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380- Beyond Your ISP Chaos w/ Chris Soucie (New Horizon Communications)

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Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
380- Beyond Your ISP Chaos w/ Chris Soucie (New Horizon Communications)
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ON THIS EPISODE

➤ What network aggregation actually means (and why most IT leaders have never heard of it)
➤ How to consolidate 50+ circuits onto one invoice with co-terminus contracts
➤ Real strategies for 20%+ cost savings while improving service
➤ POTS replacement tactics saving thousands monthly
➤ The leadership question that gets executive buy-in: “What do we lose by not doing this?”

Managing internet circuits across multiple locations feels like herding cats—if the cats all had different phone numbers and billing cycles.

Chris Soucie’s spent 20 years at New Horizons Communications, and he’s breaking down the aggregator model most IT leaders don’t know exists. Why? Because aggregators don’t spam your LinkedIn inbox with $50 gift card bribes.

From healthcare networks with 45+ locations saving $1.3M annually to retail chains like Five Guys and Birkenstock cleaning up their infrastructure mess—Chris shows how aggregation delivers wholesale pricing, unified billing, and actual path-diverse redundancy. Plus, you get 24/7 US-based NOC support. No more calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND and navigating phone trees designed by sadists.

The conversation goes beyond just connectivity. POTS line replacement (goodbye, $75 elevator lines). Firewall-as-a-service with Fortinet/Check Point—zero CapEx required. UCaaS integration. And proactive network monitoring that catches issues before your users start complaining.

Chris also drops the strategic leadership lesson that changed his career trajectory: stop selling solutions upward. Start asking, “What do we lose by not doing this?” Gets buy-in faster than any PowerPoint deck ever will.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

3 Key Takeaways

  • Network aggregators consolidate multiple ISP contracts into one invoice, one support channel, one co-terminus renewal date—typically saving 20%+
  • Asking "What do we lose?" drives executive buy-in way faster than presenting what you'll gain
  • Asking "What do we lose?" drives executive buy-in way faster than presenting what you'll gain

Episode Show Notes

00:00 – Why aggregators aren’t in your inbox (and why that’s good)

06:30 – What aggregators do: wholesale pricing, unified billing, multi-carrier wrangling

12:45 – Real examples: Birkenstock, Five Guys, healthcare networks

18:20 – Path diversity and the “fake redundancy” trap most IT teams fall into

23:15 – Stack Guard: proactive monitoring that actually works

29:40 – POTS replacement savings (elevator lines, fire alarms, those ancient fax machines)

35:50 – Firewall-as-a-service: no CapEx, hybrid management options

42:10 – Leadership lesson: “What do we lose by not adopting this?”

49:25 – Building strategic IT leadership through smarter vendor consolidation

Transcript

 

Untitled – October 16, 2025

 

Host: Phil Howard

Guest: Chris Soucie

Phil Howard: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds. Today we have Chris. I’d like to say the Seuss, but Soucie here, and we’re speaking with a vendor today. This is a breakout from what we normally do. And the reason why we’re speaking with a vendor today is because I like to put together these things called special teams. I think when it comes to vendors and vendors in the industry, there’s this really horrible saying that goes around when you ask someone why they’re good and they say, “well, we’re better because we suck less than everybody else.” And a lot of times it’s about picking who sucks less. And I just don’t believe that. That’s a very good way of going about picking your vendors. So I have a special philosophy or what do you want to call it, a strategy or way of being, which is to put together special teams inside each company. And I think when you pick a vendor, you should have a very special team of people that help support you. I have been working with New Horizons Communications (NHC) for years, and I can tell you that it really feels like a family over there, and it feels like a special team. We’ve put together a special team for anyone that ever wants to work with an internet aggregator, plus a lot more. So Chris, why don’t you just do a general introduction of who is NHC? Why are you guys special? And just to the point of everything that I just said.

Chris Soucie: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Phil. So New Horizon Communications, we started in 2002. We’re privately held. We don’t have any PE or VC backing. We’re completely organic. We have about 300 employees and are rapidly growing. About 80% of what we sell is network aggregation coast to coast, as well as in Canada and some in the Caribbean. We will probably expand into Europe in the next few years, but for right now, we’re in North America, sans Mexico. We are channel driven. The largest differentiators that I can throw out there are really the three. We’re channel focused only; we don’t have a direct sales team. We have a channel management group that is their professional relationship managers. And that’s guerrilla marketing. And they do a really, really good job of making sure that all of our partners that we market through have what they need and know where to go. And they can get quick turnaround time on any of the pre-sales support that they need. So that’s a big differentiator there.

Phil Howard: Before you go on, this is a double-edged sword because you’re going to have a lot of listeners out there who are going to say, “well, I’ve never heard of you before. Why would I use you?” And isn’t that what you want anyways? Aren’t you sick of people showing up in your LinkedIn inbox trying to offer you a fifty-dollar gift card to bribe you to get on a call with them for fifteen minutes? That’s actually a good thing. And again, you know about them because someone cared about you and brought NHC to you to begin with. Now for those out there listening, believe it or not, I’m shocked at how often I find CTOs or CIOs, even VP-level IT directors that really don’t know what an internet aggregator is. Of course, they understand aggregation; they understand aggregating internet. But from your world, what does that mean to you? Or how would you describe that to a fifth grader or someone at the family reunion?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So basically, when there are end-users that have multiple locations, maybe in different regions, say Boston, New York, LA, Chicago. And CTOs are trying to manage infrastructure throughout the entire organization. An aggregator is super important because they can go ahead and deliver network-connected services at each of those branch locations, deliver it through one support source or one support office on one invoice, regardless of who the network provider is. So, for instance, in Chicago, we might deliver an AT&T network component—so network connectivity and other services that are layered on top of that. In Boston, we might deliver a Verizon or a Comcast. And then in LA, we might deliver a former GTD or something like that. So we can deliver all of these different network components because we’re buying it on the wholesale side, upstream from these various network providers, deploying it to the customer. We’re managing it 24/7 for the customer, communicating automatically with the customer, using automation and AI behind the scenes, and then delivering the services on one invoice that they can view all their services through. This provides a standard for these CTOs and their organizations to go ahead and scale their businesses with, and it provides future-proofing for other services that might be available that they can’t necessarily get across all markets. An example of that would be, in one market, there might be a very specific manufacturer with an SD-WAN play that is cloud, kind of not, but in another market that maybe hinges on some global access, there might be another provider. So we can go ahead and bridge all those gaps into one central support chain. And then one invoice, one throat to choke, so to say, without sounding cheesy. So that’s the big aha.

Phil Howard: Yes. And honestly, most IT directors, VPs, CTOs I see out there, I know you have this metaphorical spreadsheet of sorts with all kinds of providers and applications on it, all with different contract end dates and different billing codes that you’ve got to match up to get over to the CFO. And this is where an aggregator can really clean up your life and make it easier. You can move to this gold standard, which would be how do we have all of our circuits in our network on one co-terminus contract date? Right. So some of you out there, I know you have, “Well, I’m really good at doing this. I’m good at negotiating with Comcast and AT&T and Spectrum and Verizon.” And what do you mean I’ve never heard of Lumen or CenturyLink or whatever it is. But then you might have some locations in Canada and in Mexico and you’re like, “well, I don’t even know what to use down there.” So I’m calling around and trying to figure it out. And now you’ve got all these different contract dates, and then the bills come in at different times of the month and it’s like, okay, now I’ve got to send this over to my CFO. And he’s asking me, “can you get the billing code?” Yes. Thank you. “Can we get these codes all set up right?” And this is where an aggregator, especially NHC, is very, very good at coding your bills how you want them coded so that at the end of the month or the billing cycle, whatever it is, you just send it over to the CFO. And he loves you because it’s all there. And parent-child billing. So maybe you’ve got locations that still need to receive their own bill, but you want to get one bill all divided up correctly or nicely in a nice clean package over to the CFO. And it sounds like a little thing, but it’s actually a big deal and really cleans things up nice. And one of the things I really noticed with you guys that you did well, and we did a big deal, you did really good with Birkenstock, Birkenstock of America. So for all of you Gen X guys like myself that wore Birks around forever.

Chris Soucie: It’s coming back, that trend’s coming back. By the way, I have a teenage daughter. She’s twelve. It’s coming back.

