A first-person monologue (YouTube) recounting mistakes during a rapid national wireless company launch. The speaker argues they underestimated preparation time — the launch required two years not one — and describes operational gaps (no functioning general ledger/ERP at launch), firefighting, and regulator/shareholder pressures that forced rushed decisions.
Questions this video answers
Two years (not one year).
Six months through 2010.
After Q1 of launch.
Chapters
By the time we had, we were staffed up like we were in May, June, and we're launching in December a national wireless company. Like, it's very hard to think through that narrative. If I could go back and say, how should it have been done? We needed two years to launch, not one year. Okay. So what ended up happening is we built not with all this regulatory pressure and shareholder pressure, and we're like, we don't actually know when we're going to be allowed to launch by the regulators. And when we are allowed, it's going to be like, you launch now. And we weren't able to say this is really a two year process. We were more like chickens with our heads cut off in a panic zone trying to fight fires every single day. And it was less systematic than I would have ever liked it to be. Like to give you an example, okay, we implemented Oracle erp. It's a terrible system. When we launched, we didn't really have it, so we launched a wireless company with no general ledger. Oh, wow. Right. And it took me six months through 2010 to get that thing properly implemented. So we ran for. My auditors came in after Q1 of launch and they're like, you don't have an accounting system. Like, it was crazy. Like, we're on Excel for a wireless company, adding customers like that is nonsense. And we had to either deprioritize or we just said if we, if we launch at any point in time, we just have to be able to service customers and have a bit of a network and hopefully we get longer than we think we're going to have. And so that's not a great way to do things. The better way would have been take two years, do it right, do a work back schedule with proper prioritization and give yourself a little bit of Runway to do this in Canada, the Canadian way. That's what I would say was probably. I mean, that would have been the greatest. Now often as you and I know, you don't get that time. You don't have the luxury of that.
