Years ago I met Garth Pellett. He was my AT&T Account Executive. He visited shortly after my first IHC staff meeting. A meeting where the decision was made to move from AT&T Long Distance to MCI. Garth was not happy at that first meeting.

Over the next several months Garth and I continued to meet. Garth almost constantly expressed displeasure at my decisions. IHC was a self-maintainer for its ROLM PBX systems. We had a lot of them scattered all throughout the system. Garth wanted AT&T Switches in IHC facilities. It all came to a boil one day over lunch at Magleby's in Provo. Garth let loose on me and told me that I wasn't making decisions, I was just blindly following the corporate direction.

This was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Really. I'm not being sarcastic.

What made this relationship good is that Garth and I established a very open communication. Over the years Garth kept calling on me. And kept pointing out my, in his opinion, bad decisions. Three years after the MCI decision I was in charge of dealing with an expiring contract. I decided to switch to AT&T. I knew that the base costs of AT&T were about 5% more than those of MCI. Why did I change?

Garth.

We had developed a good relationship. I was confident that he would take care of IHC and that the implementation would go smoothly. I also counted on AT&T's ability to make their system work more efficiently. It didn't take long for the decision to pay off. In fact, it happened just a couple of months later during the initial installation of the AT&T VPN.

IHC had one site, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center, still under MCI contract. This contract was for dedicated service and extended for another 12 months. We also had another hospital just a few miles north, in American Fork, that was being converted to AT&T switched service. Garth approached me during the implementation and told me that we were making a mistake. Nothing unusual about that approach.

Garth had done some analysis. It turns out that by sending the American Fork Hospital traffic across our network and sending the calls out the dedicated MCI trunks that IHC would save a fair amount of money. I looked at a spreadsheet prepared by Garth and agreed with him. That day Garth stopped the installation of AT&T switched services and worked with my staff to make arrangements to sent all long distance calls outbound from American Fork to UVRMC and out MCI circuits.

I was impressed. Garth took money out of his pocket because it wasn't the right thing to do for the customer. He was looking out for me and I knew it. That bought a lot of credibility with me. Garth and I worked together at IHC for another 7 years. When I left AT&T was at the front end of a renewed 4 year contract with IHC. That put them in at IHC for an amazing 11 years. At least.

Garth became my most trusted, best vendor. Why? He was working for me and looking out for my best interests. Simple.

Thanks, Garth. I'm still looking for more vendors like you.
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