Phil Howard: So you guys have done beautiful for Birkenstock. And I love you. And I think one of the main things is that it’s just there’s no real worry anymore. It’s like, “oh, we’re opening up a new store,” and Birkenstock has got a really big push with opening up new retail stores and really just making sure that things are delivered on time. Because a lot of times when you open up a new store, it might be new construction and you’ve got to call in. And if you’re calling a normal internet provider where they’re like, “What’s the address?” “Well, we don’t have the address yet.” Or “Here’s the address.” “Well, it’s not showing up in our system.” So NHC takes care of all of that. You guys have been great with them just allowing them to be able to call and just say, “Hey, we need something here,” and you’re able to provide, “okay, here’s all the availabilities. Here’s how we can deliver it.” Maybe just speak to that for a second. The other thing would be, what if someone really wants diversity? Like, what does diversity mean in the internet world?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So from a project management perspective, we are bonded with all the providers upstream that we’re buying network components from. So what that means basically is that their tools are our tools. So our OSS integrates with their back office. So anytime that there’s a change on a delivery or a project or anything like that, we’re leveraging the automation from their tools into ours. And we’re communicating that to the customer to go ahead and create the best possible experience for the end customer. So the moment that something’s changed or has advanced or moved along or stalled, we’re communicating that to the customer. We’re leading that. And every single customer of ours, especially a larger customer like Birkenstock, they’re receiving not just one project management, but they’re receiving a project management team to go ahead and communicate with and pave the deployment path with them. So that’s a big deal. As it relates to segueing into the diversification conversation, another key component of NHC is the fact that because we’re an aggregator, we’re not limited by one provider, one provider network. So if we have a location that has wired access by, let’s say, Comcast and we’re deploying that, but they require diversification off of the Comcast network, maybe just in a different type of delivery system like satellite or Line of Sight or something like that, or 5G. We can deploy that from different providers as well. So we can provide not just a secondary diverse route, but we can supply tertiary and redundant routes for that customer location because of the basis of being an aggregator. Because we’re not tied to just one network. And again, these components are all managed by one support team or one support organization within NHC to support the customer.

Phil Howard: I mean, there’s many instances too, and it doesn’t have to be wireless or anything. But I know there’s many circumstances where we’ve needed in the past, let’s say a one gig fiber connect coming from the south. We want it to come down Main Street. I need a one gig fiber connection coming into this end of the building. And then coming from the south, I need a completely different provider with another one gig fiber backup. And I need to know that they’re both path diverse. So there’s diversity in providers, right? And then there’s diversity in path diversity. And I’ve seen, and this is laughable, unknowingly to the IT director before, he has asked for diversity or he thought he was getting diversity because he ordered from Lumen and then he ordered from, say, Windstream or something like that. And Windstream ended up delivering a wholesale Lumen circuit. So they actually ended up with no diversity. They had two different providers, but they had the diversity on the internet. So that’s just a stupid thing that’s happened before. How about managing and monitoring? And maybe speak a little bit. Another one of the reasons why I’ve loved doing and a lot of the IT directors and partners that have been on the podcast in the past love you guys is your network operating center. And I’ve always said, “Why call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND for support? Why not call someone that actually knows what a static IP address is?” So maybe just a little bit about what you guys can do as far as managing and monitoring of circuits. I guess mainly speak to… you can tell I’ve had a lot of coffee this morning. What are maybe the top five problems that you guys eliminate for an IT leader or CTO if they are normally doing this on their own or their normal procurement process?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. Well, the biggest one is we just take the guesswork out of it, right? The customer shouldn’t be the first one to really realize that there’s a problem. In today’s world, it’s 2025. There’s technology that exists that providers should be using. I know we’re using it, that goes ahead and detects that there’s a problem on the network, whether it’s a latency issue or a hard down issue. And automatically, I use the term automatically, communicating to the end customer to say, “Oh, hey, you’re having an issue, let’s do these following things…” So we have a product called Stack Guard that comes in multiple flavors, multiple layers. There’s a tiered system. But Stack Guard 1 (SG1) is the minimum product that we’re applying on all of our circuit sales, regardless of who the network is with, that accommodates for automated detection and communication down to the end customer on whether we even own the circuit or not, whether we’re billing for it or if it’s part of a package where a customer has an agreement with somebody else and it’s under terms. So we throw Stack Guard on that circuit as well as the circuits that we deliver. It detects latency as well as hard down issues on the circuit really before the customer’s even communicating that, “oh wait, I have a problem on the circuit,” or “my video is choppy on my video calls.” And we’ve automated communication down to the customer’s IT staff or whomever is receiving. And then we have a basically a digital electronic dialogue with them. And we can get on the phone with them if need be and talk through issues and so on. And the last resort, and I say last resort just because typically we can resolve a lot of these issues remotely, we’ll roll a truck and get a technician out there within a couple hours. It depends on what the SLO is, of course, on the circuit. It’s really, really popular. We launched it in 2023, and we’ve seen a tremendous drop in the amount of trouble tickets that we’ve actually created on circuits where, again, regardless of the network, because of the automation on the tool, it’s providing really quick resolution and, if nothing else, a transparent path for the customer IT staff to know that, okay, this circuit, even though it’s cable broadband or maybe it’s dedicated fiber, whatever it is, has a team that’s monitoring and communicating and trying to resolve any sort of issues on it. So it’s a big deal.

Phil Howard: Yeah. So everyone listening to this right now, you may be thinking, well, this all sounds great, but as far as 2025 has been concerned, from the top down our entire goal is, “get tight on the budget, cut where we can, be really, really tight.” This sounds very expensive. And what I’ve noticed is that if you’ve got three locations or more, upwards of… I mean, I work with people that have 100 locations. When an aggregator gets involved and we look at the entire thing, it’s rare that I’m not seeing a 20% savings or more. So, let’s say you’ve got all your circuits you’ve been trying to manage for years. You might have 100 locations, 50 locations. You do a lot of health care, rural health care. We did one not too long ago where it was 43 locations. And when we looked at all the circuits, there was, I think it was $1.3 million in savings that we had at the end of it when we looked at them all and we brought them all into an aggregator from an aggregator’s management standpoint. And then on top of that, you get to layer in that additional monitoring and proactive support. So many of you, the problem is, how do you do this when you have all of these different contract dates? You’ve got, “If I looked at all my contracts right now, Phil, I’ve got a bunch that are 100% buyout or they’re just going to kill me on the install.” That’s fine because you couldn’t install 100 locations anyways in one day. So you look at it all. Take a look at what the savings would be overall on all these different locations. And the beauty of an aggregator is that they can start managing and monitoring it, like you just said, Chris. And we can start managing. You can get all the managing and monitoring right now. And then as those contracts start to come up, then an aggregator is very proactive. And you can talk about probably how you do rollouts and project management and all of that ahead of time. But 60 days ahead of time, 90, 120 days, depending on how long it takes to get a new fiber circuit in there. We can be prepared over the next three years to roll each one of your circuits into one bill, one contract, save you money over the lifetime, and it’s really a two-year project. What I’ve normally found is because most of your contracts are going to be up within about two years. If it’s three years, great. You’ve got a few stragglers out there, but I’ve noticed that as you do this at the end of two or three years, whatever, you’ve really got everything cleaned up very nice. And the beauty of an aggregator, again, is it’s a wholesale play. You’re really leveraging NHC’s ability to buy wholesale and then really pull it all together. And then when you have everything in one spot, it gives you significant buying power. So you end up saving money and getting so much more. You don’t have to call… for sure AT&T is always a 1-800 and you gotta literally put on your little metaphorical spreadsheet, “Option 1, 3, 5, ask for Dan if he’s available at two o’clock in the morning.”

Chris Soucie: Yeah. I mean, that’s a huge point, to be honest with you, because with AT&T, with Comcast, with Lumen, with all of these large network providers, their services or their technology is great, all of them. What’s not great, and everyone will agree, probably even employees at AT&T, Comcast, etc., is their customer experience is not a standard. It’s not consistent across the board. The aggregator space, particularly NHC, we accommodate for that gap. We fill that gap. We make certain that we’re still using the same network components. So the quality of the technology is still there. Typically it’s a lower cost just because we’re buying at a wholesale price, which is lower than street retail. But we’re supplying that consistent customer experience model. So that way the customers have a standard, they know what they’re going to get. And it’s a good experience. So that’s number one. And number two is, look, you mentioned typical 20% savings plus or minus. That’s just across the board average. When we start talking about other services beyond just the network connectivity stuff like POTS, POTS replacement services. That’s really where things start to ratchet up in terms of…

Phil Howard: If you’ve got all copper lines out there running fax machines or… well, I guess it’s really more elevators now. Elevators, fire alarms…

Chris Soucie: Security access…

Phil Howard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re getting very little voice.

