years I watched the company rebuild itself on retransmission consent, the fees that cable and satellite distributors pay to carry a station's signal. I built the per-subscriber model behind our renewals with about forty distributors, and as controller from 2011 I reported to the audit committee every quarter. Sitting on the broadcaster's side of that table taught me how the fees are set, and what a distributor's customers finally pay.

By 2014 I wanted to finance something that grew for reasons other than price. Stavely Networks, a Tulsa fibre company bought that year by a fund managed by Harrowell Infrastructure Partners, hired me as vice president of finance and treasurer. We built backhaul to mobile towers, dark fibre for hospitals and circuits for schools, many of them paid partly through the federal schools-and-libraries discount programme. I became CFO in 2018, replaced bank construction loans with long-dated notes and ran the sale of the company to a larger infrastructure owner, completed in January 2021.

I joined Ridgeburn as CFO in March 2021. Granmoor had bought the company in 2018 with a term loan due in October 2025, and its reporting had been built for a market in which broadband customers only increased. Within eighteen months fixed-wireless offers reached almost every town we serve. Since then I have restated our customer metrics, made the case for a fibre programme released in gated tranches, made the video business pay for itself and refinanced the 2025 maturity with private credit rather than adding a dividend to it.

I lead 96 people across accounting, planning, treasury, tax, revenue assurance and grant compliance. Internal audit, which we outsource, reports to the chair of the audit committee rather than to me. I ask my analysts to walk the network before they model it: everyone who builds a town's fibre case spends a day with a construction crew, and every figure in a lender presentation is checked against what a technician would find at the address.

Inside the industry I am known, sometimes wearily, for three habits. I will not report homes passed without serviceable locations beside them, I charge programming costs to the video customers who cause them, and I value a public grant by its obligations rather than its cheque. Each habit has cost us something in a particular quarter. I am now preparing to take them to the other side of an audit committee table, as an independent director.

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