Carlton Baxter’s telecoms industry rise and the much-loved oxtail
WITH a 10:00 am interview scheduled, Carlton Baxter waited while this reporter made her way to his West King’s House Road office in St Andrew. However, amid anticipation of Adidja ‘Vybz Kartel’ Palmer’s sentencing, the opening of Parliament and difficulty locating his somewhat concealed office, this reporter arrived some 30 minutes late.
Seemingly unperturbed and obviously very patient, Baxter, the vice-president of engineering for Columbus Communications Jamaica Limited, the outfit responsible for the Flow brand, delved into telling the Jamaica Observer just how he rose to being responsible for the infrastructure of one of Jamaica’s leading telecommunication outfits.
Would you guess that the much-loved oxtail had a part to play in his rise, though indirectly?
All the hurrah of the day, including the sirens blaring in the distance, contrasted drastically with his calm, jovial countenance, but effortlessly they all took a back seat once Baxter started talking.
“My life story has been one of taking chances, being in the right position, seizing opportunities, but also benefiting from mentors,” Baxter told the Sunday Observer.
Before joining the Columbus team in 2007, the Munro College Old Boy worked for several years in North America at varying levels in the telecommunications industry. But, though he has always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, it has not always been smooth sailing for the Frankfield, Clarendon, native.
Baxter started out with a cable company in New Jersey, fresh out of school. Noticeably, he was the only black person, let alone Jamaican, on the team at the time. Baxter admits that all but his supervisor, who gave him a really hard time, seemed to accept him.
Baxter’s solution? He had a closed-door meeting with his supervisor, which ended with him issuing an invitation to have lunch at a Jamaican restaurant. What was on the menu? Oxtail. Baxter said that ever since that day, the atmosphere completely changed.
When Baxter moved to Florida — with no job and no house — after deciding he did not want to participate in union actions taking place in New Jersey, he needed a recommendation. Can you guess whom he called?
The same supervisor went against protocol and gave Baxter a “glowing recommendation” that got him hired on the spot in Florida.
With a career spanning over 30 years, Baxter said, instinctively, while visiting other places, he would look up at cables to assimilate what kind of network is available and compare it to what he knew. With an affinity for visiting Jamaica every chance he got, he was driving around Kingston in 2007 and did just that.
Baxter described what he saw as a “dream come true”.
“I see all this fibre optic cable that wasn’t here before, so I began to think that something crazy is going on here,” said Baxter, while admitting that, prior to 2007, he had never heard of Columbus. “What I saw, in my mind, wasn’t the typical amplifiers… it was an advanced network.”
So Baxter just had to know more.
He asked around and, within a day of meeting with one of the stakeholders, received a call from the company’s President and Chief Operating Officer Michele English, while picking mangoes in Frankfield.
Thirty days later, though he had not been looking for a job, Baxter submitted his resignation to Comcast — the number one multi-system operator of broadband in the USA — packed his grip, and was back on the island as the design manager for Flow. A little drastic? Even his former boss offered to give him some time to explore his options, because clearly he was having a mid-life crisis.
Just two weeks on the job, disaster struck. Hurricane Dean hit the island and Flow’s network was a mess. Baxter again told the Sunday Observer how he went with a gut feeling and seized another opportunity.
“I didn’t even get a chance to get my feet wet,” Baxter recalled, adding that one of the areas he worked on for Comcast was restoration. “So they had a major meeting right after the hurricane and the all-clear was given. And I am sitting in the back of the room, three-quarters of the people in the room I didn’t even know.
“I was sitting there and they were putting plans together about restoration and I was thinking how painful it was going to be,” said Baxter. “But again, you operate off intuition sometimes, so I just put up my hand at the back of the room.”
He was identified and Baxter said that everyone turned to look because many didn’t even know there was a Carlton in the room.
He said he outlined a plan, and there and then the decision was made that all engineering and support teams should report to him until the project was finalised. A year later, there was a vacancy, and Baxter was appointed as director of engineering.
“One of the things all my mentors told me was to operate in such a manner as to work yourself out of a job,” Baxter stated.
As such, in his current capacity, Baxter said that he does as much as he can to guide those on his team, so they can also grow. His mentoring also goes beyond Columbus, because Baxter spends a lot of time in his community of Frankfield.
After studying electrical engineering at the College of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST), now the University of Technology, Baxter lived in the USA for 30 years. But Jamaica has always been his ‘go-to’ place.
“I used to be in Jamaica at least every two or three months,” Baxter said. “So the transition wasn’t as hard for me, frankly, because I spent so much time here. What was really hard for me was adjusting to the pace… the pace (in the USA) is so hectic.”
“That’s why I am blessed to be back because I finally have some time for myself. I get up in the morning, I can have a cup of coffee, I can read my paper before coming to work,” Baxter said, adding that it took him about a year to readjust to the pace here.
In fact, after suffering from hives for two and a half years while living in the USA and doing numerous tests, none of which had determined the cause, since landing in Jamaica, he has not had another reaction.
Baxter, a father and husband, told the Sunday Observer that he is now in his dream job, having contributed to building it from the ground up.
So from studying at CAST several years ago to his current position at Columbus, a success story that quite possibly got its impetus over a meal of oxtail in a Jamaican restaurant in New Jersey, this is what Baxter had to say to others wishing to rise the way he did:
“I would encourage them to be very passionate about their craft, seek mentorship, and at the same time embrace the technology,” Baxter said. “I benefitted from mentorship, I am very passionate and I did embrace the technology, and those three things afforded me the satisfaction – because you can have success in a role, but you have to have satisfaction.
“If there is no satisfaction in a job then that’s all it is – just a job,” Baxter said. “To me, what I do is a lifestyle.”