Chris Soucie: Yeah. We absolutely crush it. I mean, a customer is going to experience a tremendous value in using NHC as their aggregator because our POTS replacement suite is very simple. LEC migration, migrate as-is, even if it’s a thousand-dollar POTS line, we migrate it over so we can have control of the line and view the customer service record. And then we then optimize those lines to a replacement or an alternative, whether it’s a wireless POTS or something from our voice network, a SIP-based product, or we position it and transition it over to a cable provider that we’re going to go ahead and build for. So all of those services are compliant in fire and life safety services and dramatically drop the cost of those services for the customer. The customer can keep the telephone number, etc. It’s a major, major win for businesses.

Phil Howard: So yeah. So as we start to reveal more of the benefits of an aggregator, NHC also is a voice provider. So we call that Voice over IP, UCaaS, what else can we layer into this? Here’s another big name that we do with you guys. We do Five Guys with you. You’ve been really good with Five Guys every time they do a construction build-out. Here’s the benefit from a retail standpoint, right? What does Five Guys really need? They need internet. They need like one, maybe two phones sitting up front to answer the phone if people are even calling Five Guys to order. I mean, I know I have to call. And when I go to Biddeford, Maine, I know I have to call the Five Guys there because for whatever reason, their app can’t… I’ve got eight kids, so we’ve got all kinds of weird little special things. When you order Five Guys, it’s a $100 minimum order. And I’ve always got to call the store. “Hey, guys. Yeah, I gotta call the store guys. Okay, there’s an order that came in just from the app. I need you to make sure this, this and this.” Otherwise, my kid’s going to be like, “with the ketchup-only burger?” What do you mean, ketchup only? I know it’s crazy. But anyway, so you do really good from that standpoint, from a retail standpoint. But you alluded to another thing as you layer in other services, which I found to be really, really awesome for IT people, IT leadership, CTOs, CIOs getting what they want without having to go make this big sale to the executive roundtable. So there’s a lot of you out there. I know right now you’ve got coming to end of life, or you’ve got all these Meraki switches, or you’ve got Fortinet out there, or you’re on Meraki and you want to go to Fortinet, or you want some Juniper Firewall, whatever it is. A lot of you are out there and you want to do a network upgrade on your firewalls and you’ve got the Fortinet sales rep coming in to you and he’s giving you a PDF long list of all the different SKUs on it and all the different prices of your firewall. And now you’ve got this big CapEx that you’ve got to go sell to executive management. And NHC has a wonderful solution so that you do not have to do that. And what I’ve found is that when we look at, say, all the internet connections and we save you something like 20% there, and you just happen to be also wanting to do a firewall upgrade at the same time, just say Fortinet or whatever. NHC is a very strong… I mean, how many firewall providers do you guys sell? What are your main flavors of the day?

Chris Soucie: Well, so our most strategic right now is we’re partnered with Fortinet and Check Point. And the reason why we’ve done Fortinet and Check Point is one is more locally based still with a great cloud presence, if you will. I’m filming this now, and Check Point is more of the opposite. Check Point is more cloud-first, edge-second. And the two are Gartner leaders.

Phil Howard: So if you guys are like, “you know, hardcore, I’m not going with any of those,” this wicked, wicked… And I’m only talking like that because Chris is from Boston and I’m originally from Worcester. No Yankee fans on here. We don’t want you.

Chris Soucie: Hold on.

Phil Howard: Oh, are you kidding me? No. So the point is, look, if you’re a Fortinet shop and you want to go Fortinet or Check Point, okay? And you want to get off Meraki, and I’m not saying I’m anti-Meraki or I’m not saying Meraki sucks. Okay. But let’s just say you do want to go forward, and NHC is going to be a great option for you. And the reason why is they can put all the firewalls in. They can give you a hybrid management option if you want. If you need some help, if you want to leverage their Fortinet bench of certified SOC guys. Or you say, “heck no, I don’t want anyone touching my firewalls. It’s going to be 100% fine, no problem.” Or, “hey, I don’t want to do it at all. I want you guys to manage it all. I don’t want to do anything. I want to act as the CTO and just let you guys manage it, and my team’s actually the roundtable.” So whichever way you want to manage your firewalls, great. But here’s the thing. They can put that all on a no-CapEx. So you’ve got literally, “Hey, we’re going to do a firewall upgrade, roundtable. And guess what? It’s not going to cost us a dime.” You could literally make that sale, and you could take the savings that you saved from looking at all of your internet connections together, and that might pay for it. I’ve seen this happen numerous times. Again, I did this in a rural healthcare piece where we did 45 locations. We saved them $1.3 million and gave them an entire Fortinet upgrade at the same time and gave them hybrid management so that when you’re on the beach, hopefully sometime this summer, and you need to make a firewall change or something, you can do it with the help of… maybe just speak about that for a few seconds. What are the benefits of going through Fortinet through you guys versus Fortinet, calling and having a guy show up in your inbox on LinkedIn that’s like, “hey, let’s meet and talk about Fortinet.”

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So we have a security operations center that’s in tandem with our network operations center. So we have security licensed or security certified individuals that are supporting everything day two. We have all of our solution engineers certified with Fortinet and Check Point and VMware and all these other manufacturers that we’re selling and deploying on the edge of our VMware surrogates. So all of the support is NHC. So we’re selling Fortinet, we’re selling Broadcom, VMware, VeloCloud, whatever, Check Point, Bigleaf is another one. All of that support is through NHC and by NHC. Of course, we’re leveraging the upstream manufacturer on like a tier five or level four or five. If the flux capacitor in it breaks, what do we do type of thing. Yeah, but everything customer all the way up to L3, L4, that is NHC, and that’s the beauty of why you’d be buying it through NHC. Not just the cost comparison and the price reduction and bonding that technology or that deployment with a savings to help subsidize that project. There’s a variety of reasons. And again, it’s that transparency, that customer experience, customer management model that NHC brings. That is our IP. That is our true asset, intellectual property. So delivering the service that was created elsewhere, we’re designing a solution for the customer, with the customer, that is our IP from start all the way through. We’ve been in business since 2002. The average customer length is 13 years. Our competitive churn is less than three-quarters of one percent. Customers just don’t, they simply don’t leave. Now, you might have a customer that is only focused on price. They don’t really care about the larger support structure. That’s fine. Those customers come and go for everybody. But the customers that require a sophisticated, holistic design and something that they can grow with and scale their business with, they’re not leaving NHC. Spotify has been a customer of ours for years and years and years. There’s a number of big-name customers that we have.

Phil Howard: I’m getting ready to migrate everything to Spotify, and I think you might have just closed the deal for that. Should I do that? Nice. Because when you’ve got a podcast and you’ve got 360 episodes, it starts to become like, “oh gosh, I need to actually have an IT team now to manage all this stuff.” But Spotify, just put everything there and call it a day. What you said is really important. So right now there’s all kinds of stuff going on in just the general temperature check of the industry when it comes to IT leadership, CTO, CIOs, CFOs, what they’re being pressured to do. A lot of people are being pressured to cut costs. They might be sitting under the shadow of, “could I be replaced by an MSP?” By being proactive and cutting costs, NHC is going to help you make a significant, measurable difference in KPIs that you can deliver in a report to the board or the executive roundtable. And if you are being pressured to also consolidate, as hard as it may be, as a CTO’s job or CIO’s job, your team is the executive roundtable. Your team shouldn’t be the help desk. And this is what a lot of IT leaders have a hard time doing is that when they transition to a high C-level executive role, they still think that their team is the help desk and everything. They don’t see their team as the executive roundtable team. And we found that 93% of CTOs fail at making that strategic jump in their leadership. So how does that apply to NHC? What do you guys call yourself?

Chris Soucie: The communication stack provider.

Phil Howard: So the communication stack provider. Okay. So what does that do? It makes you more irreplaceable as a C-level executive because you’re providing a structure that MSPs really can’t touch. What is an MSP going to come in and do for you now? They’re going to run your help desk? You’re really creating more of a, you’re really being more strategic as an IT leader by picking the right vendors that are going to partner with you and give you that extra layer of human capital at really no additional cost, right, and help you really do a lot more for less. Maybe just speak a little bit about what your bench of human capital looks like behind the scenes and what people can leverage.

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So we have just floating around 300 employees. We might have a tick over. And most of those employees are operational support employees, whether it’s presale solution design, deployment, project management, day-two support, SOC 1, SOC 2 certified engineers, etc. That’s it. We have a very small roster of people that are on the finance side and then on the business management side that are managing our business. The majority of the cost of our personnel are here. And adding… I just was talking to you earlier this morning about how we just added in July alone. It’s only the 14th of the month and we’ve already added eight people to an operations deployment team. So we’re constantly adding more and more bodies just as we scale. We’re trying to scale properly.

Phil Howard: But the point I was going to ask, if anyone in Manila or the Philippines or anything like that, do we have any outsourced contact center stuff?

Chris Soucie: No, we don’t. It’s all stateside support.

