true service
Story by Susan O'Connor, Photos By Dero Sanford

When Ritter Communications recruited R. Paul Waits in 2001, the company did not resemble the Ritter of today. Waits took the sleepy little regional phone company and turned it into a powerhouse of telecommunications solutions for the business community, as well as residential customers.

Waits said he saw the need for a company to offer the gamut of technology today in an integrated package of services, and the concept has worked well. Ritter offers phone, Internet and data services, as well as 24/7 customer service in Jonesboro. The company will tailor a package to fit any business situation.
“The idea was, there is a need for that in the marketplace,” he said, “And there was nobody doing all of those things.”

With more than 20 years of experience in the telecom field, Waits was the perfect businessperson to take on this entrepreneurial role at Ritter. He has been involved in every side of the industry, including operations, regulatory affairs and marketing.

A native Arkansan with a bachelor of arts with distinction in economics and business from Hendrix College, Waits left Arkansas for Calgary, Alberta, following college. After a stint at Orbit Valve, he “high-tailed” it back to Arkansas and worked briefly trading bonds, then as a bartender, before beginning his career in telecom as a rate analyst for the Arkansas Public Service Commission (APSC) in 1982.

Waits served on several state and federal level boards in this capacity, including the Federal Communications Commission Joint Board Staff to help sort out policy at the federal level. He was promoted to telecom manager at the APSC, where he facilitated an industry agreement to resolve state issues at the time.
For a 10-year span beginning in 1987, Waits worked for Century Telephone, headquartered in Monroe, La., where he served as regional vice president managing a seven-state area.

From 1997 to 2001 he worked in marketing at Acxiom Corporation. During this period, Waits successfully brought together the necessary IT and telephone people to put together a nationwide caller ID solution for Alltel.

Now president of Ritter Communications, Waits knows the secret that is vital to the success of any customer-service driven company: “At the end of the day, it is just people serving people. And if we forget that, we lose our edge. We have the opportunity to provide something important to people.”

What makes you so passionate about your business? What I preach to our folks is sharing a passion for service, providing services that are necessary and convenient, making our customers more competitive and our communities more viable, our residential households more connected. If we don’t all share this passion, we’re missing a very real opportunity to be/create something special. My passion is having the venue to give that sermon and enroll others in the idea. I’m passionate about creating something that is larger than me, and ultimately does not depend on me for its continued existence.

What makes Ritter unique in Jonesboro? We are the only telecommunications company — that is focused in the Jonesboro business market — that can provide local telephone service, long distance services, high-speed internet access services, telephone systems, computer systems and hosted solutions. And for those who are connected to our fiber in Jonesboro, add video content (cable TV). Our uniqueness is not so much in the list of services, but how we relate and respond to our clients in Jonesboro. We customize the configuration, price or approach around the unique needs of the client. Being local and with dedicated customer service reps, we are accessible and responsive.

Ritter bought 25 cable TV properties in the state in the last three years. That is quite an expansion. What new services will that bring to customers in those areas? Most of those systems have been upgraded to a “fiber deep” network, which essentially will provide a long-term network platform for very high speed Internet, or broadband access. The new system not only speeds up our Internet capabilities, but adds digital TV, high definition channels, as well as a channel line-up that is competitive with Dish and DirectTV. Finally, the upgraded system allows the capability to provide telephone service over these upgraded networks, hence the ability to provide the “triple play,” voice, video and high speed Internet.

What is your vision for Ritter in five years? 10 years? In general terms, Ritter Communications will be the best at maximizing the value delivered to each network connection, i.e., to each customer connected to our network. This means we will dominate the markets and market segments we choose to enter, and we will not enter anywhere we do not have this opportunity. If we do this well, we will be bigger in five years, and much bigger in 10, not because getting bigger is the objective, but the natural outcome of being the best at something.

As the industry evolves, what new technologies are on the horizon that will affect the services that Ritter will offer? Yikes. There are many. What’s been termed “cloud computing” will revolutionize, among other things, the way businesses buy computers and software. We will see new business models from service providers where a business customer no longer has to own any computer or any software, and can buy the function of computing and the applications through a monthly service fee. As a high-speed Internet provider, we have an opportunity to help our business clients take advantage of this emerging trend. We will also see more television programming being delivered over a high-speed Internet connection, bypassing the set-top box of the cable TV or satellite company. This will be a “game changer” in the video industry — hard to see how this will shake out because of all the variables among a number of very large stakeholders. Sort of like climate change. We’re pretty sure something significant is happening/about to happen, but not real sure of the final outcome and when.