Don't be afraid...

This story gets to be a little long. But, please, read it to the end. A lot of what I am writing here will resonate with a lot of you.  As I am writing this, scrolling across on my news feed, a text image read in big bold letters “Don’t be afraid to start all over again. You may like your new story better.”  Today, May 8, 2020 marks twenty years to the day that I started in wireless site development. 

After school ended, I worked a series of retail jobs, always working my way up the company ladder no matter what type of business I was in. My last retail job was working for the now-defunct RadioShack. I was a store general manager, a young gun, working 80+ hours a week. Work was all I did. Opened new stores and took over a failing one to get it back to where it should be. That was never good enough for “The Powers That Be” up in Tandy Towers in Fort Worth. You could work all the hours in the world but if you don’t meet their particular goals on selling people things they don’t need and can’t afford - you aren’t at the top of the ranks. I’ve never been a salesperson. I hate selling, especially to people who can’t afford the purchases, on a 21.99% APR credit card. I have too much integrity for that, to get people to bury themselves in debt. I got burned out. I needed a change. 

World’s Weirdest Interview

One of the part timers that I worked with at one of the RadioShack locations, who is someone I consider a really good friend then, and to this date, worked full time doing something known as “site acquisition”.  She knew I was looking to get out of retail, and got me an interview with, well, not sure what his title was, but he seemed important, at the site acquisition firm she worked at. I literally knew nothing about what I would be interviewing for. That was okay – I was always up for a challenge. The interview went something like this:

Peter: “So, we will give you a map with a circle on it – and you have to go out and find a property to put a tower on. Think you can do that?”

Matt: “Sure”

Peter: “See you Monday morning”.

I don’t even think we talked salary, hours, responsibilities, pretty much anything. But I was out of retail! Thank you, Tanya Negron, for getting me the interview and my long career in wireless. 

A funny side story which I tell frequently – the night of the interview that I got the job, I was filling in for my District Manager at RadioShack doing open interviews at the District Office as he was out of town. I had trouble with integrity that night – do I do the right thing and tell these interviewees to run as far as they can, or do I do what I was being paid to do, and conduct the interviews. I think I did a mixture of both. As I was leaving for the night, I handed my letter of resignation into the DM’s administrative assistant. 

The following Monday, May 8, 2000, twenty years ago today, I walked into this non-descript building on a dead end at 1290 Peconic Ave in Babylon, NY, across the street from a coffee factory, and next door to a horseriding academy. We were underneath a cell tower, and behind the building were the remains of a defunct AM radio station, 1290 WGLI. The building actually used to be their studios and transmitter location. As a radio geek, I loved that. I was now at work at Highlander Consultants, Inc. on Long Island doing something known as “site acquisition”. A few hours later, in came Ed Mooney, a larger than life character, the owner of the firm and lots of towers throughout Long Island. I learned a lot from Ed, and his daughter Joy, the firm’s vice president, along with Tanya, Chris Hanley, Vicky Brennan, and the rest of the cast of characters, over the next few years, cutting my teeth in the industry. I learned to read and create contracts, read engineering drawings, and somehow piece that all together to build a cell site. I was hooked.  First I worked on Nextel, then AT&T got into the mix. Things were great back then - we got work done quickly! These are the days when you could bring a lease template on a site visit in the Borough's, sketch up an exhibit, and the Landlord would sign it. There wasn't 30 layers of approvals that there are now a days to get the most basic task done.

The Keebler Elves

Sometime in 2003, Joy asked if I wanted to do some work in the Philly market. I was young, single, and willing to do anything at this point in my life. Road Trip! Highander got a contract with SBA Network Services, now one of the top publicly traded tower company’s, who also did site acquisition/site development work for the wireless carriers, to do an expansion of Sprint PCS’s network in the Philly market. Sprint named the project “Project Keebler”. As the story goes, it was named by someone at Sprint HQ who said “building these cell sites should be cookie cutter right now! Let’s call it Keebler”. This was named by someone who obviously never did the job before!  Highlander rented an apartment in Bensalem, PA, a suburb of Philly. Tanya, myself, and Tony D lived and worked out of there for a short period of time. At one point, Joy and her husband and kids were down there, along with Tony, Tanya, myself, and others. We hit the roads during the day running search rings, and spent all hours of the night putting SCIP packages together. We were going non-stop. It was fun. It was tiring. We were all one big happy wireless family, making good money, living life, and seeing the sites at a State not at all familiar to us. 

