Hi, and welcome to The Bridge. I'm your host, Scott Kinka. My guest on this episode is Mark Palmer. Mark is the Vice President of Managed Services at Granite. Mark is a telecom lifer. His dad worked at Bell Atlantic. He was a service splice technician to pay for college. His first job was selling telco and like many of us, he went through the dot bomb in the early 2000. And he eventually ended up at Granite where he's been for 20 years at this point. I have some history with Granite. At my previous employer, we used them for field services. Experts at sourcing, training, hiring and mechanically, and consistently deploying people for other tech companies to do physical install work, onsite troubleshooting, et cetera.
This is a business that grew out of, not so much a tech focus as a use case focus, right? In this case, businesses with lots of consistently deployed small to mid-size locations, right? LD became local. Local became internet aggregation, pots replacement field services, eventually security and SASE. Today, their field services alone, are larger themselves than many tech companies.
But yet they've never wavered in that market. Specialists in multi-location, 1500 sites, 5,000 sites, 7,500 sites. We took all the time on this pod about how the pandemic changed the way we do our jobs. The way we construct our networks, the way we secure our workers, the changing state of hybrid work, and the fact that we really haven't figured it out yet.
But very often we talk about the changing value of location in the IT equation. We've moved to people-centered IT. So what happens when you're a company whose entire identity is around lots of consistent little locations? You double down and you grow as a result. This is a great story about leaning into headwinds and finding your niche.
And of course, Mark picked the Eagles to win the Super Bowl this weekend. So I loved it, but we'll see how well that holds up when we release next week's episode. In the meantime, here is an informative post0-COVID look at location focused Managed Services Provider, Granite, and they're VP of Managed Services, Mark Palmer.
ABOUT MARK
Mark Palmer is Vice President of Managed Services at Granite Telecommunications. Mark currently works to build solutions to help customers have better visibility and control over the health of their networks. Mark previously worked at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) in 1995 - 1996 as a service splice technician upgrading phone services at older facilities. In 1999, Mark moved his career to direct sales, working for Network Plus. By 2001, Mark was helped launch a new Network Plus office in Philadelphia, PA.
Mark joined the Granite Telecommunications team shortly after its founding in 2002, selling analog phone lines. In 2011, he was asked to help start the data team at Granite to sell non-POTS service to our customer base. In 2015 Mark was named one of the first directors in the Relationship Development team, which was more proactive in understanding customer goals and ensuring that we were helping to meet them. In 2017, Mark hit his 15th year with Granite Telecommunications and was asked to work with the Granite Channels team to develop programs introducing current clients and agents to next generation products Granite delivers today. In 2022, Mark celebrated his 20th anniversary with Granite.
Mark lives in Rhode Island with his wife and three children. He is currently the President of the non-profit, Burrillville Junior Hockey League and very much enjoys coaching his children’s hockey teams.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-palmer-14b4a07/
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