A CLEC Operations Consultant — continued

It's not a recipe, it's a way of life
Tague is confident that he can tell people exactly what he does, and still be able to run his consulting business. In fact, he says, when Win.Net initially launched as a CLEC, the company intended to keep its business a secret. However, he eventually decided to share the information, and started giving advice to the company that was most interested. Since they were based in Georgia, in a Bell South area, many of the issues that Win.Net faced in Louisville, Kentucky were applicable to the ISP in Georgia.

But they still didn't seem to get it. "So we invited them up here and taught them everything we knew, and even gave them access to our internal wiki—American CLEC didn't exist then—and we did not hear from them again. So about eight or nine months later I called them and asked them how things were going, and found they were still stuck on square one, the state approval process. So here we were guarding the secret and we learned that even if we told someone exactly what we were doing it wouldn't help them. I'd been thinking of building a consulting group—it was what I'd done before I founded Win.Net—but I wanted to avoid the little stuff and do big projects. Suddenly I realized I could do this."

The price and the time
It's not cheap and it's not easy but it's cheaper and easier than many think Tague says that at that same FISPA meeting one person claimed that becoming a CLEC takes two years and half a million dollars.

In fact, American CLEC charges about $60,000 and takes about six months, although prices and times vary depending on the network of the client company. Of course, the ISP may have to buy some new equipment, and some contracts will change, so the actual cost to the ISP will vary widely.

During the process, American CLEC charges a fee, generally $2,000 to $3,000, that Tague calls "earnest money". American CLEC takes the rest of its fee by charging the new CLEC 50 percent of its savings until the fees are paid off.

Tague wants ISPs to be able to afford the services of American CLEC. "We know what the cash flow situation is. We don't charge an up front fee."

"Savings can vary widely," Tague says. It could be about fiber being available, it could be an oddly favorable or unfavorable state tariff. No two jobs are the same.

The process begins with a visit. "The first part of the process is I go visit them and I sit down and talk with whoever's interested. It could be one guy or it could be a whole roomful."

Next, American CLEC needs to understand the client's network. "We have a checklist. It used to be I would go there and take notes and then people would have to interpret my chicken scratches. Now I get them to describe their network POP by POP, every circuit, every piece of communications equipment, and all the contracts related to the circuits."

Tague has only found one case of an ISP he could not cut costs for—because the ISP had not been started yet. "That's tough because the fee becomes a big number, and you cannot take it out of savings. He needs to buy a lot of equipment, he's got lots of other expenses."

Tague is proud to help others become more efficient. "Most of what we do is operational. It's not paperwork. Often telco is the largest cost for an ISP. Sometimes it's the second largest after personnel. Generally, we cut telco costs by 40 to 60 percent. We cut your top line item in half. We make your life better, and you can choose whether to spend the savings on marketing or on a new home in Florida."

— End