RONNIE Burchell Thompson had the ambition to make it big in life one day, although he might have been pleasantly surprised that he moved so far up the ladder in one of the region’s largest companies.

Thompson hails from a community in south St James that is known for producing fine human talent. But although Cambridge, regarded as a town, has been stymied in its own development over the years, there is no stopping the senior LIME/Flow official from keeping his foot on the accelerator in search of further success.

The Cambridge-born and raised has spent 30 years at LIME, starting from the days of Cable & Wireless, and now heads up a department that focuses on customer experience, in the merged entity with Columbus Communications, or Flow.

Having attended Herbert Morrison Technical High School during the 1980s at a time when the school was at the top of its football game with names like Hector Wright and Winston “Tonto” Henry mesmerising opponents, Thompson, who played Headley Cup cricket for the Montego Bay-based institution, spent a year at the Montego Bay Community College and then headed to Cable & Wireless.

He began training to become a technician right away and things gradually fell into place thereafter.

“In those days you train for a year. My college training started while I was working. I left to attend CAST to do telecommunications engineering, after my first three years on the job. An interesting part of that is that you grew up in a community where the resources were scarce. My parents at the time couldn’t afford to send all of us to college. I had another brother at the time and I gave him the opportunity to attend college, because at Cable & Wireless there were several opportunities available along with a scope for upward mobility,” he told the Jamaica Observer in an interview.

Soon after completing

his diploma in telecommunications engineering, Thompson became a supervisor for mobile when the company went the cellular route in 1991, serving as the first supervisor in western Jamaica on the technical side, a duty which included doing installations.

But in his desire to succeed, after spending two years as a supervisor (1993-1995), he then went off to St Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago to complete his Bachelor’s Degree in electrical and computer engineering.

Upon his return he moved from mobile to business solutions as a superintendent, a notch up from a supervisor and soon, a PBX engineer.

Not wanting to stay off the education pace, Thompson decided to broaden his management experience, and did his MBA with Florida International University, travelling from Montego Bay to Kingston every weekend for two-and-a-half years.

“There was no other life but studying and working hard for those two years,” said the man who by then was working as a manager in the residential services – delivering services to customer premises on the residential side.

Then came a consolidation. PBX merged with residential to become customer support area in 2004, and he had the responsibility to manage everything.

“I started to move things in the west, creating a stir by getting things done down there. I was asked to come into Kingston for six months to help transform the area, but before that six months ended I was asked if I could stay in the capital city. It was a big challenge, because at that time I was building my house in Montego Bay, but I said I am a company person … I benefited tremendously from this business, so I will stay.

“Shortly after that I lost my father, and being the eldest of six children in a pretty young family, I had a tough decision to make in terms of returning home.”

But 10 years later he is still in Kingston, although he makes regular weekend treks to the second city.

After serving as southern regional manager for service delivery and playing a major role in the outsourcing for Ericsson during which he was asked to head up the service support operations division, managing areas such as facilities, business continuity, and disaster preparedness, it was time for another challenge.

The LIME/Flow merger was close to reality and he was asked to lead the company’s customer experience charge which encompasses several of the functions that he would have gone through over the years. This, for him, represented a real opportunity to take customer experience to a new level, never before seen in Jamaica.

Now one of the top boys at LIME/Flow, Thompson credits his early years in Cambridge for having prepared him well.

It is like a breeze of traditional history blowing in his direction, as his father worked for several years in Kingston, and would return on weekends to be with his family in Cambridge, similar to what he is doing now.

“What helped me most of all was my parents. I had to go to Sunday school every week – I didn’t have a choice. I had other friends who could be all over the place, doing just about anything, growing wild, but I could not,” Thompson related.

“I didn’t come from any wealth. My father was a painter, so he would go out and do jobs painting to support his six children, making major sacrifices, and living out of town. Our parents instilled in us that hard work was the key to success.

“My mother said to us every time: ‘I did not get a good education. I don’t want any of you to come and be like me’, so she would do anything that was required for us to go to school and go to church at Shortwood Baptist.

“Those years have helped me to stay focused. I had a lot of cousins who were really growing wild. I did it sometimes, but would pay for it. My mother didn’t want to see you certain places, she needs to know where you are going … she was always in control. So if you fall out of line, when your father comes home on a Friday, you would be in big trouble.

“Like normal children we would go to the river, help our father do his subsistence farming and also learn his job as a painter.

“When you look back at your community now, there were the people who were the Mr So and So, they are the ones now saying Mr Thompson, and you are trying to say to yourself, 20 or 30 years ago he wouldn’t be saying that … you were a Mr Nobody. So it’s been a turnaround.”

Is he overly surprised by where he has reached?

“Not really, because I remember when I joined the company as a technician and when I remember what I could achieve, I just set my eyes on the prize. It didn’t take me a long time to move through the ranks. I knew that I would reach some place in the organisation, but I didn’t know where, although I knew I wasn’t going to stop,” he stated.

“I hope that we can build on all the gains made over the years and make sure that we get every ounce of benefit that exists. We have to move quickly in delivering what needs to be delivered. Our customer experience is going to be a major item in this competitive space. What is going to be the differentiator is how well we deliver that superior customer experience, so that your customers can be satisfied.

“I came to this company out of high school. I got all my training here and I think that’s a big thing – the opportunities that this company offers to its people. Even if you didn’t want to attended college, the company has a first-class training school where you could go and learn just about every aspect of telecommunications. Right there on Camp Road was a university.

“This company has built every other telecoms company operating in Jamaica, technically, out of the people they have invested in and people are now really excited to see how we are going to bring mobile, landline and cable all together,” Thompson said.