This keynote by Cheri Beranek Podzimek, President & CEO, Clearfield, was given at the 360 Degree Look at Leadership Conference, February 25, 2009. Ms. Podzimek spoke about her role in Clearfield 's successful turnaround, which resulted in the company being named the "Business Turnaround Story of 2008" and winning a Stevie Award for Women in Business.

Probably the best way to introduce the turn-around story that is now Clearfield is to first set the stage. That stage is one of great improv – not the stage of a highly-rehearsed, high theatre environment. Like many other companies, our employee group had suffered through the telecom implosion of the early part of this decade. However, unlike the 90% of the industry that simply disappeared, the company that was to become Clearfield, first had to be: a) acquired by a third party, b) merged with a competitor, and c) treated as a cash cow by a neglectful farmer. (In this case, the farmer -- our new parent company -- continued to milk but didn't feed the organization to encourage growth.) This was a community of survivors, however, who flourished without focused support from the parent. This scrappy little group continued to seek out ways in which they could provide value to the industry. Then, after nearly four years of working without corporate support, there was a change in direction and focus at the board level. And the potential of Clearfield was unleashed during the summer of 2007.

A Tiny Book With Big Thinking
When I was named CEO of Clearfield, a dear friend gave me a tiny pocket book entitled "Wisdom for the Young CEO." It's no more than 2 by 3 inches, but it carries the insight of some of the world's greatest business thinkers. In its pages, I've found many words to live by.

In fact, our first days as a stand-alone company were probably best depicted by Henry McKinnell, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, when he said, "The best thing that you can do right now is keep yourself open to a variety of experiences and not be afraid to make some mistakes." As a result, speed and nimbleness are among our biggest competitive advantages.

Our Values Make a Statement
Our company values became our foundation upon which we make decisions. I was a bit unconventional about this --- I didn't have the group meetings and brainstorm the collective process --- I wrote the list while in an airplane after reflecting on what mattered most to me and what I saw displayed amongst the Clearfield community.

At Clearfield, we make every decision by listening to our clients; recognizing our skills and talents; understanding our client's needs; collaborating with each other to deliver the best solution; and then celebrating our success. No matter what we undertake, we deploy outcome-based thinking to work toward the desired goal.

The Critical Difference
Our competition has always been billion dollar giants. The question was: How could we succeed by being different? I knew we would be an ethical company (as are our competitors), but we would differentiate by having engineers who sat across the table from clients and who really listened – thereby recognizing the issue and seeking to truly understand the problem.

In the end, we committed to field-engineering our product-line versus what we saw as the lab-engineered solutions that were available on the market.

We knew we were unusual. Generally, sales people don't like to put engineers in front of customers because they're too honest. Ours sat across the table from them and, together, they designed products.

My VP of sales became my VP of engineering --- and now COO. The result is the most market-driven engineering organization in the industry! Moving forward, Clearfield was not about implementing a mission, but it was about achieving change, action and success through the needs and perspective of our client community.

Celebrate the Difference
Another differentiator is understanding that celebration is key. Like many companies we have the pizza parties and potlucks. But we also have "Bad Sweater Day," "Funky Slipper Day," and "Tiki Times" during a frigid February. My favorite party was entitled the "The Magic Is In You." We brought in a magician, closed the production floor, and converted the shipping bay to a stage. It reminded everyone that our success wasn't a perception created by the sleight of hand.

Our success was the power that was within each person.

Fiber to the Need
Fiber management is meant to consolidate, protect, and distribute incoming and outgoing fiber circuits in a service provider's passive network architecture. We were building a company by truly listening to every client and prospect. What we found is each unique service provider wanted to custom configure their fiber management requirements to their requirements – not the requirements of the giant telephone or cable TV vendor down the street.

We also knew that we had smart customers. They knew that the total cost of the product included not only getting a good price for the capital good, but that it needed to save them operational costs.

It's been said that there are really no big ideas --- there are only small ideas that scale. Our small idea was the Clearview Cassette.

Clearview Cassette: Small Idea, Big Difference
Traditionally fiber management has been designed "from the outside in." All hardware that provides the necessary protection was designed into the box — it was a fixed, up-front expense. Instead, with the Clearview Cassette, fiber management could now grow in-step with your subscriber take rates and revenue. With the Clearview Cassette, fiber management could be designed from "the inside out."

And to ensure the efficiency of deployment, fiber management should be the same in the inside plant, outside plant and access network. No more does the service provider need to consider fiber management within the network layout — it's already built into the solution.

The Clearview Cassette is a system of five parts that fully-nest together to support any application. Parts are added or removed to support the configuration element desired for the environment into which it is being deployed. All types of fiber construction can be integrated into the cassette.

The cassette can support all patch-only, patch & splice, passive optical component hardware, and plug n' play scenarios. Supporting patch-only, in-cassette splicing, and optical component packaging for all cable constructions and environments, the Clearview Cassette multiplies and scales to meet your port density and application needs. It serves as a multiplier for fiber management solutions that scale from 12-port Wall Mount Panels to 864 cross-connects, and everything in between.

Today, more than 150 independent telephone providers use the Clearview Cassette in the FieldSmart product line as their foundation for FTTH deployment. The beauty of these deployments is that these networks range from small, rural providers with less than a 1,000 access lines to large metropolitan networks with more than 800,000 access lines. Due to the scalability of the Cassette, every panel, wallbox, outside plant cabinet, or wallbox can be custom-configured to the application requirements of that site.

A Huge Turnaround
Financially, this has resulted in a huge turn-around for the company. We're a small publicly-held company, traded on Nasdaq under the symbol CLFD. In its last year of operation before our renewed focus as Clearfield, the legacy company lost nearly $3 million dollars. In our first year as Clearfield, revenues and gross profits were strong and growing. Profitability is now solid at more than $1.5 million annually.

We're not a giant company. And the economic environment is hitting us all. But my favorite bumper sticker says, "We choose not to participate in this recession." And we're not.

We have graphics throughout our facility that state: "Times Are Tough --- But So Are We!" We have pictures of our employees showing what tough guys we are. Whether they're hockey players, tree trimmers, motorcycle enthusiasts, or ultimate fighters, our team takes pride in meeting our clients' ultimate challenges.

Our biggest limitation is having enough feet on the street to provide our clients with the type of direct dialogue on which we've built our reputation and our Company. We have high ambitions. In fact, we want to sit down with every perspective customer before they commit to a competitive offering that was designed for some hypothetical "standard" network somewhere.

I'd like to encourage everyone to check us out at www.ClearfieldConnection.com. Better yet, give us a call at (800) 476-6866. We won't send out a salesperson. Instead, we'll introduce you to an application engineer who wants to talk about the problems and opportunities of your network. Together, we'll discover how we can help you make your network world-class – one small idea, or cassette, at a time.

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