It pays sometimes to come to your craft as an outsider. That’s particularly true in telecom where a lifetime of telco can lead to habits that are hard to break and broken processes that are hard to recognize.
Mostly it is the process that needs to be changed to make a company or a project more efficient. Nobody knows that better than a filmmaker. Richard Batenburg, now president of Batmann Consulting, was a filmmaker. He specialized in infomercials and says he learned a lot of hard lessons about the importance of process in that role. He decided he liked the whole idea of business process management. He took his skills to Comcast and has turned them into a full-blown consultancy with best practices and methodologies that can help telcos and other verticals be more successful. He spoke with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott about company, his “intention-to-retention “ approach to BPM and the origins of his company’s eye-catching name.
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| Batmann Consulting's Rich Batenburg |
Tell us about the circuitous route from infomercials to consultancy.
We started Batenburg and Hofmann as a production company in 1994. We produced infomercials. And producing infomercials is a lot like being a consultant, because every new product is like launching a new company. After basically “launching” more than 50 companies, I discovered that what I really liked was the business process end of things and figuring out what customers wanted and how to price it, source it, package it, manufacture it and do service delivery. Those crazy inventors gave me a lot of experience organizing and reorganizing their products. So my partner, Jerry Hofmann, and I decided it was time to break apart the company. He took the existing clients we had and I went out to find commercial ones.
I wound up in cable because we’re in Denver and the cable universe sprouted from Denver. We shortened our name to Batmann because nobody remembers Batenburg-Hofmann; it sounds like a Jewish law firm. People remember Batmann.
Because of my experience producing, I landed a consulting gig running crews for TCI which was doing a hybrid fiber-coax rebuild of its plants in Denver, Salt Lake, Portland and Seattle. Through that I really learned cable from the pedestals and customer premises back into the head end. From there I began doing work in field ops in the corporate office and did consulting on their telephony launch around processes and procedures for their field operations group. I got to work on cool projects like MDU rebuilds and the SOHO experiments.
