Practice · Telecom & Connectivity
Telecom is where the contract and the bill disagree, and where the savings are real but nobody has time to chase them. This practice is led by someone who has carried the billing and renegotiated with the carriers.
Who Leads It
Telecom is the category where the invoice and the contract disagree most often, and where the savings are real but tedious to find. It rewards someone who has sat with the bill, the circuit inventory and the carrier rep — not someone reading a market quadrant.
Steve Staniszewski leads this practice. He has carried $4M in telecom billing, consolidated contracts for $750,000+ in savings, cut a manufacturer's telecom cost in half while increasing bandwidth, and rolled out circuits to 550+ locations. He has also been on the other side of the renegotiation often enough to know which concessions a carrier will actually make.
On the enterprise end, IQ4hire's connectivity work ran through every major engagement — including global network selection for McDonald's across 121 countries and 30,000+ locations, covering both the stores and the data center.
Engagements
| Organization | Category | Scope | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empire TodaySteve · Telecom Manager · 2007–08 | Billing · Network | Held responsibility for $4M in telecom billing and re-worked the billing and vendor processes behind it. Deployed Ciscoworks to monitor and configure 600+ Cisco devices, built an outage database for root-cause analysis, re-established carrier relationships to obtain improved service levels, and assisted in establishing 15 new markets. | $4M Billing600+ devices |
| AVSCSteve · Director, IT Ops · 2001–05 | Consolidation · Rollout | Consolidated multiple telecommunication contracts and rolled out DSL and T1 service to 550+ locations as part of a three-year infrastructure plan. | 550+ LocationsSaved $750K+ |
| Designed Alloy ProductsSteve · Director IT · 2008–12 | Cost · Bandwidth | Reviewed, negotiated and approved all telecom, vendor and service contracts, cutting telecom cost while increasing bandwidth. Implemented a remote-access solution across Citrix, Terminal Server and VPN. | Bandwidth UpCost cut 50% |
| Allied Van LinesSteve · Sr LAN/WAN · 1986–2000 | WAN · Frame Relay | Owned network and security design across a 1,000-node corporate network, a 250-node frame-relay network and a 300-node dial-up VPN. Designed the frame-relay network with MCI. | 1,000 Nodes |
| McDonald'sIQ4hire · 2001–03 | Global Connectivity | Global network and communications vendor selection across 121 countries and 30,000+ locations, including connectivity to the stores and to the data center. | 121 CountriesPart of $72M saved |
| Great KitchensSteve · Director IT · 2020–26 | Operations · Telecom | Owned network and telecom across the manufacturer, most recently before joining IQ4hire. | 6 Years |
What We Evaluate
Most multi-site estates are paying for circuits to closed locations, duplicated during a migration, or never disconnected after a cutover. An inventory reconciled against the bill is usually the fastest money in the category.
Carrier agreements auto-renew, and the leverage window opens and closes before most IT teams look at it. Knowing when to start — and what the carrier's quarter looks like — is worth more than the negotiation itself.
Cutting telecom spend while reducing capacity is not a win. The target is better cost per delivered megabit with the resiliency intact — which is how a 50% cut and a bandwidth increase happen together.
Consolidating to a single carrier simplifies billing and support but concentrates risk and weakens the next negotiation. We score that trade explicitly rather than defaulting to it.