Phil Howard: Nothing against Manila. They may have an accent. You might hear some guys talk like this guy when you call them.

Chris Soucie: You know what’s funny, though, Phil? In all seriousness, we do have some employees that are United States citizens that maybe during the pandemic, 2021, they moved to their house in Brazil or wherever, and maybe Morocco.

Phil Howard: Everyone knows I was in Morocco since August, so I’ve just been back for a month.

Chris Soucie: But all of our customer-facing, meaning communicative, whether it’s digitally or over the phone or whatever, it’s all stateside support, 100% W-2, NHC. We’re committed to scaling that way. And it works. It works because while it might be less costly for us to invest in a call center overseas, we’ve found that we’re able to retain our customers and jump to our customer’s needs and adapt by having a stateside support team. It just is what it is.

Phil Howard: It’s just great to call someone that is familiar with who you are and knows what a static IP address is right off the bat. Sure. Okay, so all that aside, we’ve sold enough for the last half an hour. I want a piece of advice from you. You’ve been in this business long enough. I want some actual piece of leadership advice or some aha moment, some big failure that you had, whatever it was. Was there ever at some point in your career where you just figured something out and it was this big strategic hard reboot in your leadership style or something? Give us some piece of leadership advice that we can take that will make us all better.

Chris Soucie: Yeah, sure. So first of all, I’ve been with NHC for 20 years, celebrated 20 years in June, which is great. I got the steak knife, just one though. I just got one steak knife. I get the big one. It was in the butcher block. So I’ve been with the company for a long time, and I’ve transitioned through a variety of different organizations within NHC, everything from sales ops to operations, solutions, etc. And back around 2017, I started doing some product development for NHC and started leading the product development to try and onboard new technologies, which at that time was technologies like SD-WAN, things like that. And I found myself swimming constantly against this large, massive wave or current. That was, “What is SD-WAN? Why do we need it?” even though the field was telling us we need it, the marketing research was telling us we need to get in line with it, etc. So, after about six months of not making any ground, I decided to flip it and put it onto my team and say, “Okay, we’re being told that we need SD-WAN, we’re not having any movement because nobody upstairs is buying it.”

Phil Howard: There’s no buy-in.

Chris Soucie: Exactly, exactly. How do we push this up to make them… So once we made that determination that we’re not going to swim against this wave anymore, this current, we’re going to put it into the field and make them tell us precisely who it is that we need to acquire or adopt and why that rapidly changed. It was pretty much like the business, we forced the business to tell us why.

Phil Howard: Yeah. So how do you do that? And this could be used as any example like, “Hey, we need an ERP,” or “we need this,” or “we need that.” Right now, it’s AI, and that’s a whole other… okay. So how do you plant that seed is basically what you’re saying. How do you plant that seed to get them to start telling you, “Hey, we need it” versus you telling them, “We need it”?

Chris Soucie: Well, it was really financially based. It was looking at a growth model and determining, “Okay, for the past four years, we’ve been selling all these services. Now we’re going to be asked to sell these services with an extended edge and management of these. Are we going to continue to experience the same growth in margins and revenue while this new technology is going to be added, that other people are going to be able to go ahead and sell the circuits to while selling this technology?” So that planting that seed got a lot of people to…

Phil Howard: In other words, can we continue to experience our level of growth by not adopting this? Is really what you were… that’s the point. And so people had to think, “Wait a second, no, T1s aren’t fast enough anymore. We need cable.” I’m trying to think of another basic… if we do our backup on tape backups, can we continue to back up our files on backup? Or should we maybe consider these other options? No one’s going to buy tape backup anymore. No one’s going to buy just straight circuits if you don’t offer any value-added network monitoring and services on top of it, and you’re going to start losing your…

Chris Soucie: What do you lose? The question ultimately is, what do we lose by not adopting this technology or not adopting this process? What do we lose? It’s not so much what do we gain, because there’s a ton that you’re going to gain. But what you don’t know through the process of understanding what you gain is that cost. The cost is ultimately going to be a factor. And it’s a variable as you gain more stuff, more things. But what you lose is the ultimate question. That’s the ask why. What do we lose? So once I asked that and I started pushing that not just up, but also down to my team and so on, things started happening really, really, really, really fast. Conversations were occurring.

Phil Howard: I think the hardest thing that our listeners have to sell is security. I think that might be one of the hardest things. “What do we stand to lose if we don’t do this? What do we stand to lose if we do this? Oh, we lose a whole company.” “What do we stand to lose if we don’t adopt this?” I’m just asking the questions. I don’t know, guys. I know you want to sell it, but stop selling. Start asking. Selling is not pushing. It’s not presenting. Selling is asking. And I think that selling is a beautiful skill to have. It’s wonderful. It’s how America was built. No farmer’s beans get to the market without someone selling something. And CTOs and CIOs and IT leaders need to embrace this aspect of learning how to sell. And they need to learn how to sell to executive management. And selling is asking, it’s not telling. So I think it was really beautiful what you just said there. “What do we stand to lose if we do not do this?” So that was beautiful, man. It’s mind-blowing but simple at the same time. And that’s how things should be. So for anyone that’s been a part of our community and been a part of the podcast, we have a secret community where no vendors are allowed. They’re kind of allowed. They can have a spot in the community where you can reach out and ask them, but they’re not allowed to lurk in the corner, so to speak.

Chris Soucie: Is there a secret handshake for the community too?

Phil Howard: I think we do have to figure that out. But so NHC is one of our sponsors. They’ve sponsored us. And not everyone gets to sponsor. You have to be a special team player to begin with for me to even reach out to you and ask you to sponsor us. But they are a special sponsor of the community, of the podcast, and our entire platform here. We do have a secret platform that is getting ready to be revealed in September, which I’m super excited about. And in order to do that, you have to give away something. You have to give away something for free that’s special that you don’t give away to anybody else. So what do you got for us? For the people that have the secret handshake, if they do the secret handshake with you, what do they get that nobody else ever gets?

Chris Soucie: So I don’t know if other people get it or not. It seems like less and less. But we’re giving away two things. One, fancy swag. Obviously, we have some great hats. But we’re also giving away Amazon gift cards. And they tier from $20, $50, and $100. So the better the handshake and the better the conversation, the higher the card.

Phil Howard: So everyone knows my feelings about Amazon gift cards. Anyways, I don’t think any provider should ever have to bribe you to get in front of you, which you don’t. But with NHC, it’s a nice little gesture of, “Phil said I should meet with you and talk with you.” At least have a conversation. If anyone out there is just pissed off at their ISP or even just mediocrity, I feel like the name of the game lately is just mediocrity. And if anyone else out there feels like, “Yeah, my guys are all right, they just suck less than everybody else,” and you’ve got a ton of internet circuits out there, and you want to just even go through the exercise of sitting down with someone and seeing what they could do for you, whether it be from a telecom or voice perspective. Do you guys do any Teams integration? I’m just curious. I forgot about that.

Chris Soucie: Yes. Yes, we do. I don’t know what that looks like behind the scenes, but we do. From our own voice network, our UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service, that integrates with Teams for Teams dialing and so on and so forth.

Phil Howard: Okay. So what can NHC do for you? First, clean up all of your circuits and insanity and give you a nice parent-child billing in one bill and send that over to the CFO with the right codes. Give you a 1-800 number to call that’s not calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND to a family and friends network that has a little bit of a Boston accent. So they can help you with the voice. Also, they can help you with your firewall upgrade. They can help you with, maybe you now loved VMware but Broadcom is so bad and we’d love to just kick them in the teeth. They can help you make that transition or just manage it even better. There’s really a lot… what am I forgetting? What else do you guys do? POTS replacement. Guys, you got some old POTS, you got crazy, stupid bills coming in from Verizon and AT&T and Lumen or whatever. They’re charging you $75 for a phone line. Guess what? They can make that go away overnight. They can make that go away with just a flip of a switch.

Chris Soucie: One thing that we didn’t talk about real quick is we have a service called Carrier Access Management. It’s abbreviated as CAM. And with CAM, when we’re deploying circuits for a customer of our own that may still have other circuits upstream that are under contract, we can convert the billing of those already contracted circuits to NHC, and we operate on behalf of the customer. So that way we’re managing all our services. It’s a huge, huge deal. And then as they come up to term, we’re going ahead 90 days out, 180 days out, we’re communicating with the customer, “Hey, this is going to come up. Let’s go ahead and install new, flip over,” whatever, guys.

Phil Howard: The reason why that’s wicked awesome is because for all those, maybe you’re a construction company and you’ve got little trailers out everywhere and you’re managing all this stuff and you just want someone to, “Can you guys just manage this for me? Can you just be in charge for me? Can you call? Can you make changes on my behalf? Can you do all this?” That’s what that helps.

