Q&A With John Cunningham Of BCM One As It Celebrates 25 Years

When did you realize that your company could go beyond its original mission?

Even to this point in time, [I don't think] our mission has changed … We originally started to bid [on work] because companies were still wrestling with their domestic carriers [after the breakup of AT&T in 1984]. So, it was broken up into hardware, long distance, and local. What that created was an environment of finger pointing between those providers as compared to having one entity [before the breakup] and their issues would be resolved.

What we did is we said, "OK, that situation has changed for the clients. We're going to come in, act as an offsite telecommunications department for those businesses in order to alleviate that pain, and give them the information they need so they can make educated business decisions. And we're going to do that in a world-class manner." And we continue to do that today so, although our company has grown [and] the clients that we're servicing have grown up into the mid-market and the enterprise space conceptually, we are still doing the same thing on our clients' behalf.