Interview with Billy D’Arcy

Billy D’Arcy was born in in Dublin, Ireland, in 1969. His parents were self-employed owning a retail and wholesale business. Billy says: “As an only son, I was destined to enter that business.” His mother, however, had other ideas and did not want Billy to follow into the family business because of the amount of work involved and the fact that his father had not been able to take time off for weekends or holidays.  Billy adds: “She felt it was better if I went into more of the corporate life and as a result, I changed course and entered into telecommunications.” His corporate life has however involved working weekends and forfeiting holidays along the way!

Billy says that as well as gaining an appreciation for customer experience, he also gained a high level of emotional intelligence from his father who he describes as a people person. He adds: “I also gained a political awareness because we were very keen on local and national politics when I was growing up. I was involved on the fringes of that with my parents and it taught me a lot about market and country economics, social impact, all of the various things that have come to help me throughout my career.”

Billy describes Ireland of the late sixties as a resilient place, adding: “There’s something about the spirit of Irish people; if you want to get them to do something, it’s probably best to tell them that they can’t because it makes them even more determined. I would describe myself in that camp.”

Whilst enjoying his education, Billy adds: “I did enjoy it but I couldn’t wait to get out and work. I really wanted to get stuck in.  I wouldn’t describe myself as overly academic, but I understood that I needed to have a good basic layer.  I went to third level education.  I may not have been the top of the class but I got myself through that. It wasn’t wasted, it reinforced much of what I actually came to love and learn out there in industry and in practice.”

Billy studied English, economics, sociology, and Greek and Roman civilisation.  He explains his choices: “English and sociology were my favourites. I found it fascinating learning how people operate and interact. I’d really no interest in Greek and Roman civilisation, none whatsoever, but at the time you had to pick four subjects, so it was that or anthropology and I felt that it was probably the lesser of two evils.”

After finishing his school education, Billy was encouraged to go to university while many of this peers went into apprenticeships, he says; “Ireland was changing dramatically then, there was a real focus on education and actually how you could be empowered as a result of a great foundation in relation to university.”

In 1991, Billy joined Cable & Wireless as an Account Manger. He says:  “I begged them for a job.  I was shameless.  I had several interviews, I was rejected at least once or twice, and finally I think they gave in and I joined. I had a fabulous time. I learnt how to sell in that business and it was very much a great commercial grounding.”

Billy explains that Cable & Wireless in Ireland was unique and different to the organisation in the rest of the UK. He says: “They decided that they wanted a presence in Ireland and they decided to buy two organisations; Telephone Rentals, and Sound Systems. They brought them both together and renamed it Cable & Wireless. It was a small company in Ireland of about 200 people and it felt like family. It didn’t have too much of an influence coming in from the UK, for example, albeit you knew who the boss was.”

Billy was trained and provided with mentors among them, Nick Koumarianos and Barry Moylan. He says: “Barry was one of the best salespeople I’ve ever seen commercially, and from a customer point of view and relationship perspective, really, really very good.  Noel Ryan, another individual who I worked with for many years there, again, fastidious in terms of how he went about managing his customers.  They were all very different, but actually when you take the best of what you see from each of these individuals and you look to adopt that in terms of your own style, it’s hugely helpful.”

In 1995 Billy decided to leave Cable & Wireless and join Eir. He says: “I left because I felt that I was going to be very niched and in a very small aspect of a much broader industry of telecommunications and the only way to really understand the true breadth of telecoms, which I was starting to get a real passion for, was to actually go and work for the national incumbent. In Ireland it’s Eir, which used to be called Telecom Éireann. They did everything from residential landlines all the way through to corporate business, public sector business, SME business, and retail and it was a vast piece.  That was the main reason for me wanting to go there.”

He joined as an Account Manager and quickly started to get involved more with management. He adds: “I was the first external person into Eir’s Corporate division and I was tasked with managing some of the largest accounts, including Intel, where I had an office on site. There was a team of people there, I was responsible for the day to day, and then also with one or two other very major accounts that they had where we had exchange equipment located on sites.  These were huge, these were massive campuses and it was then that I honed probably more my management skills.”