Chris Soucie: Can you open trouble tickets with them directly for me on my behalf?

Phil Howard: Exactly. How many of you guys have someone right now where they can’t… “Well, first, just give me the trouble ticket and then I’ll escalate it.” No. This is going beyond. I used to work for CBS.

Chris Soucie: And one more thing. So when we’re throwing Stack Guard or SG1 on a CAM circuit, meaning a circuit we don’t own…

Phil Howard: Yeah.

Chris Soucie: Now that’s automating the communication to the customer. “Oh hey, we have a trouble ticket with your circuit, blah blah blah…” all that stuff.

Phil Howard: So here’s what’s to come. We’re going to be doing a special webinar only for the secret handshake people. So everyone out there in the public, if you actually want to see the secret webinar that’s going to be coming up, maybe third or fourth quarter on the roadmap, where we’re going to demonstrate all this. We’re going to show the… I hate to say it, single pane of glass because it’s such a cliché term. I’m going to say we’re going to call it the GUI. We gotta call it what we really should call it. The GUI guy. GUI. And if you just want a cool company, honestly, if you want just good people, New Horizons Communications. So yeah, man. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. And we look forward to building the relationships and bringing the family closer on the inside.

Chris Soucie: Thank you. Appreciate it.

380- Beyond Your ISP Chaos w/ Chris Soucie (New Horizon Communications)

 

Untitled – October 16, 2025

 

Host: Phil Howard

Guest: Chris Soucie

Phil Howard: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds. Today we have Chris. I’d like to say the Seuss, but Soucie here, and we’re speaking with a vendor today. This is a breakout from what we normally do. And the reason why we’re speaking with a vendor today is because I like to put together these things called special teams. I think when it comes to vendors and vendors in the industry, there’s this really horrible saying that goes around when you ask someone why they’re good and they say, “well, we’re better because we suck less than everybody else.” And a lot of times it’s about picking who sucks less. And I just don’t believe that. That’s a very good way of going about picking your vendors. So I have a special philosophy or what do you want to call it, a strategy or way of being, which is to put together special teams inside each company. And I think when you pick a vendor, you should have a very special team of people that help support you. I have been working with New Horizons Communications (NHC) for years, and I can tell you that it really feels like a family over there, and it feels like a special team. We’ve put together a special team for anyone that ever wants to work with an internet aggregator, plus a lot more. So Chris, why don’t you just do a general introduction of who is NHC? Why are you guys special? And just to the point of everything that I just said.

Chris Soucie: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Phil. So New Horizon Communications, we started in 2002. We’re privately held. We don’t have any PE or VC backing. We’re completely organic. We have about 300 employees and are rapidly growing. About 80% of what we sell is network aggregation coast to coast, as well as in Canada and some in the Caribbean. We will probably expand into Europe in the next few years, but for right now, we’re in North America, sans Mexico. We are channel driven. The largest differentiators that I can throw out there are really the three. We’re channel focused only; we don’t have a direct sales team. We have a channel management group that is their professional relationship managers. And that’s guerrilla marketing. And they do a really, really good job of making sure that all of our partners that we market through have what they need and know where to go. And they can get quick turnaround time on any of the pre-sales support that they need. So that’s a big differentiator there.

Phil Howard: Before you go on, this is a double-edged sword because you’re going to have a lot of listeners out there who are going to say, “well, I’ve never heard of you before. Why would I use you?” And isn’t that what you want anyways? Aren’t you sick of people showing up in your LinkedIn inbox trying to offer you a fifty-dollar gift card to bribe you to get on a call with them for fifteen minutes? That’s actually a good thing. And again, you know about them because someone cared about you and brought NHC to you to begin with. Now for those out there listening, believe it or not, I’m shocked at how often I find CTOs or CIOs, even VP-level IT directors that really don’t know what an internet aggregator is. Of course, they understand aggregation; they understand aggregating internet. But from your world, what does that mean to you? Or how would you describe that to a fifth grader or someone at the family reunion?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So basically, when there are end-users that have multiple locations, maybe in different regions, say Boston, New York, LA, Chicago. And CTOs are trying to manage infrastructure throughout the entire organization. An aggregator is super important because they can go ahead and deliver network-connected services at each of those branch locations, deliver it through one support source or one support office on one invoice, regardless of who the network provider is. So, for instance, in Chicago, we might deliver an AT&T network component—so network connectivity and other services that are layered on top of that. In Boston, we might deliver a Verizon or a Comcast. And then in LA, we might deliver a former GTD or something like that. So we can deliver all of these different network components because we’re buying it on the wholesale side, upstream from these various network providers, deploying it to the customer. We’re managing it 24/7 for the customer, communicating automatically with the customer, using automation and AI behind the scenes, and then delivering the services on one invoice that they can view all their services through. This provides a standard for these CTOs and their organizations to go ahead and scale their businesses with, and it provides future-proofing for other services that might be available that they can’t necessarily get across all markets. An example of that would be, in one market, there might be a very specific manufacturer with an SD-WAN play that is cloud, kind of not, but in another market that maybe hinges on some global access, there might be another provider. So we can go ahead and bridge all those gaps into one central support chain. And then one invoice, one throat to choke, so to say, without sounding cheesy. So that’s the big aha.

Phil Howard: Yes. And honestly, most IT directors, VPs, CTOs I see out there, I know you have this metaphorical spreadsheet of sorts with all kinds of providers and applications on it, all with different contract end dates and different billing codes that you’ve got to match up to get over to the CFO. And this is where an aggregator can really clean up your life and make it easier. You can move to this gold standard, which would be how do we have all of our circuits in our network on one co-terminus contract date? Right. So some of you out there, I know you have, “Well, I’m really good at doing this. I’m good at negotiating with Comcast and AT&T and Spectrum and Verizon.” And what do you mean I’ve never heard of Lumen or CenturyLink or whatever it is. But then you might have some locations in Canada and in Mexico and you’re like, “well, I don’t even know what to use down there.” So I’m calling around and trying to figure it out. And now you’ve got all these different contract dates, and then the bills come in at different times of the month and it’s like, okay, now I’ve got to send this over to my CFO. And he’s asking me, “can you get the billing code?” Yes. Thank you. “Can we get these codes all set up right?” And this is where an aggregator, especially NHC, is very, very good at coding your bills how you want them coded so that at the end of the month or the billing cycle, whatever it is, you just send it over to the CFO. And he loves you because it’s all there. And parent-child billing. So maybe you’ve got locations that still need to receive their own bill, but you want to get one bill all divided up correctly or nicely in a nice clean package over to the CFO. And it sounds like a little thing, but it’s actually a big deal and really cleans things up nice. And one of the things I really noticed with you guys that you did well, and we did a big deal, you did really good with Birkenstock, Birkenstock of America. So for all of you Gen X guys like myself that wore Birks around forever.

Chris Soucie: It’s coming back, that trend’s coming back. By the way, I have a teenage daughter. She’s twelve. It’s coming back.

Phil Howard: So you guys have done beautiful for Birkenstock. And I love you. And I think one of the main things is that it’s just there’s no real worry anymore. It’s like, “oh, we’re opening up a new store,” and Birkenstock has got a really big push with opening up new retail stores and really just making sure that things are delivered on time. Because a lot of times when you open up a new store, it might be new construction and you’ve got to call in. And if you’re calling a normal internet provider where they’re like, “What’s the address?” “Well, we don’t have the address yet.” Or “Here’s the address.” “Well, it’s not showing up in our system.” So NHC takes care of all of that. You guys have been great with them just allowing them to be able to call and just say, “Hey, we need something here,” and you’re able to provide, “okay, here’s all the availabilities. Here’s how we can deliver it.” Maybe just speak to that for a second. The other thing would be, what if someone really wants diversity? Like, what does diversity mean in the internet world?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So from a project management perspective, we are bonded with all the providers upstream that we’re buying network components from. So what that means basically is that their tools are our tools. So our OSS integrates with their back office. So anytime that there’s a change on a delivery or a project or anything like that, we’re leveraging the automation from their tools into ours. And we’re communicating that to the customer to go ahead and create the best possible experience for the end customer. So the moment that something’s changed or has advanced or moved along or stalled, we’re communicating that to the customer. We’re leading that. And every single customer of ours, especially a larger customer like Birkenstock, they’re receiving not just one project management, but they’re receiving a project management team to go ahead and communicate with and pave the deployment path with them. So that’s a big deal. As it relates to segueing into the diversification conversation, another key component of NHC is the fact that because we’re an aggregator, we’re not limited by one provider, one provider network. So if we have a location that has wired access by, let’s say, Comcast and we’re deploying that, but they require diversification off of the Comcast network, maybe just in a different type of delivery system like satellite or Line of Sight or something like that, or 5G. We can deploy that from different providers as well. So we can provide not just a secondary diverse route, but we can supply tertiary and redundant routes for that customer location because of the basis of being an aggregator. Because we’re not tied to just one network. And again, these components are all managed by one support team or one support organization within NHC to support the customer.

