About the owner
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Tomol: A plank-build boat that was traditionally made by the Chumash of California's central coast and used for transportation, fishing, and religious journeys.
TōMOL Consulting was created by consultant and author Stephen Olejniczak. He began his telecom career in 1991 and rose through the ranks of provisioning and customer care working for dynamic young carriers before landing a job as Director of Operations. With a small staff and a lot of hard work, the company was eventually recognized by INC 500 magazine as the 41st fasting growing company in America – 9th fastest growing telecom company for that year.
The increase in business caused considerable growing pains. As the Director of Operations, there was constant pressure to deliver new product while simultaneously managing the inventory, billing, customer expectation levels, and updating an infrastructure of policies and procedures in a logical and sustainable and scale-able manner. Fundamental questions about where the company would be in 6 months or a year had to be answered and the growth planned for in advance. At times, the whole process felt like trying to build a boat while treading water.
The world was waking up to the new discipline of “Data Science” in the late 1990’s as the tenants of it were being used every day within the working of telecom companies across America. Stephen forged ahead into this uncharted territory, gathering millions of lines of CDR, vendor and customer invoices and a hardworking database to answer complex questions of profitability or network integrity. The company now had insight into profit margin based on carrier, customer, call type, and even individual call level on a monthly basis. Millions of dollars of carrier disputes were executed, managed and eventually resolved through detailed analysis of the data available.
The greatest benefit of working for a small company is the lack of barriers. Where large companies delineate jobs into structured departments for efficiency, there is no limit to the responsibilities available inside a smaller company. As Director of Operations, only the need to meet monthly sales goals was NOT part of the job. Everything else - from training to fraud mitigation, and technical sales support to contract review were handled by Stephen.
The position also required him to act as a crucial escalation point for customer and vendor billing disputes and technical troubleshooting. It was a great opportunity to develop the diplomatic and political skills necessary to diffuse and resolve these issues. This professionalism also proved helpful while handling the legal inquiries to the company from the FBI, CIA, DHS, law enforcement and both customer and vendor legal counsel.
In his free time, he authored a few books to include: Telecom for Dummies; and VoIP Deployment for Dummies. He’s comfortable in the international arena, being well traveled, and functions at a conversational level in Spanish and German (and degree of familiarity with some other languages).
As is too often the story in telecom, if you build it, and make it profitable . . . they will come. . . and buy the company. What happens next generally involves some wonderful people with a wealth of knowledge and experience polishing up their resumes.
Stephen spent 3 years working for a consulting firm before creating TōMOL Consulting in May of 2018. His goal was to work with telecom and technology companies by providing executive level analysis, helping them navigate the turbulent waters of business.