FROM THE INDUSTRY
What to start Start building management routines before the first crisis forces your hand. The operators I saw handle this well did not wait for a regulatory breach or a board intervention. They invested in structured disciplines while the build was still running. Weekly operational reviews. Defined handover points between teams. Documented standards that field staff could actually use. Not bureaucracy. The minimum operating framework that allows a business to function without every decision routing through one person. Start treating the transition as a formal project. It needs a plan, a timeline, and accountability. Operators that treat it as something that will sort itself out once the build winds down are the ones replacing their leadership team 12 months later. Start documenting before you have to. Processes, standards, contractor agreements, escalation routes, pricing structures. If it is written down, it survives a departure. If it is not, it leaves with the person who knew it. The time to document is while the people who hold the knowledge are still in the building. Start measuring what operations actually needs. Fault recurrence rates. First-time- right installation percentages. Maintenance response times. Repeat customer contacts. These are the metrics that tell you whether the operation is stabilising or whether the costs are compounding silently underneath headline growth. The build phase rewarded speed, improvisation, and tolerance for disorder. The operating phase punishes all three. The operators that recognise this as a skills transition, not a people problem, and invest in the management disciplines accordingly, are the ones that will still be operating independently five years from now.
The UK fibre sector is restructuring. Four altnet M&A transactions closed in the first quarter of this year alone. Cumulative accounting losses across the sector widened to £1.5 billion in 2024, according to analysis by Telecoms.com. An AlixPartners survey found that 47% of UK fibre companies face refinancing a significant proportion of their debt or equity by the end of this year. And in January, one of the larger operators placed over 400 staff on redundancy notice as it shifted from building networks to acquiring them. The financial pressure is well documented. What receives less attention is the management challenge sitting underneath it. Over the past 18 months, more than a dozen senior executive changes have taken place across UK alternative network operators. Not only CEOs and MDs, but COOs, CFOs, and CTOs. Several of those businesses also went through rounds of redundancies in the same period. That volume of leadership turnover is not a coincidence; it is a sector discovering, under pressure, that the management disciplines required to run a fibre network are fundamentally different from those required to build one. Stop letting critical knowledge live in people’s heads. When knowledge is undocumented, every resignation is a crisis and every redundancy round a gamble on what walks out the door.
I spent over a decade inside fibre operations. What follows are the habits I saw cause the most damage during that transition, and the disciplines that made the difference where operators got it right. What to stop Stop letting critical knowledge live in people’s heads. In every fibre operator I worked inside, there was at least one person whose departure would have caused serious disruption. Network planning logic, contractor pricing history, escalation patterns, regulatory commitments. When knowledge is undocumented, every resignation is a crisis and every redundancy round a gamble on what walks out the door. Stop treating firefighting as evidence of a committed team. If your operations team spends most of its week on urgent problems, you do not have an operations team. You have an emergency response unit. The urgency feels productive, but it masks a structural failure: the absence of routine management disciplines that prevent problems from becoming emergencies in the first place. Operators that normalise firefighting are burning capacity they will need when the commercial pressure tightens further. Stop setting targets before configuring the process they measure. Uptime commitments, fault resolution SLAs, customer satisfaction scores. These mean nothing without the maintenance routines, escalation procedures, and reporting systems to deliver them. Setting KPIs before building the process is not ambition. It is decoration. Ofcom’s One Touch Switch system has now handled close to two million broadband switches since launch. Customers can leave more easily than ever. The targets need substance behind them. Stop outsourcing what you need to understand. Operators that handed installation, maintenance, and customer service to contractors during build are now discovering they own a network they do not know how to run. The capability you delegate does not come back when you need it. It has to be rebuilt, slowly and expensively, while the network is live and customers are watching.
www.gregkurnikov.com
Greg Kurnikov is the founder of Business Invincibility Advisory (gregkurnikov. com). He has spent over two decades in UK telecoms and national contracting, including more than a decade inside fibre operations, leading teams of more than 1,000 people and managing budgets exceeding £200 million. He now advises fibre operators and infrastructure businesses on the operational transformation required to move from build phase to sustainable, profitable operation.
Volume 48 No.23 SEPTEMBER 2026
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