 Billy was also allocated Gateway 2000. He says: “They were an amazing organisation.  They located in Ireland because Ireland had re-created itself yet again during the decades to become the call centre capital for Europe.  As such Gateway 2000 was the first major call centre into Ireland. They needed somebody on site running that account on behalf of Eir and I went in and provided the leadership for that, until the day I left.”

Asked if Eir were concerned with potential issues around Y2K, Billy says: “I still remember the people that were tasked with ensuring that everything stayed up and nothing crashed.  It was a very momentous time, particularly in the industry because people hadn’t given it a lot of thought, right up until probably two or three years just before the date, and then everybody started to panic.  Thankfully, everything went very, very smoothly in that respect, but it was a very interesting time.”

In 2000, Billy left EIR and joined World Com as Head of Corporate Sales. He says: “The reason why I left Eir was because I was approached by WorldCom under a brand they had called UUNET which was the jewel in the crown.  It was a beautiful company, seventy-five per cent of all the email globally transited their network.  It was a huge business and they were looking for somebody in Ireland to become the first UUNET employee, and that was me.  It was a start-up, challenger type piece, I’m not afraid to take some risks, which are hopefully very calculated but based on good judgement.  I went in to do that and loved my time there, I felt it was amazing, very innovative, creative company, terrific clients that actually spanned all of the continents around the world.”

Unfortunately, the business had financial and corruption difficulties for which Bernie Ebbers was given a custodial sentence, as Billy explains: “The company had corruption attached to it at the highest level and it never was able to shake off that scandal at the time, which was registered as the largest bankruptcy of its type anywhere in the world in the Guinness Book of Records.  It taught me about brand, loyalty of customers and doing things that were not in my job description to keep the show on the road and the business coming in.” For the last nine months of Billy’s four years at World Com, the company was in administration.

He says of the experience: “I felt disappointed and I felt let down, when the news broke I thought, no, it’s too big to go bust, surely this is a mistake.  Unfortunately it wasn’t a mistake.  Clearly governance and compliance and accounting practices have dramatically improved as a result of organisations such as WorldCom, Enron, Arthur Andersen and others; it all happened around the same time.”

In 2003, Billy joined O2 as Head of Business Sales O2 Ireland. He says of the move: “It was my first foray into mobile communications.” Over the next fourteen years he progressed through the company taking on the position of Managing Director for the Enterprise and Public Sector Business. During his time with O2, in 2009 together with his family he moved to the UK to lead the Corporate division of O2.

Asked if he has ever considered setting up in business for himself, Billy says: “The reality of it is, the way I actually set myself up in these businesses is that I feel like I’m actually running that business, I’m in a start-up.  For example from my time in O2. Around 2012 I had noticed that O2 in the UK wasn’t very relevant in public sector business and I convinced the board to put me in as managing director of that business. We went from eleven per cent market share to forty per cent in two and a half years, as a disrupter, as a challenger.  We weren’t operating as an overly corporately considered organisation. We were behaving like a start-up, however, we were very well backed and very well-funded.”

Billy stayed at O2 for fourteen years before moving to BAI as Chief Executive Officer. “When I left O2 in 2017 to join BAI people thought I was nuts, they thought I was mad.  I was going to an organisation that nobody had heard of, at that time it wasn’t a household name. It was a vision from the group CEO of BAI, which was a government owned state department in Australia, a hundred years old, was spun out, originally bought by Macquarie and then subsequently bought by Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board that had a vision to enter into Europe. They needed a CEO to  build that business and to ensure that London got to benefit from BAI’s infrastructure and expertise in the Underground. I went in to do that, but it was a start-up mentality because it was building from scratch and now today we have up to 600, 700 people at any one time in the Underground on any one day doing five million man hours of work over the course of the next number of years.”

BAI uses neutral host telecoms to transform cities as Billy explains: “It means we can build one network that many operators get to share and use at a fraction of the cost that it would cost them to build it themselves.  There’s a time advantage in that as well, and if you look at the Underground where we’re doing that, even if four operators wanted to build their own network they wouldn’t be able to because there’s not enough space.  So therefore we come in and we say, we’re neutral hosts, we’re technology and vendor agnostic, we concentrate on outcomes, we’re not tied to any one technology or vendor.  It’s all about the solution and ultimately we take a long-term view as we build these networks out and we don’t compete against our customers in their traditional markets, so I don’t have an enterprise business, I don’t have a consumer business or an SME business. We are a network providers’ network, that’s what we do. We provide networks to organisations like Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, the likes of BT, the likes of Three, Vodafone, all the networks that you would expect.”