Phil Howard: I mean, there’s many instances too, and it doesn’t have to be wireless or anything. But I know there’s many circumstances where we’ve needed in the past, let’s say a one gig fiber connect coming from the south. We want it to come down Main Street. I need a one gig fiber connection coming into this end of the building. And then coming from the south, I need a completely different provider with another one gig fiber backup. And I need to know that they’re both path diverse. So there’s diversity in providers, right? And then there’s diversity in path diversity. And I’ve seen, and this is laughable, unknowingly to the IT director before, he has asked for diversity or he thought he was getting diversity because he ordered from Lumen and then he ordered from, say, Windstream or something like that. And Windstream ended up delivering a wholesale Lumen circuit. So they actually ended up with no diversity. They had two different providers, but they had the diversity on the internet. So that’s just a stupid thing that’s happened before. How about managing and monitoring? And maybe speak a little bit. Another one of the reasons why I’ve loved doing and a lot of the IT directors and partners that have been on the podcast in the past love you guys is your network operating center. And I’ve always said, “Why call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND for support? Why not call someone that actually knows what a static IP address is?” So maybe just a little bit about what you guys can do as far as managing and monitoring of circuits. I guess mainly speak to… you can tell I’ve had a lot of coffee this morning. What are maybe the top five problems that you guys eliminate for an IT leader or CTO if they are normally doing this on their own or their normal procurement process?

Chris Soucie: Yeah. Well, the biggest one is we just take the guesswork out of it, right? The customer shouldn’t be the first one to really realize that there’s a problem. In today’s world, it’s 2025. There’s technology that exists that providers should be using. I know we’re using it, that goes ahead and detects that there’s a problem on the network, whether it’s a latency issue or a hard down issue. And automatically, I use the term automatically, communicating to the end customer to say, “Oh, hey, you’re having an issue, let’s do these following things…” So we have a product called Stack Guard that comes in multiple flavors, multiple layers. There’s a tiered system. But Stack Guard 1 (SG1) is the minimum product that we’re applying on all of our circuit sales, regardless of who the network is with, that accommodates for automated detection and communication down to the end customer on whether we even own the circuit or not, whether we’re billing for it or if it’s part of a package where a customer has an agreement with somebody else and it’s under terms. So we throw Stack Guard on that circuit as well as the circuits that we deliver. It detects latency as well as hard down issues on the circuit really before the customer’s even communicating that, “oh wait, I have a problem on the circuit,” or “my video is choppy on my video calls.” And we’ve automated communication down to the customer’s IT staff or whomever is receiving. And then we have a basically a digital electronic dialogue with them. And we can get on the phone with them if need be and talk through issues and so on. And the last resort, and I say last resort just because typically we can resolve a lot of these issues remotely, we’ll roll a truck and get a technician out there within a couple hours. It depends on what the SLO is, of course, on the circuit. It’s really, really popular. We launched it in 2023, and we’ve seen a tremendous drop in the amount of trouble tickets that we’ve actually created on circuits where, again, regardless of the network, because of the automation on the tool, it’s providing really quick resolution and, if nothing else, a transparent path for the customer IT staff to know that, okay, this circuit, even though it’s cable broadband or maybe it’s dedicated fiber, whatever it is, has a team that’s monitoring and communicating and trying to resolve any sort of issues on it. So it’s a big deal.

Phil Howard: Yeah. So everyone listening to this right now, you may be thinking, well, this all sounds great, but as far as 2025 has been concerned, from the top down our entire goal is, “get tight on the budget, cut where we can, be really, really tight.” This sounds very expensive. And what I’ve noticed is that if you’ve got three locations or more, upwards of… I mean, I work with people that have 100 locations. When an aggregator gets involved and we look at the entire thing, it’s rare that I’m not seeing a 20% savings or more. So, let’s say you’ve got all your circuits you’ve been trying to manage for years. You might have 100 locations, 50 locations. You do a lot of health care, rural health care. We did one not too long ago where it was 43 locations. And when we looked at all the circuits, there was, I think it was $1.3 million in savings that we had at the end of it when we looked at them all and we brought them all into an aggregator from an aggregator’s management standpoint. And then on top of that, you get to layer in that additional monitoring and proactive support. So many of you, the problem is, how do you do this when you have all of these different contract dates? You’ve got, “If I looked at all my contracts right now, Phil, I’ve got a bunch that are 100% buyout or they’re just going to kill me on the install.” That’s fine because you couldn’t install 100 locations anyways in one day. So you look at it all. Take a look at what the savings would be overall on all these different locations. And the beauty of an aggregator is that they can start managing and monitoring it, like you just said, Chris. And we can start managing. You can get all the managing and monitoring right now. And then as those contracts start to come up, then an aggregator is very proactive. And you can talk about probably how you do rollouts and project management and all of that ahead of time. But 60 days ahead of time, 90, 120 days, depending on how long it takes to get a new fiber circuit in there. We can be prepared over the next three years to roll each one of your circuits into one bill, one contract, save you money over the lifetime, and it’s really a two-year project. What I’ve normally found is because most of your contracts are going to be up within about two years. If it’s three years, great. You’ve got a few stragglers out there, but I’ve noticed that as you do this at the end of two or three years, whatever, you’ve really got everything cleaned up very nice. And the beauty of an aggregator, again, is it’s a wholesale play. You’re really leveraging NHC’s ability to buy wholesale and then really pull it all together. And then when you have everything in one spot, it gives you significant buying power. So you end up saving money and getting so much more. You don’t have to call… for sure AT&T is always a 1-800 and you gotta literally put on your little metaphorical spreadsheet, “Option 1, 3, 5, ask for Dan if he’s available at two o’clock in the morning.”

Chris Soucie: Yeah. I mean, that’s a huge point, to be honest with you, because with AT&T, with Comcast, with Lumen, with all of these large network providers, their services or their technology is great, all of them. What’s not great, and everyone will agree, probably even employees at AT&T, Comcast, etc., is their customer experience is not a standard. It’s not consistent across the board. The aggregator space, particularly NHC, we accommodate for that gap. We fill that gap. We make certain that we’re still using the same network components. So the quality of the technology is still there. Typically it’s a lower cost just because we’re buying at a wholesale price, which is lower than street retail. But we’re supplying that consistent customer experience model. So that way the customers have a standard, they know what they’re going to get. And it’s a good experience. So that’s number one. And number two is, look, you mentioned typical 20% savings plus or minus. That’s just across the board average. When we start talking about other services beyond just the network connectivity stuff like POTS, POTS replacement services. That’s really where things start to ratchet up in terms of…

Phil Howard: If you’ve got all copper lines out there running fax machines or… well, I guess it’s really more elevators now. Elevators, fire alarms…

Chris Soucie: Security access…

Phil Howard: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re getting very little voice.

Chris Soucie: Yeah. We absolutely crush it. I mean, a customer is going to experience a tremendous value in using NHC as their aggregator because our POTS replacement suite is very simple. LEC migration, migrate as-is, even if it’s a thousand-dollar POTS line, we migrate it over so we can have control of the line and view the customer service record. And then we then optimize those lines to a replacement or an alternative, whether it’s a wireless POTS or something from our voice network, a SIP-based product, or we position it and transition it over to a cable provider that we’re going to go ahead and build for. So all of those services are compliant in fire and life safety services and dramatically drop the cost of those services for the customer. The customer can keep the telephone number, etc. It’s a major, major win for businesses.

