A year into his tenure, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri searches for answers in unlikely places

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The vaunted corporate boardroom isn’t where the action is any more, at least not for Tony Staffieri. Anyone trying to find Rogers Communications Inc.’s chief executive officer these days is better off looking in unlikely places: a call centre, next to employees fielding customer complaints, or in a store, talking to a clerk.

Coming up on his first anniversary as CEO of the country’s largest cellphone and cable provider, Mr. Staffieri opens an interview by naming the cities where he recently dropped by, unannounced, to chat with Rogers Communications sales staff. He rhymes off Montreal, London and Barrie.

He says the conversations revolve around one topic: How Rogers can do better. And when he does go back to head office in Toronto, the CEO acts on what he heard. “A store in Montreal had an idea on how to make pricing on new phones easier to understand,” Mr. Staffieri said. “We rolled it out nationally within two weeks.”

This feedback, and his recent focus on network stability, is aired in an hour-long conversation with The Globe and Mail. The past year was a messy one for Rogers, but Mr. Staffieri is looking forward now, and he wants to make it clear exactly what he will focus on as CEO. Under his watch, Rogers will be obsessed with service and performance.

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Some of this was thrust on him, some is his own doing. Mr. Staffieri sits in one of corporate Canada’s hottest seats, and his arrival as CEO came after a boardroom brawl at Rogers. Not only is he fighting to land one of the largest takeovers the country has ever seen with a $26-billion bid for Shaw Communications Inc. – a deal originally signed by his predecessor – but his first year at the helm was marked by a national outage that left 12 million Canadians without cellphone and internet service for an entire day.

On top of all that, the Rogers boss is acutely aware that consumers love to hate their telecom companies.

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Every year, polling firm Leger ranks the reputations of Canadian companies. In 2022, Rogers placed 194th of 288 businesses, behind rivals Telus Corp. and Shaw, but ahead of BCE Inc.-owned Bell. Yet Leger’s survey came out in the spring, prior to Rogers’ nationwide outage in July. That technical failure outraged subscribers as the Interac banking network went down and some customers could not make 911 calls.

Mr. Staffieri knows the company’s response to the outage will define its brand, and it is critically important Rogers get things right. “We have to own it, we have to be accountable,” the CEO said. He then listed a series of steps the company is taking to upgrade its systems, including billions of dollars in spending with leading tech companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and Ericsson. “If we don’t have the best network, we don’t have a business.”

He is also well aware that chair Edward Rogers and his siblings, the company’s controlling shareholders, have lofty expectations for leaders of the business built by their visionary father, Ted Rogers. Since the founder passed away 14 years ago, Rogers has cycled through four CEOs. “My mandate from the board was clear, and it was two things: turn around operating performance and close the Shaw deal,” Mr. Staffieri said.

A year into his tenure, Mr. Staffieri has fulfilled half that mandate. Rogers led the industry in the most recent quarter by signing 122,000 new cellphone subscribers, doubling its growth from the previous year. Revenue rose by 10 per cent to $3.4-billion and profit jumped 35 per cent to $409-million. Rogers’ stock price hit an all-time high in April. It has since dropped 31 per cent, in part because equity markets are falling amid recession fears.

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Closing the Shaw takeover is proving more elusive. The federal Competition Bureau wants to block the deal, on the grounds it will result in higher prices for cellphone services. To deal with these concerns, Rogers agreed this summer to sell Shaw’s Freedom Mobile cellphone business to Quebecor Inc. for $2.85-billion, roughly half the amount Calgary-based Shaw invested in the business.

As part of the Freedom sale, Rogers signed a long-term contract to supply the network services that Quebecor needs to expand in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. In contrast to the Competition Bureau’s concerns that the deals will result in higher cellphone bills, Mr. Staffieri said Quebecor will have the scale required to bring down prices, as it did while winning 22-per-cent market share in Quebec over the past decade. “Quebecor will have a better cost structure than they would have had on their own,” he explains.

Rogers, Shaw and Quebecor will hold mediation talks with the Competition Bureau next week. If the two sides cannot reach an agreement, the Competition Tribunal will hold hearings on the deal in November. The tribunal would be expected to rule by early in the new year, and both sides can appeal the decision. Federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne must also approve the transactions. Mr. Staffieri declined to comment on the state of proceedings with government, but said he is “confident the deal will close.”