On the London Underground project, Billy says: “The company is currently investing over £1.2 billion in terms of the cost of that programme and that is over the lifetime of the contract which is a twenty plus five year contract which will not just see BAI design, build, and fund a 5G and 4G network in this environment, but actually upgrade into 6G and 7G during the period, because every seven years that goes by, an extra G is added, as such.  So because of the length of it, we expect to do upgrades.”

The Underground project involves laying optical fibre and much more as Billy explains: “Because of what we’re doing, we will effectively run 700 kilometres of cable in that environment and linking all of the technology up that we need to link up.  We are not just tasked with putting in the cellular infrastructure in the Underground, we’re also tasked with doing a parallel network for the police, fire and ambulance for emergency services.  We’re taking over 100,000 streetscape assets at street level, which are traffic lights, lampposts, bus shelters, front of stations.  We’ll also run a fibre network through the Underground, coming up at every one of the iconic stations, to nine data centres that we’re building across London and interlinking these with the traffic management ducts that are at street level that TfL own.  We’ll also take over the existing pilot on the Jubilee Line and furthermore, we’ll take over the wi-fi that’s been in there for over ten years and we’ll enhance that.  It’s a massive programme, it’s a truly connected London, and London is the last greenfield place of its size and scale in the world to have this infrastructure which until now has been denied for decades.”

The company has already worked on similar projects successfully in New York and Hong Kong. Billy adds: “In Hong Kong, we’re on the fourth generation upgrade there, it’s been in the Subway there for twenty-two years.  In New York, over a decade ago, we were given seven years to build a similar network and we did it within five and a half years.  So we’re very experienced, and we also won the rights to do it in Toronto  and we’ve built a great network there.  In fact I benefitted by taking the CEO of Toronto to become my COO here in the UK, because he’s an amazing engineer and I want to make sure we have the most advanced network anywhere in the world in London.”

 Asked if BAI will continue to grow organically or through acquisitions, Billy highlights two acquisitions; Vilicom and Mobilitie, made in 2021. Billy was directly responsible for the Vilicom deal and the company now reports directly into him. The company has an Irish business based in Dublin, as well as a centre in Reading. Mobilitie is US based operating in every state as neutral host and venues leaders. He adds: “We’ll continue to build through inorganic growth, we’ve been doing that, and we will continue to look where it makes sense to go further in that respect.  But great organisations are able to do both and we’ve been able to demonstrate this year we’ve definitely done both, and we will continue to make sure that we do, which is the reason why we acquired Vilicom. I wanted to make sure I have more firepower and more capacity, more capability, and I wasn’t ignoring the market that needed to be addressed.”

Asked of which European city may offer future opportunities, Billys says: “We have been looking at the Paris Metro and they’re adding lines to that at the moment in preparation for the Olympics which will be there.  The big opportunity in mainland Europe is where many of these networks have been built out, they’ve been built out by the operator community, the mobile network operators in the past. That was fine when they were building a 2G, 3G and 4G network, but now they’re looking at a scenario where capital expenditure isn’t as plentiful as it was before and if there is a better, smarter way to do this. That’s where neutral host comes in. We can take that pain away, we can do that for them, and on behalf of them.  So there’s an opportunity there to look at where that’s going to happen quite quickly.  Europe is behind where the US is in terms of its receptiveness to neutral host.  UK is ahead of the rest of Europe in relation to that, but the rest of Europe is catching up fast.”

Asked if he intends to follow his five year rule of moving on to a different company Billy says: “I’m very excited by my current role and I really want to make sure that I stay true to creating a legacy in London for myself and whoever follows behind me. Both in life and in work, to look at this and go wow, this guy was able to mobilise an amazing team to defy gravity, to be able to do this for London. I’m very happy and passionate about what we’re doing right now and I often say to people when they say, well, when are you going to leave?  I’ll say as long as I feel valued, as long as I feel excitement, I’m excited about what I can see in the next couple of years, why would I want to leave?”

