K. Paul Singh is the Chairman, President and CEO of Primus Telecommunications [NASD:PRTL], a $658.6 market cap company that turned in close to $1.3b in revenues. Its extensive fibernetwork now connects 29 countries and passes through approximately 80 percent of the world's markets. The McLean, VA-basedcompany bundles hosting, Internet access, voice and data services targeted at multi-national business customers. Almost written off as another victim of the “Great Telecom Meltdown,” Primus has risen from the ashes, debt-free and posting 13 quarters of profits since its restructuring. The man at the helm talks about the experience.

On His Beginning
I came to the U.S. in 1971 after graduating from the Punjab Engineering College. After a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the SUNY at Stonybrook, I went to work in satellite communications. Between RCA, Americom and Comsat, I spent over 7 years and then decided I had enough of engineering [laughs]. In 1982, I graduated from the Harvard Business School and went to work for Maycom, where Hughes had a stake. After a couple of years, I decided it was time to do things on my own. In 1984, I founded Overseas Telecom which was subsequently acquired by MCI in 1991. For the next three years, I worked as the global marketing VP at MCI.

In 1994, the telecom deregulations were firmly in place, and I thought it was time to explore again—this time as a global company. In 1995, I founded Primus. The key here is the window of opportunity that we found—we were not the first entrants into the game, nor did we spend time fighting regulators. We found the space condusive and entered it at the right time.

On Primus
By 1994, most of the world had deregulated the telecom sector, yet there was no company was operating in all of them with its own network. We thought it was a great opportunity to lay our own network and become a global service provider. It does three things for us. One, it gives us alower cost structure to compete with the larger players, whichown and operate their networks.

Two, having our owninfrastructure gives us faster time to market, so we’re notdependent on other players that we would lease capacity from.That would be the lowest common denominator. Third, we design our network to increase the reliability and quality of services, which, again, is very tough to achieve when somebody else is operatingthe network and the customer is counting on you to give service-level guarantees.

The learning here is that the company looked at the opportunity for a long-term play. This has still been our business goal and we are very successful at it.

On Primus Evolution
In 1995, our revenue was $1 million. We set the goal to be a billion-dollar company by 2002, as only then would we be taken seriously. To this end, our team was expanded on a local-global model—the members in each country were locals, but would have had some global experience in their careers. This gave us a good platform to develop and share a single vision with all team members, which was crucial in understanding our goals. Also, our focus ranged on the business and residential customers alone. In 1996, we went public and raised over a billion-and-half in capital for the infrastructure expenses. We were the early entrants in Australia, Europe, Canada, Japan and countries where the deregulation was in waterfall mode.

On Primus Re-emergence
Our long-term debt was about $1.3 billion in 2000. As the capital markets nosedived, the bankers were at our doors, urging us to declare bankruptcy. But I realized that it was not a solution—there were real shareholders at the end of the line. We decided to buy back our debts—when most companies would buy back stocks, and started to shrink our long-term outstanding. Almost $800 million of the debt was bought back, and the interest expenses went way down—from $140m to about $50m this year. We also cut out the unprofitable businesses, and from breakeven last year, we produced $40m revenue this year. This, again, is what I call the window of opportunity—our company technology and business were strong. We did not lose them out to the bankruptcy deal. Rather, we took up the opportunity to reduce our debt.

Today, we are debt-free and cash-flow positive.

On His Management Style
With over 6,000 employees worldwide, the key to success is to understand that people are the reason for the business to flourish. We have encouraged team members to be aggressively entrepreneurial, and this has paid off. We have adopted new opportunities, and adapted to changing conditions very well. Our style has been to “delegate, but verify.” We believe in people’s capabilities, and that people are smart. Unless the management allows team members to innovative, there cannot be growth.

On Building a Team
People don’t come to work to fail. They are smart. We need to find good fit for the people when we hire them. It takes time for a member to find his or her fit—at least a year. And at the end of it, we again look at how comfortable the person is in the work environment. It is as hard for us to let a person go, as it is in hiring the talent. Apart from the experience and technical knowledge, we look for energy, the spirit of entrepreneurism and the success factors the person can bring to the table.

Our people have marked over 10 years with us, through the toughest of times. And our leadership in the countries of operations stand proof of their contribution!