Leaving the Island

I was traveling back and forth from home on Long Island to the Philly market basically every week or two weeks. My stint in Philly was supposed to be for 6 months or so. As my lease at my apartment in Long Island was coming to an end and up for renewal, and the Keebler Elves were still making cookies in Pennsylvania, I decided to make the move. I found an apartment of my own in Pennsylvania, packed my bags, moved my belongings over the course of a few weeks, and became a Pennsylvania resident. After a year or so, I moved just across the river to Palmyra, NJ to another apartment, just a few miles from where I reside today. I loved the area. I loved the historical nature of the Philly area. I loved how close Lancaster was. I loved that it didn’t take an hour to drive 20 miles. It was everything that Long Island wasn’t. I wasn’t going back. SBA, who I was working for thru Highlander, had a few openings in the office, and I took a job with them as a “Property Specialist II”, basically the job that I was reporting to before. I ended up managing the project both in the Philly and the Baltimore/Washington markets, and then going on to be Director of Tower Development for the Northeast. I found a house in nearby Delanco, made an offer, and was a first-time homeowner in 2005, working in a career at a great national company.

Hanging a Shingle

As 2006 started, SBA changed its model for tower development management, and both myself, and my counterparts in other territories, ended up basically having to run all decisions thru people who reported to us in Boca, thus hindering our ability to manage our own destiny, as our bonuses were based on incentives. When I am happy at a company, I will give it my all, blood sweat and tears, to do what’s right for the company. I can’t work at a company I’m not happy at. I knew it was time to leave. I reached out to someone I had worked with at SBA, who not too long prior took a position at Verizon Wireless as Director of Engineering and Operations for Northern New Jersey. Phil Timm was someone that I had, and still do have, high respect for. Phil was able to get me in the door at Verizon Wireless as a contractor doing site acquisition work. At that moment, aceWireless Consulting and Development was born, which after some name changes, mergers and unmergers, and business reformations eventually became Atlantic Site Development, LLC, the company it is today, 14 years later. I owe my entire business formation, and the ability to get my first contract to Phil, and I am forever grateful, and told him that at a surprise retirement dinner party our Sprint/SBA team had for him a few months ago. 

In 2015, I brought on Steve Bosque to the company as a partner. Steve and I have been best friends since High School. We are each other’s son’s godfathers, and he has been my best man at both of my weddings. Maybe someday I’ll return the favor!  Back in my early days at Highlander, right about the time I moved to Philly, I got Steve a job at Highlander, I think working on an AT&T/Bechtel project – Project Liberty if I recall correctly. He was at Highlander for a time, then moved on to other things, and eventually in 2009 I again brought him back into the business, this time working for with me down in Philly for a larger company Atlantic merged into for a short time. I separated ways from that company, and re-formed Atlantic, and eventually the stars aligned and in 2014, Steve came back to work with me first as an employee, and then in 2015, I brought him on as a partner to the firm. He has been there by my side thru all the milestones in life, marriages, births, divorces, marriages again, and everything in between. “Brother from another mother” as the saying goes. 

That is why, 20 years from the day I started working in wireless, I am leaving Atlantic, and the wireless industry. Steve will still be operating the business, and I’m sure I’ll be helping out in the background. I have full faith that he will continue the business I started with as much as integrity as I ran the firm with. Atlantic is never one to make promises we can’t keep, and accept work we can’t perform 100% on. 

Frankly, my heart just isn’t in the industry anymore. We are all working five-times as hard for a fraction of the compensation, as the end clients consistently are lowering what they are paying, and increasing the work expected to be performed.  As my daughter is graduating high school this year, and my son is at the beginning of elementary school, I personally need to be able to plan for my retirement. I want to be able to retire one day and not work till I’m in my death bed. I can’t put money away any more in today’s wireless industry. I don’t have time to spend with my kid’s in today’s wireless industry, spending countless hours a week on countless conference calls where nothing really gets accomplished, for the most part. Conference calls that we don’t get compensated to be on any more than the base pricing that we are working for. Last week I had 10 hours of conference calls. Enough is enough. Madness!

As the stars aligned when I first got into wireless in 2000, and as the same stars aligned when I first started Atlantic in 2006, the stars aligned again now in 2020 and are enabling me to take the next step in my career in a different industry. Perhaps a mid-life crisis is making me take this change; perhaps this Coronavirus is causing me and a lot of others to see what else life has to offer. 

To my current clients, I’ll be finishing all of my projects that I have been working on, giving it my all like I always do. I never walk away from any project unfinished. Again, it goes back to my integrity. Thank you for all of the work you have given Steve and myself throughout the years, and that I expect you will still give to Steve and Atlantic.  To reiterate: status quo for our current projects! You still will have the detail oriented, thinking outside of the box, questioning doing something “just because”, and “finding a better way” Matt Bartlett you have grown to love, or hate, or a mixture of both. I just won’t be taking on any new jobs personally. 

To come full circle to the beginning of this now four-page, I don’t what to call it, memoir, story, love affair with an industry: “Don’t be afraid to start all over again. You may like your new story better.”