Raising Arizona

When the voice over the telephone informed Steve Rizley he had been selected as a 2005 Vanguard Award winner, the Cox Communications Arizona VP/GM waited patiently for a punch line that never came.

“I reacted neutrally because I thought the guy had to be pulling my leg,” says Rizley.

This understated response is a Rizley signature, say industry associates. The cable-advertising-manager-turned-operations-executive is effective at what he does in part because he takes his work more seriously than he takes himself.

“Amassing awards is not his mantra at all,” says Susan Bitter Smith, executive director of the Arizona Cable Telecommunications Association, who has known Rizley for more than 20 years. She describes him as “very intense but very human—a very caring kind of guy.”

Kevin Barry, now a Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau VP, first met Rizley in 1989 and recalls him as a “gracious” executive who was unpretentious in dealing with Barry, who then was a relatively green affiliate-marketing staffer for Discovery Communications.

At Cox, Rizley is responsible for overall management of one of the cable industry's largest regional operations. In the Phoenix and southern Arizona areas, Cox serves 37 communities and close to 770,000 video customers, making it among the top 20 cable properties in the U.S. But the Arizona market is known less for sheer size and more for a pitched degree of competition that Rizley has confronted ever since he took the job as general manager of Cox's largest cable property in October 2000.

At that time, the Arizona operation was battling not only an increasingly successful satellite-TV industry but also one of the first real insurgencies from the wire-line telephone industry. In Phoenix, phone company US West had launched a supercharged DSL network that delivered cable-like video services along with high-speed Internet access. “We had every reason to believe that the gates of hell had opened up to us in late 1999,” says Rizley.

DSL grew quickly. By the fall of 2000, US West had 55,000 video customers, and in July 2001, Cox executives blamed slower-than-expected cash-flow growth on steep costs associated with fighting the US West challenge.

But Rizley turned Cox around in Arizona. The company is the largest multichannel video provider in the state, as well as the largest Internet service provider. US West's successor, Qwest Communications, remains the dominant phone provider in Arizona, but Cox is growing in that area, too. In 2004, J.D. Power and Associates ranked Cox's digital phone service highest overall in customer satisfaction in the western U.S. for the second year in a row.

Cox also says it serves more “bundled” customers—buyers of combined video, Internet and telephone services—than any other Arizona company.

Rizley says winning competitive battles requires reliance on an old-school cable- industry trait. “You're never out of the woods,” he says, “but we have to have faith in a couple of areas. One is that, at the end of the day, our whole industry is built on entrepreneurship. Our business model is extremely flexible, it's extremely dynamic, and it can stop on a dime—and it has needed to several times in our history.”

Quick thinking and nimble management are Rizley hallmarks. Angling for a larger presence in the retail-media sector in 2003, Rizley hired more than 100 college students and sent them to area Best Buy stores, where they pitched customers during weekends to sell them on Cox's high-definition TV and Internet services.

The scheme worked. One zealous “striker,” as Rizley called the college students, clocked 146 sales in a single day.

That sort of results-minded thinking comes in part from Rizley's early experience in the advertising-sales world. He joined Cox Media in 1995 as its general manager after working in the advertising business for Times Mirror Cable and American Cable. There, Rizley had wide authority to manage sales operations that lurked in the shadows of much-larger cable-operations groups.

“We were the bastard children,” Rizley says. But his advertising-sales experience was instructive. In particular, it allowed him to learn income-statement management. Rizley effectively had responsibility for managing the profitability of an entire company—“albeit a small company,” he says. He also got a lesson in competition. “You came into work thinking, 'How does our little industry keep from getting its teeth handed to it by ABC, CBS and NBC?'” he says. “It stood many of us in very good stead.”

At least two cable-industry mentors figure largely in Rizley's career. One is his uncle, Arizona-cable-industry pioneer Bruce Merrill, who founded American Cable. It was a chance conversation between Rizley's mother and Merrill that led Rizley to leave a job selling classified advertising for The New York Times and take a job in the barely born cable advertising business in 1980.

The second is Cox EVP/COO Patrick Esser, who, like Rizley, came up in the advertising-sales side of the business before rising to a general-management role. Esser surprised some industry peers in 2000 when he recommended a fellow cable- advertising-sales veteran for the top job in Arizona.

“He went out on a limb by hiring a guy from ad sales who had never worked in cable [operations],” says Rizley, thankfully. Ten years and one Vanguard Award later, it appears to have been a wise choice.