Regional Managing Director — Mobile And Fixed Network

The mandate

This integrated operator has reached a point at which separate mobile and fixed-network plans no longer produce an acceptable regional outcome. Spectrum renewals, fibre commitments, radio modernisation and enterprise resilience obligations compete for the same capital while customers experience one brand and one bill. Coverage has improved in aggregate, yet persistent neighbourhood gaps, installation backlogs and uneven business-service performance continue to drive complaints and churn. The board is appointing a Regional Managing Director to turn those disconnected choices into a coherent United Kingdom operating plan.

The role owns consumer, small-business and selected enterprise performance, including revenue, contribution, service, distribution and deployment priorities. Network engineering, product and certain technology platforms remain group functions. The Regional Managing Director must therefore win decisions through evidence, convert national design into executable local commitments and hold shared functions to the customer outcomes on which the region is judged.

This is a spectrum and capital reset, not indiscriminate expansion. The leader must distinguish capacity that protects valuable demand from projects built on optimistic adoption, and compare owned construction with fixed-wireless, wholesale or fibre-partner alternatives.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in London, the appointment covers approximately 2,600 employees and material partners across the United Kingdom and a wider international operating region. The perimeter brings together regional sales, channel management, customer operations, field delivery, local commercial planning and the business interfaces into mobile radio, fixed access, core network, wholesale and property teams. Important delivery capacity sits with construction partners, tower companies, local authorities, landlords and equipment vendors.

The portfolio contains sharply different markets. Dense urban districts face capacity constraints, complex permissions and high expectations for indoor service. Suburban and regional communities may have satisfactory headline coverage but poor street-level consistency or slow fibre activation. Enterprise customers require resilient access, credible restoration and changes coordinated around their operations. A single regional average conceals these differences and has encouraged investment cases that look sound in presentation but disappoint after deployment.

Spectrum decisions add urgency. Refarming older bands can release capacity and reduce cost, but only if device, roaming and local coverage effects are understood. New radio investment must be sequenced with transmission, power, site access and core readiness. The Managing Director will ensure technical plans resolve prioritised customer and commercial needs and survive delivery reality.

First-year agenda

During the first twelve weeks, the Managing Director will establish a granular performance baseline. The review will join demand, customer value, churn, complaints, radio and fixed experience, installation intervals, repeat visits, enterprise incidents, channel economics and capital already committed. It should expose exchanges, clusters and customer journeys where several modest failures combine into a material regional disadvantage. Existing programmes will be tested for remaining cost, achievable benefit and dependency rather than defended because expenditure has begun.

The executive will then present a three-year regional investment thesis. Each major commitment must state the customer problem, addressable value, technical intervention, full delivery dependency, operating-cost consequence and trigger for continuing or stopping. Spectrum refarming, site upgrades, fibre build, wholesale access and field-capacity investment will compete on comparable economics. The portfolio should preserve essential resilience and regulatory commitments while creating room to redirect capital when evidence changes.

A joint mobile-and-fixed planning cadence will replace parallel functional reviews. Commercial teams will identify demand and promise; engineering will define viable options; operations will validate access and serviceability; finance will challenge conversion and lifetime value. Decisions will be recorded at locality or customer-cohort level. Where the region cannot deliver an advertised experience, propositions and selling behaviour must change until capability catches up.

Service recovery will be equally prominent. The Managing Director will select a small number of persistent failure zones and mobilise cross-functional teams around root causes such as landlord access, contractor quality, inaccurate availability data, weak indoor coverage or repeat installation defects. Progress must be visible in customer outcomes rather than activity counts. Enterprise cases with recurrent faults will receive named technical and commercial ownership, including credible interim resilience where permanent remediation takes time.

Channel and workforce plans will follow the new footprint. Retail, digital, contact-centre and partner channels should steer customers towards services the network can support and make limitations clear. Field capacity will be matched to activation and repair demand by skill and geography, with partner incentives revised where completion volume has outrun first-time quality. By year-end, the region should demonstrate disciplined capital reallocation, improved performance in chosen problem areas and a credible path to higher returns.

Leadership responsibilities

The Regional Managing Director will run an integrated operating forum that joins commercial demand, service evidence and network delivery. They will sponsor investment cases, recommend regional capital priorities and escalate group-function constraints with quantified consequences and alternatives. Once choices are agreed, the role owns the regional promise and cannot attribute missed outcomes to organisational boundaries.

They will lead relationships with strategic enterprise customers, infrastructure partners and selected public stakeholders where access, planning or service obligations affect delivery. Customer commitments must be specific enough to execute and cautious enough to survive uncertainty. The executive will also build leaders who can work across network and commercial disciplines, replacing functional advocacy with ownership of locality-level results.

Capital governance will be direct. Benefits, costs and service effects will be revisited after commissioning, and weak projects will not be hidden inside an aggregated programme. The Managing Director will bring the board early decisions on trade-offs, including where accepting slower expansion protects resilience or where a targeted intervention deserves priority over a more visible national initiative.

Measures of success

The board will track regional revenue quality, contribution, churn, complaint recurrence, enterprise renewals, mobile and fixed experience in priority clusters, installation lead time, first-time completion and restoration. Network statistics matter only where they explain customer or economic movement. Improvement in a national average without progress in the named failure zones will not constitute success.

Capital measures will include committed and deployed expenditure, schedule confidence, benefit realisation, cost-to-serve change, spectrum-refarming milestones and post-investment utilisation. The quality of stopped or redesigned projects will be considered alongside completed builds. Leadership measures will cover cross-functional decision speed, succession depth, partner accountability and whether local teams can explain the economics behind their priorities.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring at least 28 years of senior operating experience in telecommunications, connectivity, infrastructure or another network-intensive service. They must have carried a substantial profit-and-loss account while shaping capital allocation across mobile, fixed or converged assets. Experience reconciling engineering constraints with customer commitments is essential; a career confined to a single functional tower will not be sufficient.

The board will look for evidence of redirecting a network portfolio after challenging its assumptions, improving service in difficult geographies and managing enterprise or public stakeholders through constrained delivery. Candidates should understand spectrum economics, access-network dependencies, wholesale choices, field operations, channel behaviour and the financial distinction between coverage, capacity and profitable use.

The right leader will be commercially decisive without treating engineering evidence as an obstacle. They will be comfortable making location-specific choices, withdrawing promises that cannot be supported and defending less visible resilience investment. Their communication should translate technical uncertainty into clear decisions for the board, employees, customers and partners.

Compensation and appointment terms

The indicative base salary is GBP 350,000–520,000, plus annual incentive and long-term participation. Incentives will balance value creation, service improvement, responsible capital deployment and sustainable leadership outcomes; build volume alone will carry no reward. Final terms will reflect the scale of prior accountability, relevant spectrum and convergence experience, and treatment of forfeited awards.

Confidentiality

The operator remains unnamed because spectrum positions, investment choices, regional service weaknesses and enterprise dependencies are commercially sensitive. Detailed network, customer and programme information will be shared only after identity, conflict and confidentiality review. Applicants must not submit maps, customer records, regulated information or proprietary investment models belonging to current or former employers.