Last month, Ritter Communications and Great Plains Communications — both owned by private investment firm Grain Management — announced they would combine to form a single company under the name Rightfiber. Telecompetitor spoke with Rightfiber’s CEO Heath Simpson about the factors leading to the merger, the company’s growth plans, and what companies should consider when rebranding.
Simpson said there were multiple reasons for the merger of Ritter Communications and Great Plans Communications. “Scale matters in our industry,” he said, “and scale brings the benefits of being able to provide more and better services to our customers [and] our communities.”
Although the two companies had different service areas, they offered similar services. “Scale helps by bringing each other’s best practices to our complementary geographies,” Simpson said. He described Ritter and Great Plains as “storied, highly successful, 100-plus-year-old companies” and said their combination to become Rightfiber is “a growth story.”
Simpson stressed that — because the merger has just been announced and some regulatory matters must be addressed before it is finalized — the new company is still in its planning stages. At the moment, Rightfiber’s plans include expanding Ritter’s 7 Gbps speeds and Great Plains’ whole-home Wi-Fi service across what will be a 20-state footprint.
Part of Rightfiber’s promise, Simpson said, will be to remain a local company despite its growth. Both Ritter and Great Plains have reputations to maintain.
“How do you have that level of longevity?” he said, referring to the companies’ histories. “You have to take care of your people, you have to be active in your communities, and you have to innovate. How are we continuing to be local? You see so many people at the little league games or in the grocery store or at church; we’re not some nondescript offshore company. The people who answer the phone are the folks who live and work in the communities.”
Rebranding to Rightfiber
Rightfiber used an agency to develop branding that would reflect its goals and growth, which Simpson recommends for anyone undertaking a rebrand. “Have someone be a kind of a shepherd, or guide, as you go through this, because it’s so important,” he said. “It’s important to your employees, it’s important culturally, it’s important to your customers and your communities. Make sure the name is right.”
While Ritter and Great Plains were both longstanding companies that evolved from local telephone companies, neither name was a good expression of their current service areas. “The merger was the catalyst to get us going,” Simpson said, but added that — even without the merger into Rightfiber — both companies might still have considered new names reflecting their growth over the years.
Simpson said the name Rightfiber — which originated from a preexisting Ritter Communications service name, RightFiber — was chosen because it describes what the company does and how they do it: “We’re the right people bringing the right products and services to you at the right price. We’re right there with you in the community. If we stumble, we’ll make it right. And fiber is the medium that we’re going to do it through.”
While Rightfiber employs some hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) broadband, Simpson said the company’s name emphasizes that fiber is at the core of everything the company does. “Fiber is the best solution. It’s the future solution.”
He also noted aspects of the new Rightfiber logo, like the lighter font weight for “fiber” — which suggests thin strands — and the new logo mark, which can be variously seen as an interlocking network, rooftops, shields representing cybersecurity, or a series of six 9s (as in 99.9999% reliability).
Simpson, who previously served as CEO of Ritter Communications, said he is “proud and humbled” to be the CEO of Rightfiber during this period of growth. “To be asked to be CEO of the much larger organization means the world to me. I strongly and genuinely believe in our mission: serving our communities, our customers, and our employees. I love to connect people, and I’m just happy to be able to do it at an even larger scale.”