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There is a precision to the way Mr. Staffieri speaks. As he talks through an issue, he’ll say he wants to make three points, and then number them 1, 2, 3 as he goes along. The methodical approach helps explain why PriceWaterhouseCoopers made him, in the first stage of his career, one of the youngest tax partners in the accounting firm’s history. From there Mr. Staffieri shifted to finance roles at tech manufacturer Celestica Inc. and Bell parent BCE Inc. before joining Rogers in 2012 as chief financial officer.

Mr. Staffieri’s promotion to the top job last fall outdid the drama of award-winning HBO series Succession. Two months of battles in boardrooms, the courts and on Twitter pitted Edward Rogers against his late mother Loretta and sisters Martha and Melinda Rogers-Hixon. When the dust settled, CEO Joe Natale – the former head of Telus – was out and Mr. Staffieri was in. What is Mr. Staffieri’s take on the family feud?

“I am clinical about this. I see family-controlled companies as having a competitive advantage,” he said. “My philosophy is, how do we create something that’s going be great, not just tomorrow, but in five years, 10 years, 25 years – an enduring Canadian success story. The Rogers family shares that long-term view.”

Edward Rogers has a tight group of friends who date back to his school days at Upper Canada College and Western University. Mr. Staffieri is outside this circle.

His parents, both born in Italy, built a restaurant equipment business in north Toronto. Mr. Staffieri earned his degree at nearby York University’s Schulich School of Business. Outside work and family – he and his wife have three adult children – education is Mr. Staffieri’s passion. He is chair of Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly known as Ryerson, and said: “As the child of immigrants, I know that a good education is what creates opportunities in life.”

Rogers director Robert Gemmell, a retired investment banker, said the common ground between chair and CEO is a focus on operational results. He said outsiders tend to underestimate Edward Rogers’s insights, gleaned over two decades of experience in the trenches, including a six-year stint running the cable division. “The thing you need to remember about Edward is he knows this business cold.”

After a decade at Rogers, Mr. Staffieri believes having an experienced telecom executive as the controlling shareholder and chair of the board translates into “complete alignment” through the ranks. “The chair’s priorities are very crisp and clear and that only helps in our execution, because no one in our 23,000-person organization is confused about our priorities.”

When it comes to his relationship with Edward Rogers, Mr. Staffieri took a practical tone: “I have what I would call very productive and constructive conversations, as you would expect any CEO to have with the chair.”

Mr. Staffieri runs Rogers from a modest office – picture the living room of a suburban home – dominated in part by two screens. On one wall hangs a muted TV, tuned to Rogers-owned Citytv news. On the other is a massive computer monitor charting the state of the company’s operations. The CEO can glance at it and see wait times at call centres, and then flip to traffic levels across the network, in real time.

Every Rogers executive has similar screens in their offices. Instant access to data shapes Mr. Staffieri’s management approach. The company’s leaders have the ability to spot problems as they develop, and reach out to the front lines if required. “It’s always a bit of leaning in when it makes sense, but also allow our people to execute,” he said. “And they’re doing a great job.”

Another centrepiece of Mr. Staffieri’s office is a poster-sized black-and-white photograph from the 1920s of a storefront in Brampton, Ont., which has a sign out front advertising Rogers-Majestic batteryless radios. Ted Rogers’s father made those sets, and then died at age 35, when his son was five years old. His widow sold the business.

Ted Rogers spent his career tirelessly working to recapture what his father lost, starting a new company to compete with the media business his mother auctioned off. By any measure, he succeeded, pioneering the cable industry in Canada, then winning cellphone customers away from far larger, incumbent telecom companies. Mr. Staffieri, who arrived at the company two years after the founder passed away, wants to keep that spirit alive.

“The DNA of this organization is entrepreneurial,” he said. “That’s our heritage, that’s the culture we want for our people, that’s the great Canadian business we want to build.” And to do that, Mr. Staffieri plans to keep stopping by Rogers stores and call centres to soak up new ideas.