In the early ‘90s, I was given a CD of a TV program featuring an interview with half-a-dozen middle-aged men who had been classmates at Harvard where they obtained their MBA degrees. This was handled by a leading television network in the US. If my memory serves me right, at least one of them was somewhat happy with his lot in life. The others had lots of excuses – why it turned out wrong for them. I have never heard more whining from an extremely educated bunch of men at the autumn of their lives. Remember what Kipling said? "We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."
I once saw in a department store in New York blue jeans for sale on display with the words "NO EXCUSES" in big letters at the back. I think those two words deserve a better place than the behinds of blue jeans. In fact, this should be a national slogan.
For you will succeed on your terms in whatever way you define success. If you don’t, there should be no excuses – except perhaps a catastrophic illness, God forbid. Other than that, no excuses – not for race, creed, color, national origin, physical disability, sexual orientation, lack of popularity at school that still haunts, not even a parent’s abuse.
No excuses, because you can always turn it around as the trigger to make you realize that success is something you work for, something you simply have to achieve, something that’s worth the sweat and the sacrifice. And you will have success if you have talent to do the job and the desire to apply that talent to achieve what you want. This is the story of Next Mobile Inc. (NMI), and of course Mel Velarde, its CEO.
From the failure of its corporate precursor, Nextel, who was unable to handle the onslaught of competition, to its present success as a vital, progressive and profitable company – that is the NMI story! Actually, it started as the country’s first and only duly enfranchised, and fully integrated digital wireless operator, merging four types of communications services: digital mobile, cellular telephone, digital 2-way radio, data services and messaging.
Re-inventing the company carried a name change, and with it NMI developed a new branding strategy. It chose the new brand name of IMX that stands for Incredible Mobile Experience, which could well describe the experience Velarde is going through right now. Re-inventing also required a new value proposition for providing these services – its novel fleet dispatch features.
Success has to be translated into concrete figures. I remember the words of a great American jurist, Justice Louis Brandeis, a name every law student comes across: "In business, the earning of profit is something more than an incident of success. It is an essential condition of success. It is such because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure."
Mercenary as the statement may seem, nothing can be truer.
And that’s certainly what happened to NMI. Towards the end of 2003, it succeeded in converting debts/loans to equity. So, with the negative equity of P11 billion plus, a P2.9 billion plus positive equity evolved, resulting in a net income of P23 million, on revenues of P500 million, for the first time in its history.
This can be attributed to reversals of taxes among others, cleaning up the database by focusing on profitable customers, and converting the non-profitable ones to profitable. Velarde had NMI go through a streamlining process and a recalibration of operations in order to decrease costs and prepare the groundwork for growth. All these changes have been done at zero bank debt. This combination of trunked radio, cellular, messaging and packet data with Internet access in the same handset is primarily targeted at the business market and organizations.
Most markets that NMI is in right now, translates to approximately 10 percent of the total wireless post-paid subscriber base. It is this lucrative segment that NMI is focusing on, because it is this market that gets attracted to and will benefit most from the multi-functionality and versatility of the technology utilized.
Was it really a "kid" that did it? Probably true, 40-year-old Mel easily looks like a young 30. And he is handling the business from Harvard where he is working for an MBA degree, easily assimilating into the studentry because of his youthful looks and the smile that’s always on his face as if there was no care in his world. But those cares and difficulties were many very early in his life. He had to shoulder the financial burden of his family when his father got afflicted with a crippling disease.
From Cambridge, Massachusetts, he tells me now that NMI will very soon be launching new technologies, necessary if you want to have success in the dynamic telecommunications market.
I will always remember Mel as the young man who produced the People Power 2 digital library, and the kid who, a year before that event, strode into my office one day and declared he wanted to discuss broadband with me.
In one picture, Mel is shown being interviewed by a TV reporter after donating radio paraphernalia for Rainbow GMA, the public service radio facility of GMA-7. Visible in the picture are the words, "When it’s mission critical – IMX, the incredible mobile experience."
That, by the way, could very well be Mel Velarde himself.