Of his love of selling, he says: “I like customer interaction and no two people are the same. I like to understand what makes people tick and really also understand what people need and look to see if we can address that.  I love doing what I do today because we concentrate on outcomes; what is the outcome somebody is looking for and how can you, if at all, help that individual and organisation to be able to achieve the outcome.  I love that in terms of my current role and it gives me a buzz.”

While he started in sales, Billy’s career has provided him with opportunities to experience other functions building to general management, managing director of an area, and ultimately CEO. He adds: “Today, being a CEO still involves that buzz and I hope it always will, in terms of sales. More importantly it’s about getting great people to do stuff that they thought they may ordinarily not have been able to do.  So it’s leadership and that’s the difference today.”

Billy says his management style is based on delegation. He says: “I learnt how to do that very late in my own career and I wish I’d learnt to do it a lot sooner.” Learning to delegate happened when his wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 2013 which she was able to fight and recover from successfully. Billy learned to rely more heavily on his team. He adds: “As a result of that, my team became more experienced, I learnt to trust them more than I ordinarily would. I often joke that I kept them so busy they hadn’t got time to find a job anywhere else which was another benefit. I was called into the CEO’s office one day and he asked me why my element of the business was going so well with my wife so ill. I said, it’s quite simple, I learnt to delegate. He replied with; well, there’s a lesson in that for all of us. It is something that I now encourage people that come and work with me to strongly ensure that they do within their own teams.”

He adds that “However, there are certain things there that you just need to be able to be there to involve yourself in.  Ultimately, I like to give responsibility, but you have overall responsibility as a CEO.”

Asked if he’s been lucky in his career choices, Billy says: “I am and I have been described as a bit of a lucky general by people, but I do try to remind them that I actually put a lot of it down to judgement, hard work and tenacity. Luck is of your own making and I also have a belief that it’s important to surround yourself with great people, and they don’t always have to work for you, but people that you’ve learnt to like along the way, people whose values are what you want and their judgement.  Triangulation is a very important piece for me, because you don’t always make the right decision, nobody has a monopoly on that. , When you’ve got to make some really large decisions in life, sometimes it’s very important to be able to ask of others what they would do. A lot of the time that satisfies you that the decision you were going to take was the right one to take and sometimes it’s the other way round. It can stop you in your tracks, and you say maybe I need to think about this a different way.  But it’s being able to do either that is very important.”

 Asked about making difficult management decisions, including letting people go, Billy says: “I believe the day you look somebody in the eye to give them a role, you have to be prepared that it’s maybe three to six months later that you may have to look that same person in the eye and tell them that it hasn’t worked out. However, you must always treat people with respect along the way, because behind every one of us there’s a family and making sure that you always recognise that, is so important.

“I’ve never got enjoyment or any thrill or any kick or any pleasure of having to let somebody go. I feel that actually we may have let that person down because the vast majority of people come into work to do a very good job.  Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but the main thing there is to tackle it and to handle it head on and not to bury it.

“One thing I have learnt along the way is to go to the nth degree to make sure we’ve the right person coming into the business and that they can do the job.  That’s a prerequisite. Will they create the magic and will they fit in with the culture of the business. If you can get somebody that you can satisfy yourself on all three of these things, it’s more than likely that it will work out. The three attributes I often look for with people is have they got the hunger, are they hardworking and are they humble, is there a humility.  Those three elements are extremely important in terms of their mindset. It’s extremely important because what’s not to like about those things because if you think about the opposite to those items, they’re fairly repugnant.

Asked about mistakes he’s made, Billy highlights the lesson of wishing that he had learned to delegate sooner in his career. He adds: “I learnt by delegating that you provide a greater level of leadership and ultimately the bar rises in the organisation.”

He also says that staying in one organisation for too long is not a good thing, adding: “I was nearly spending fifteen years in O2.  When I started my career I never wanted to work in any organisation more than five years, I felt that was a good time.

Getting out at the top is very important too. … I would say regret for me is probably not staying true to that, maybe I should have left O2 a little bit earlier, because what I do now I just love.  I’m thinking could I have done that maybe five years earlier.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley