In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, Nick Jeffery talks with McKinsey Senior Partner and North America Managing Partner Eric Kutcher. Since taking the CEO role in 2021, Nick has admirably steered Frontier Communications from bankruptcy through an incredible turnaround, with the course now set toward a multibillion-dollar deal with Verizon, which is expected to close in early 2026. Nick talks about the opportunity he saw in the struggling company and the bold culture change, grounded in simplicity and a clarity of purpose, that has rallied a workforce around a shared transformation mission.
This is an edited transcript of their conversation, which took place on September 22, 2025. For more discussions on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Eric Kutcher: We are living in interesting times; certainly, Frontier has come a long way and is now on an interesting trajectory with the pending Verizon deal. If we step back to the beginning, can you talk about the US landscape when you arrived five years ago? What was the opportunity that you saw in Frontier at that time?
Nick Jeffery: One thing that motivated me was that the US has a very interesting market structure. It had the potential to deliver really strong returns on capital for people making the right investments in the right technologies at the right time. I thought Frontier could be one of those companies.
When I came to Frontier, it was bankrupt. It had been through years of declining revenue; it was losing customers and losing EBITDA. It had terrible net promoter scores. But the fundamentals were very compelling: It was coming out of bankruptcy with a clean balance sheet and the capacity to invest; fiber penetration in the US was very low by international standards (at maybe 35 percent here versus 60, 70, 80 percent or more penetration elsewhere). Fiber is a product that consumers and businesses want, and it’s also one of those rare instances of an end-state technology; there will never be a better way of connecting homes and businesses, because your information over fiber runs at close to the speed of light.
If you put all that together, you think, “Hey, maybe there is an opportunity to grow fiber in the US in the way that it’s grown elsewhere.” Frontier had the potential to become the largest pure play fiber provider in North America. I thought, “This is an opportunity that really needs to be grabbed with both hands.”
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Eric Kutcher: Could you talk more about the cultural change that you had to make, and specifically, what exactly did you do to instill that sense of purpose at Frontier?
Nick Jeffery: I think purpose is extremely important. It is about making people feel a connection with what the company does, pride in its ambition, and a sense that you are part of a bigger ambition and vision that matters. A lot of companies have purposes that are extremely generic and don’t, therefore, meet the goal they should be setting out to deliver on—which is to make you feel great about the company you work for, what you do, and why you do it. So we had a good purpose and a clear strategy, but in a company that’s been through bankruptcy and years of underperformance, there’s always a layer in the organization that simply won’t believe, or doesn’t want to believe, the company can be successful again.
One thing I did was simply talk to the whole company on a regular basis. Every two or three weeks, I have a call where anyone in the company can dial in; we call it Listen Live. We use that not just to communicate what the strategy and purpose are, but also to communicate the proof points of where we’ve actually delivered progress. So if we said we’re going to become more efficient, this is what we’ve done. Through that, you begin to build followership, belief, and engagement. You have to be very transparent and open with people on those calls, which means that sometimes I’ve told people things they didn’t like hearing. I’ve often had people come to me saying, “Hey, that was a tough message, but we’re so glad you told us as it is, and we believe we’re going in the right direction with this kind of leadership.”
The other piece of cultural change we’ve been trying to support is to give people the confidence to bring up things that don’t work, then support them and use the resources of the company to fix the issue they’re bringing forward. To try and embed this in the DNA of the company, we ran an employee-led program called Frontier 50, where we wanted the whole employee base to help us find $50 million in cost savings. The idea being: You know where this money is being unwisely spent and where the inefficiencies are, so tell us. I will never forget—there was this guy in, I think it was Arizona, who wrote in saying, “I’ve been here ten years, and every couple of years, I write in and tell management that this guy turns up with a truck on a Wednesday. He gets his mowers off the truck, and he goes up and down outside my window. But there’s no grass there. This is Arizona. It’s the desert. You’re paying somebody to mow the dirt.” That’s fantastic; that’s exactly the sort of employee empowerment you want, where real, actual things can be changed for the better. We have many examples of how we try to engage the whole workforce in this mission.
Eric Kutcher: When I think back to Frontier prior to bankruptcy, the perception was that it was rural communications; it felt more like the laggard of technology than the leader of technology it has become. How do you think about brand?
Nick Jeffery: We have many nonrural areas like in Dallas and in Tampa, Florida, and some parts of California, but, yes, I think that was the brand image. The Frontier we have today feels very modern and appeals to a wide array of people, not just its rural roots.
I think a brand is what a brand does. One of the first things I did early on was get my executive committee together once a week to go through the data on why customers had contacted us the week before. I remember billing came up as a top issue, so I asked to see the bills. They looked like they had been printed by one of those golf ball dot matrix printers from the early ’80s. I’d been in telecom for some 33 years, and there was stuff on these bills that I had no clue what it meant. It was so complicated, so badly presented. Of course, customers were upset. So great, we now knew the issue, and we focused on changing things with a new billing vendor, new format, new proposition. We tested with customers and rolled it out. And sure enough, billing drops off the top category. That management operating model of bringing the entire leadership team’s focus to bear on a small number of operational things, and fixing them one by one, year in, year out, is a big part of what has changed the perceptions of who Frontier is and what we do. It’s changed our brand.
Eric Kutcher: The decision to sell the company comes at a moment in time when you’ve made this incredible transformation, which obviously is what makes it attractive to Verizon. How did you approach that decision-making process?
Nick Jeffery: When we formed a new board and a new executive leadership team at the beginning of this journey with Frontier, we had a point in time where we had to make some choices. What do we do with this asset? One of the things we could have done was just sell the different parts off to people at that time. But we chose to invest over $5 billion in building ten-million-plus fiber homes across our footprint. At no point did we set out to build a company with the goal of selling it; we set out to build the best possible company we could. From the brand to the people we hired, to the systems we deployed, and the processes we built—every single thing was about scaling beyond the Frontier we had at that time. We were always trying to build something that could become a national champion. When you set about that mission and you are successful—and you end up with an asset that’s got back to revenue growth, EBITDA growth, and is well on the way to cash flow growth—inevitably, people notice. We started to gain interest from third parties, ultimately culminating in the sale to Verizon that we hope will close in Q1 next year.
And, of course, you go through a very rigorous process with your board to make sure that you have maximized value for your shareholders. I think the deal we ended up with certainly delivers a significant cash premium to Frontier shareholders and is good for our employees, and I believe ultimately great for our customers as well.
Eric Kutcher: You led the company through an incredible turnaround. What is it like to lead through a moment when you know that you’re trying to hand this over to someone else?
Nick Jeffery: I have to say, that has been a new, interesting, and difficult leadership task for me. When you’ve built a deeply purpose-driven organization—where every day, day in and day out, people are thinking about how to build “Gigabit America,” how to become a market leader, how to be the best at what we do—to suddenly not have that ambition clearly in front of you is a different kind of leadership challenge for the team.
But my reflection is actually that purpose is still the most important thing, because it was and is the bigger ambition. The reason why people come to work is because we are part of a bigger national endeavor. I don’t think that changes, whether we’re owned by Verizon in the future or by current shareholders as we are today. And people can see that this ambition is going to be easier to fulfill under the ownership of a much more financially muscular, powerful company that’s a national champion with the capacity to do even more of what we like doing.
My goal has been to keep the whole team running as fast as we possibly can and get ourselves over the finish line in the best condition possible for our new owners, Verizon. I’m very pleased to say that in the last two quarters, we delivered record-breaking performance across almost every metric. And this business continues to have amazing momentum as we head toward the close of our deal with Verizon.
Purpose is still the most important thing, because it was and is the bigger ambition. The reason why people come to work is because we are part of a bigger national endeavor. I don’t think that changes, whether we’re owned by Verizon in the future or by current shareholders as we are today.
Eric Kutcher: We’ve talked a lot about the company, and you’ve talked about what it’s like to lead through this level of transformation. As a leader, how has your playbook for turnaround and transformation evolved?
Nick Jeffery: Really, a turnaround is just an extreme example of making a business better. And what makes a business better? I think it starts with having a very strong and simple purpose so that people are clear on why we do what we do, where we are going, and why it matters. Strategy is super important, but I’ve seen so many company strategies that you can’t remember. And strategies, as you’ll know much better than I do, are only a recipe for how you allocate resources to get the outcome you want. So making it very simple and very memorable really matters, because you want thousands of people across the organization to understand what they have to do. How do they apply the recipe to making the business better, to get a better outcome for the company and its teams?
It starts with having a very strong and simple purpose so that people are clear on why we do what we do, where we are going, and why it matters.
So building a simple, clear strategy is incredibly important—then communicating it at all levels relentlessly. My team laughs because the purpose and strategy slide [is the one] I have used in every single presentation I’ve done, to every single audience I’ve spoken to for the last five years. Nothing ever starts without us talking about purpose and strategy, because it has to be drilled in right across the organization until it’s something that’s almost burned on the back of people’s retinas.
Building a simple, clear strategy is incredibly important—then communicating it at all levels relentlessly.
Eric Kutcher: My last question. If you had one bit of advice that you could give to your 20-year-ago self, what would it be?
Nick Jeffery: I’d say, first of all, figure out where the money is in a company and go work there. Be at the center of the action; that really matters. Second, find the most talented people you can to work for, because you’ll learn huge amounts from them. You’ll be dragged up on their coattails, and if you’re half decent, they’ll spot you and invest in you as well. They’ll take risks on you, which is certainly something I benefited from a lot. The third thing I’d say is, don’t have a plan. I never believe anyone with a career plan. But be very conscious of serendipity. When you come to a fork in the road, be very mindful and purposeful about which way you are going to go, and why, and take the risk. Nine times out of ten, that’s paid off for me.
Keep it simple and have fun would be the other two in my books. A lot of people at my level seem to take business and strategy very seriously. But I think a great strategy is super simple. It’s just a recipe for how you allocate resources. And if you make it fun as well, you get people to come with you. And when people are moving with you, amazing things start to happen.
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