Phil Howard: So yeah. So as we start to reveal more of the benefits of an aggregator, NHC also is a voice provider. So we call that Voice over IP, UCaaS, what else can we layer into this? Here’s another big name that we do with you guys. We do Five Guys with you. You’ve been really good with Five Guys every time they do a construction build-out. Here’s the benefit from a retail standpoint, right? What does Five Guys really need? They need internet. They need like one, maybe two phones sitting up front to answer the phone if people are even calling Five Guys to order. I mean, I know I have to call. And when I go to Biddeford, Maine, I know I have to call the Five Guys there because for whatever reason, their app can’t… I’ve got eight kids, so we’ve got all kinds of weird little special things. When you order Five Guys, it’s a $100 minimum order. And I’ve always got to call the store. “Hey, guys. Yeah, I gotta call the store guys. Okay, there’s an order that came in just from the app. I need you to make sure this, this and this.” Otherwise, my kid’s going to be like, “with the ketchup-only burger?” What do you mean, ketchup only? I know it’s crazy. But anyway, so you do really good from that standpoint, from a retail standpoint. But you alluded to another thing as you layer in other services, which I found to be really, really awesome for IT people, IT leadership, CTOs, CIOs getting what they want without having to go make this big sale to the executive roundtable. So there’s a lot of you out there. I know right now you’ve got coming to end of life, or you’ve got all these Meraki switches, or you’ve got Fortinet out there, or you’re on Meraki and you want to go to Fortinet, or you want some Juniper Firewall, whatever it is. A lot of you are out there and you want to do a network upgrade on your firewalls and you’ve got the Fortinet sales rep coming in to you and he’s giving you a PDF long list of all the different SKUs on it and all the different prices of your firewall. And now you’ve got this big CapEx that you’ve got to go sell to executive management. And NHC has a wonderful solution so that you do not have to do that. And what I’ve found is that when we look at, say, all the internet connections and we save you something like 20% there, and you just happen to be also wanting to do a firewall upgrade at the same time, just say Fortinet or whatever. NHC is a very strong… I mean, how many firewall providers do you guys sell? What are your main flavors of the day?

Chris Soucie: Well, so our most strategic right now is we’re partnered with Fortinet and Check Point. And the reason why we’ve done Fortinet and Check Point is one is more locally based still with a great cloud presence, if you will. I’m filming this now, and Check Point is more of the opposite. Check Point is more cloud-first, edge-second. And the two are Gartner leaders.

Phil Howard: So if you guys are like, “you know, hardcore, I’m not going with any of those,” this wicked, wicked… And I’m only talking like that because Chris is from Boston and I’m originally from Worcester. No Yankee fans on here. We don’t want you.

Chris Soucie: Hold on.

Phil Howard: Oh, are you kidding me? No. So the point is, look, if you’re a Fortinet shop and you want to go Fortinet or Check Point, okay? And you want to get off Meraki, and I’m not saying I’m anti-Meraki or I’m not saying Meraki sucks. Okay. But let’s just say you do want to go forward, and NHC is going to be a great option for you. And the reason why is they can put all the firewalls in. They can give you a hybrid management option if you want. If you need some help, if you want to leverage their Fortinet bench of certified SOC guys. Or you say, “heck no, I don’t want anyone touching my firewalls. It’s going to be 100% fine, no problem.” Or, “hey, I don’t want to do it at all. I want you guys to manage it all. I don’t want to do anything. I want to act as the CTO and just let you guys manage it, and my team’s actually the roundtable.” So whichever way you want to manage your firewalls, great. But here’s the thing. They can put that all on a no-CapEx. So you’ve got literally, “Hey, we’re going to do a firewall upgrade, roundtable. And guess what? It’s not going to cost us a dime.” You could literally make that sale, and you could take the savings that you saved from looking at all of your internet connections together, and that might pay for it. I’ve seen this happen numerous times. Again, I did this in a rural healthcare piece where we did 45 locations. We saved them $1.3 million and gave them an entire Fortinet upgrade at the same time and gave them hybrid management so that when you’re on the beach, hopefully sometime this summer, and you need to make a firewall change or something, you can do it with the help of… maybe just speak about that for a few seconds. What are the benefits of going through Fortinet through you guys versus Fortinet, calling and having a guy show up in your inbox on LinkedIn that’s like, “hey, let’s meet and talk about Fortinet.”

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So we have a security operations center that’s in tandem with our network operations center. So we have security licensed or security certified individuals that are supporting everything day two. We have all of our solution engineers certified with Fortinet and Check Point and VMware and all these other manufacturers that we’re selling and deploying on the edge of our VMware surrogates. So all of the support is NHC. So we’re selling Fortinet, we’re selling Broadcom, VMware, VeloCloud, whatever, Check Point, Bigleaf is another one. All of that support is through NHC and by NHC. Of course, we’re leveraging the upstream manufacturer on like a tier five or level four or five. If the flux capacitor in it breaks, what do we do type of thing. Yeah, but everything customer all the way up to L3, L4, that is NHC, and that’s the beauty of why you’d be buying it through NHC. Not just the cost comparison and the price reduction and bonding that technology or that deployment with a savings to help subsidize that project. There’s a variety of reasons. And again, it’s that transparency, that customer experience, customer management model that NHC brings. That is our IP. That is our true asset, intellectual property. So delivering the service that was created elsewhere, we’re designing a solution for the customer, with the customer, that is our IP from start all the way through. We’ve been in business since 2002. The average customer length is 13 years. Our competitive churn is less than three-quarters of one percent. Customers just don’t, they simply don’t leave. Now, you might have a customer that is only focused on price. They don’t really care about the larger support structure. That’s fine. Those customers come and go for everybody. But the customers that require a sophisticated, holistic design and something that they can grow with and scale their business with, they’re not leaving NHC. Spotify has been a customer of ours for years and years and years. There’s a number of big-name customers that we have.

Phil Howard: I’m getting ready to migrate everything to Spotify, and I think you might have just closed the deal for that. Should I do that? Nice. Because when you’ve got a podcast and you’ve got 360 episodes, it starts to become like, “oh gosh, I need to actually have an IT team now to manage all this stuff.” But Spotify, just put everything there and call it a day. What you said is really important. So right now there’s all kinds of stuff going on in just the general temperature check of the industry when it comes to IT leadership, CTO, CIOs, CFOs, what they’re being pressured to do. A lot of people are being pressured to cut costs. They might be sitting under the shadow of, “could I be replaced by an MSP?” By being proactive and cutting costs, NHC is going to help you make a significant, measurable difference in KPIs that you can deliver in a report to the board or the executive roundtable. And if you are being pressured to also consolidate, as hard as it may be, as a CTO’s job or CIO’s job, your team is the executive roundtable. Your team shouldn’t be the help desk. And this is what a lot of IT leaders have a hard time doing is that when they transition to a high C-level executive role, they still think that their team is the help desk and everything. They don’t see their team as the executive roundtable team. And we found that 93% of CTOs fail at making that strategic jump in their leadership. So how does that apply to NHC? What do you guys call yourself?

Chris Soucie: The communication stack provider.

Phil Howard: So the communication stack provider. Okay. So what does that do? It makes you more irreplaceable as a C-level executive because you’re providing a structure that MSPs really can’t touch. What is an MSP going to come in and do for you now? They’re going to run your help desk? You’re really creating more of a, you’re really being more strategic as an IT leader by picking the right vendors that are going to partner with you and give you that extra layer of human capital at really no additional cost, right, and help you really do a lot more for less. Maybe just speak a little bit about what your bench of human capital looks like behind the scenes and what people can leverage.

Chris Soucie: Yeah. So we have just floating around 300 employees. We might have a tick over. And most of those employees are operational support employees, whether it’s presale solution design, deployment, project management, day-two support, SOC 1, SOC 2 certified engineers, etc. That’s it. We have a very small roster of people that are on the finance side and then on the business management side that are managing our business. The majority of the cost of our personnel are here. And adding… I just was talking to you earlier this morning about how we just added in July alone. It’s only the 14th of the month and we’ve already added eight people to an operations deployment team. So we’re constantly adding more and more bodies just as we scale. We’re trying to scale properly.

Phil Howard: But the point I was going to ask, if anyone in Manila or the Philippines or anything like that, do we have any outsourced contact center stuff?

Chris Soucie: No, we don’t. It’s all stateside support.

Phil Howard: Nothing against Manila. They may have an accent. You might hear some guys talk like this guy when you call them.

Chris Soucie: You know what’s funny, though, Phil? In all seriousness, we do have some employees that are United States citizens that maybe during the pandemic, 2021, they moved to their house in Brazil or wherever, and maybe Morocco.

Phil Howard: Everyone knows I was in Morocco since August, so I’ve just been back for a month.

Chris Soucie: But all of our customer-facing, meaning communicative, whether it’s digitally or over the phone or whatever, it’s all stateside support, 100% W-2, NHC. We’re committed to scaling that way. And it works. It works because while it might be less costly for us to invest in a call center overseas, we’ve found that we’re able to retain our customers and jump to our customer’s needs and adapt by having a stateside support team. It just is what it is.

Phil Howard: It’s just great to call someone that is familiar with who you are and knows what a static IP address is right off the bat. Sure. Okay, so all that aside, we’ve sold enough for the last half an hour. I want a piece of advice from you. You’ve been in this business long enough. I want some actual piece of leadership advice or some aha moment, some big failure that you had, whatever it was. Was there ever at some point in your career where you just figured something out and it was this big strategic hard reboot in your leadership style or something? Give us some piece of leadership advice that we can take that will make us all better.

