#76 Des Wynne: Building Lazer Telecom with Grit—from Door-to-Door Sales to CEO

Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation at SimTech sharpened his checklist mindset, which he later brought to telecom operations: remember the flow, then back it up with a list so nothing mission-critical slips.As CEO, Des dismantled the myth of the perfect 90-day plan. Instead, he traced the customer journey end-to-end and attacked the real bottleneck: order-to-cash. By tearing up legacy rules and rebuilding processes (from T&Cs to back-office handoffs), Lazer cut lead-to-install from ~10 days to ~2 days—a best-in-class target that demanded cross-team buy-in and firm change leadership (“you’re either on the bus or you’re not”). Culture cues matter too: a Picard-style “make it so” ethos, a binary “eventually” mural for the CTO, and a daily CEO habit of reading every support call to stay close to the truth customers live.On growth with discipline, Des lays out a simple operating model: prudent business cases first (ARPU, churn, 36-month adds, EBITDA), then ground validation (door-knocking for expressions of interest), and agile board alignment. Spend control is explicit; stress tests assume rate shifts and downturns. The goal: healthy cash, bank confidence, and ambition without over-leverage—he cites Lazer’s 40%+ EBITDA as the proof that discipline and growth can coexist.Resilience, for Des, starts with communication. Ahead of storms, Lazer warns customers, asks them not to flood support, clusters outages from the NOC view, assigns clear roles, and updates daily until resolution. Having worked post-hurricane disasters, he’s blunt about human factors under stress and returns to the aviation “7P rule”: Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Possible (Piss) Poor Performance. Also: sleep on hard calls, clear your head, then decide.Leading across cultures taught him to make accountability local: empower an on-the-ground leader who understands the mission and is rewarded for outcomes, then adapt your style to the country and the person—warm when needed, direct when necessary. Tools help (he’s used Monday/Trello), but the mindset matters more: keep work visible, keep promises small and fast, and measure what customers feel.What you’ll learn in this episode- How door-to-door sales builds lifelong leadership habits (15 seconds to earn trust; people buy from people).- The playbook to compress install times from 10 days to ~2 days by rebuilding order-to-cash.- Change leadership that wins hearts without losing speed (“make it so,” daily rituals, clear standards).- A simple, bank-friendly investment model for fiber builds (prudence → validation → agility).- Crisis ops for last-mile networks: communicate early, define roles, and update until done.About Des Wynne:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/des-wynne-557b4718/About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast05:34 Sales and industry insights10:14 The First 90 Days at Lazer Telecom13:51 Organizational Growth and Change Management19:13 Leadership Lessons from Captain Picard20:40 Balancing Growth28:24 Leadership Habits30:45 Lessons from Aviation and the Checklist Mentality37:24 Resilience Strategies and Crisis Management43:56 The 7P Rule45:38 The Human Factor in Crisis Scenarios