The three most important things at Zayo are the investors, the investors, and the investors. After the Private Equity investors, it is the CEO who holds the largest equity stake in the company. Every company tries to make as much money as possible, but Zayo is hyper-focused on the bottom line. The most important factor in any decision is how will this impact Equity IRR. Their stated goal has been 30% equity IRR and they have consistently achieved that in the past. There are numerous mechanisms built into their systems to ensure that various financial measures are met with every contract and every sale.
While there is nothing wrong with that, there are trade-offs and sacrifices that must be made to achieve these goals. While Zayo likes to advertise itself as an entrepreneurial, innovative company, they have essentially been running the same game plan since inception: identify undervalued assets to purchase, integrate them as quickly as possible to achieve the greatest amount of synergies (layoffs, cost-cutting, network optimizations etc) and them monetize those assets as quickly as possible. They like to say they act quickly and make course corrections later. They are very good at this and brutally efficient, but as much as the CEO would like to believe that he has built a newer and better type of company, it is more about operational efficiency than real innovation.
In addition, the company runs very lean and resources are hard to come by. Less money is invested in hiring and retaining quality employees and the other resources that are required to keep a communications company -- even an infrastructure services company -- performing at a high level. As a result customers are less satisfied and employee morale suffers.
Zayo tries to instill a work hard / play hard culture and many employees seem to wear this as a badge of honor. So what if everyone is working 60-80 hour weeks, you have not received a raise in your base salary in four years, and your family was wondering where you were while you were checking email for 2-3 hours every night on your last "Zaycation"? I think that a lot of employees put up with this because it is so common and they look on the bright side and hope that the things that they don't like will get better.
Hope is not a strategy. Sometimes you have to take an objective look at your surroundings and make a decision. Zayo can be good for some employees -- especially if you are young, work in the Boulder office, and are looking to develop resume experience as quickly as possible and don't necessarily care about being paid at market rates. But it is dangerous and naive to think that the CEO, executive management team, or your manager care about you personally or your career development. They don't. This company cares about the investors and how you can contribute to the bottom line. They don't care about employees or even really the customers -- those are just a means to an end.
Zayo also expects that you do as you are told and is not open to many suggestions, even constructive ones. The CEO assumes that he has all of the answers and that if something did not meet his high expectations then it must be someone else's fault and a change must be made immediately. He is not open to other viewpoints and does not react well to any bad news. As a result most people will try to sweep anything negative under the carpet or blame it on another group or person if it cannot be concealed which does not least to any lasting change or meaningful improvements to the company. That's not leadership.
The prevailing attitude -- which has been demonstrated by the CEO's responses to previous Glassdoor posts -- has been to disagree with any negative observations where possible and then simply dismiss others by saying that person wasn't the "right fit" for Zayo -- basically don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Obviously Zayo could have changed certain things if they had wanted to --- the sales compensation plan, regular employee reviews and merit-based raises, adding resources where needed. Actions speak louder than words. It will be interesting to see now that the lockup has expired and as pre-IPO equity continues to vest if anything will change in the future.