Chris Soucie: Yeah, sure. So first of all, I’ve been with NHC for 20 years, celebrated 20 years in June, which is great. I got the steak knife, just one though. I just got one steak knife. I get the big one. It was in the butcher block. So I’ve been with the company for a long time, and I’ve transitioned through a variety of different organizations within NHC, everything from sales ops to operations, solutions, etc. And back around 2017, I started doing some product development for NHC and started leading the product development to try and onboard new technologies, which at that time was technologies like SD-WAN, things like that. And I found myself swimming constantly against this large, massive wave or current. That was, “What is SD-WAN? Why do we need it?” even though the field was telling us we need it, the marketing research was telling us we need to get in line with it, etc. So, after about six months of not making any ground, I decided to flip it and put it onto my team and say, “Okay, we’re being told that we need SD-WAN, we’re not having any movement because nobody upstairs is buying it.”

Phil Howard: There’s no buy-in.

Chris Soucie: Exactly, exactly. How do we push this up to make them… So once we made that determination that we’re not going to swim against this wave anymore, this current, we’re going to put it into the field and make them tell us precisely who it is that we need to acquire or adopt and why that rapidly changed. It was pretty much like the business, we forced the business to tell us why.

Phil Howard: Yeah. So how do you do that? And this could be used as any example like, “Hey, we need an ERP,” or “we need this,” or “we need that.” Right now, it’s AI, and that’s a whole other… okay. So how do you plant that seed is basically what you’re saying. How do you plant that seed to get them to start telling you, “Hey, we need it” versus you telling them, “We need it”?

Chris Soucie: Well, it was really financially based. It was looking at a growth model and determining, “Okay, for the past four years, we’ve been selling all these services. Now we’re going to be asked to sell these services with an extended edge and management of these. Are we going to continue to experience the same growth in margins and revenue while this new technology is going to be added, that other people are going to be able to go ahead and sell the circuits to while selling this technology?” So that planting that seed got a lot of people to…

Phil Howard: In other words, can we continue to experience our level of growth by not adopting this? Is really what you were… that’s the point. And so people had to think, “Wait a second, no, T1s aren’t fast enough anymore. We need cable.” I’m trying to think of another basic… if we do our backup on tape backups, can we continue to back up our files on backup? Or should we maybe consider these other options? No one’s going to buy tape backup anymore. No one’s going to buy just straight circuits if you don’t offer any value-added network monitoring and services on top of it, and you’re going to start losing your…

Chris Soucie: What do you lose? The question ultimately is, what do we lose by not adopting this technology or not adopting this process? What do we lose? It’s not so much what do we gain, because there’s a ton that you’re going to gain. But what you don’t know through the process of understanding what you gain is that cost. The cost is ultimately going to be a factor. And it’s a variable as you gain more stuff, more things. But what you lose is the ultimate question. That’s the ask why. What do we lose? So once I asked that and I started pushing that not just up, but also down to my team and so on, things started happening really, really, really, really fast. Conversations were occurring.

Phil Howard: I think the hardest thing that our listeners have to sell is security. I think that might be one of the hardest things. “What do we stand to lose if we don’t do this? What do we stand to lose if we do this? Oh, we lose a whole company.” “What do we stand to lose if we don’t adopt this?” I’m just asking the questions. I don’t know, guys. I know you want to sell it, but stop selling. Start asking. Selling is not pushing. It’s not presenting. Selling is asking. And I think that selling is a beautiful skill to have. It’s wonderful. It’s how America was built. No farmer’s beans get to the market without someone selling something. And CTOs and CIOs and IT leaders need to embrace this aspect of learning how to sell. And they need to learn how to sell to executive management. And selling is asking, it’s not telling. So I think it was really beautiful what you just said there. “What do we stand to lose if we do not do this?” So that was beautiful, man. It’s mind-blowing but simple at the same time. And that’s how things should be. So for anyone that’s been a part of our community and been a part of the podcast, we have a secret community where no vendors are allowed. They’re kind of allowed. They can have a spot in the community where you can reach out and ask them, but they’re not allowed to lurk in the corner, so to speak.

Chris Soucie: Is there a secret handshake for the community too?

Phil Howard: I think we do have to figure that out. But so NHC is one of our sponsors. They’ve sponsored us. And not everyone gets to sponsor. You have to be a special team player to begin with for me to even reach out to you and ask you to sponsor us. But they are a special sponsor of the community, of the podcast, and our entire platform here. We do have a secret platform that is getting ready to be revealed in September, which I’m super excited about. And in order to do that, you have to give away something. You have to give away something for free that’s special that you don’t give away to anybody else. So what do you got for us? For the people that have the secret handshake, if they do the secret handshake with you, what do they get that nobody else ever gets?

Chris Soucie: So I don’t know if other people get it or not. It seems like less and less. But we’re giving away two things. One, fancy swag. Obviously, we have some great hats. But we’re also giving away Amazon gift cards. And they tier from $20, $50, and $100. So the better the handshake and the better the conversation, the higher the card.

Phil Howard: So everyone knows my feelings about Amazon gift cards. Anyways, I don’t think any provider should ever have to bribe you to get in front of you, which you don’t. But with NHC, it’s a nice little gesture of, “Phil said I should meet with you and talk with you.” At least have a conversation. If anyone out there is just pissed off at their ISP or even just mediocrity, I feel like the name of the game lately is just mediocrity. And if anyone else out there feels like, “Yeah, my guys are all right, they just suck less than everybody else,” and you’ve got a ton of internet circuits out there, and you want to just even go through the exercise of sitting down with someone and seeing what they could do for you, whether it be from a telecom or voice perspective. Do you guys do any Teams integration? I’m just curious. I forgot about that.

Chris Soucie: Yes. Yes, we do. I don’t know what that looks like behind the scenes, but we do. From our own voice network, our UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service, that integrates with Teams for Teams dialing and so on and so forth.

Phil Howard: Okay. So what can NHC do for you? First, clean up all of your circuits and insanity and give you a nice parent-child billing in one bill and send that over to the CFO with the right codes. Give you a 1-800 number to call that’s not calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND to a family and friends network that has a little bit of a Boston accent. So they can help you with the voice. Also, they can help you with your firewall upgrade. They can help you with, maybe you now loved VMware but Broadcom is so bad and we’d love to just kick them in the teeth. They can help you make that transition or just manage it even better. There’s really a lot… what am I forgetting? What else do you guys do? POTS replacement. Guys, you got some old POTS, you got crazy, stupid bills coming in from Verizon and AT&T and Lumen or whatever. They’re charging you $75 for a phone line. Guess what? They can make that go away overnight. They can make that go away with just a flip of a switch.

Chris Soucie: One thing that we didn’t talk about real quick is we have a service called Carrier Access Management. It’s abbreviated as CAM. And with CAM, when we’re deploying circuits for a customer of our own that may still have other circuits upstream that are under contract, we can convert the billing of those already contracted circuits to NHC, and we operate on behalf of the customer. So that way we’re managing all our services. It’s a huge, huge deal. And then as they come up to term, we’re going ahead 90 days out, 180 days out, we’re communicating with the customer, “Hey, this is going to come up. Let’s go ahead and install new, flip over,” whatever, guys.

Phil Howard: The reason why that’s wicked awesome is because for all those, maybe you’re a construction company and you’ve got little trailers out everywhere and you’re managing all this stuff and you just want someone to, “Can you guys just manage this for me? Can you just be in charge for me? Can you call? Can you make changes on my behalf? Can you do all this?” That’s what that helps.

Chris Soucie: Can you open trouble tickets with them directly for me on my behalf?

Phil Howard: Exactly. How many of you guys have someone right now where they can’t… “Well, first, just give me the trouble ticket and then I’ll escalate it.” No. This is going beyond. I used to work for CBS.

Chris Soucie: And one more thing. So when we’re throwing Stack Guard or SG1 on a CAM circuit, meaning a circuit we don’t own…

Phil Howard: Yeah.

Chris Soucie: Now that’s automating the communication to the customer. “Oh hey, we have a trouble ticket with your circuit, blah blah blah…” all that stuff.

Phil Howard: So here’s what’s to come. We’re going to be doing a special webinar only for the secret handshake people. So everyone out there in the public, if you actually want to see the secret webinar that’s going to be coming up, maybe third or fourth quarter on the roadmap, where we’re going to demonstrate all this. We’re going to show the… I hate to say it, single pane of glass because it’s such a cliché term. I’m going to say we’re going to call it the GUI. We gotta call it what we really should call it. The GUI guy. GUI. And if you just want a cool company, honestly, if you want just good people, New Horizons Communications. So yeah, man. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. And we look forward to building the relationships and bringing the family closer on the inside.

Chris Soucie: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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HOSTED BY PHIL HOWARD

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