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POSTED: Monday, November 03, 2008

Eric Schatz had thought he would be a restaurant manager someday, and he obtained a bachelor's degree in business administration at the University of Denver with that goal in mind. But after he graduated and returned to Hawaii, where he had been raised, Schatz had a change of heart.

               

     

 

 

Name: Eric Schatz Title: Director of site acquisition & development         Job: Oversees the leasing, permitting, zoning, construction and property management of cell sites for Mobi PCS

“;I decided I wanted to be outside of the normal economic cycles of Hawaii,”; he said last week, “;and this was a terrific opportunity for me.”;

That opportunity was to work for a now-defunct wireless communications company in Hawaii, which eventually led him to work for Houston-based Crown Castle International, for whom he ended up managing its portfolio of communications towers in Hawaii.

That led to his employment with Mobi PCS, the locally owned and operated wireless network that does business out of eight retail stores on Oahu, two on the Big Island and one on Maui, as well as 81 dealer locations statewide, including on Kauai and on Molokai.

Schatz has been with the firm for almost four years, since before it officially opened for business in January 2006.

In fact, of the 100 or employees the company now has overall, he was the fifth employee to be brought on board.

In a sense, he's also a part owner of the firm, as about 13 percent of the company is owned by its employees.

“;Including you?”; I asked.

“;Yes,”; he responded. “;Including me, I'm happy to say.”;

Besides college, Schatz, 46, also is a graduate of Kalaheo High School in Kailua.

He is married to the former Millie Sardon, with whom he has two sons, Evan, 11, and Dane, 10. They reside in Kahaluu.

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Mark Coleman: What is your job title?

Eric Schatz: My official title is director of site acquisition and development for Mobi PCS—which is a real mouthful.

Q: What does that mean you do?

A: With Mobi PCS, the job includes everything that is related to acquiring, permitting, designing, building, and then managing cell sites.

Q: What is a cell site?

A: A cell site consists of a piece of radio equipment, utility connections and antennas.

Q: Do they take up a lot of room?

A: Mobi's equipment actually is very small. We have taken advantage of the technology changes, and our typical lease premises—the area that we lease from a building or landowners—is about 150 square feet.

Q: How many Mobi PCS cell sites in Hawaii are there?

A: The number is proprietary information, but I can tell you that we turned on 25 additional sites this year alone, and there are more pending.

Q: Do they have to be a certain distance apart?

A: The cell-site radius in our network can vary from four or five blocks all the way out to five to six miles.

Q: Where have you had to go to put in cell towers?

A: (Laughter) I'm going to change the question a little bit, Mark, because for the most part on Oahu, they're not on towers, they're on buildings. We take advantage of existing structures whenever possible to minimize the visual impact.

Q: But there are some towers?

A: There are a few towers, yes. For the most part, those towers are not in the Honolulu urban core. They're in the rural areas, or areas that don't have tall buildings.

Q: Did you install them all yourself?

A: We hire contractors to do the actual installation, but we manage the design, bid the work, and then project-manage the construction.

Q: Do you have a small staff you work with?

A: Mobi's engineering team is about 14 people, including myself and my construction manager, Jim Seminara, and then we hire consultants and contractors to help as needed.

Q: What kind of a background did you need to have to get this job? Engineering? Real estate? Construction?

A: Most of the people who do the work that I do have either some kind of construction or real estate or sales background. My training has mostly been doing this job—with other companies and for Mobi.

My background was basically being able to learn things quickly. I had outside sales experience, and I acquired a real estate appraiser's license along the way.

There's really no school for what I do. It's all been developed as the industry has grown.

Q: How long have you been doing this?

A: I have been with Mobi for almost four years. I was employee No. 5, and I have coming up 13 years in the business.

Q: How did you get this job?

A: Well, Mobi's investors were doing business-case modeling in 2003 and 2004, and in my then-current job, which was managing a portfolio of communication towers for another company, the investors' consultant contacted me to investigate business practices for communications companies in Hawaii and reality-check how long it would take them to build a network and how much it would cost. And eventually I was offered the opportunity to build that network.

Q: What's your daily work routine?

A: One of the best things about my job for Mobi is that there almost isn't a routine. At any given moment I could be negotiating leases with landlords, looking at blueprints, working on construction contracts, doing site walks with contractors, ordering and tracking materials ... There's a tremendous amount of variety.

Q: Are you out in the field a lot?

A: Yes. That's another great thing about being in this business. You get to go to places most people normally wouldn't get to go. For example, we've been building our network on the neighbor islands over the last couple years, so I've been able to travel to the neighbor islands a lot.

I think I spent about 40 days on the neighbor islands last year, and it will be a similar number this year.

Q: Has the technology of your job changed much since you started?

A: The technology that the carriers deploy has changed dramatically. Mobi has benefited from the miniaturization of all electronics. So our cell sites are smaller, lighter, less costly to operate. That allows us to put sites in areas that other companies wouldn't consider economically viable. So we can put sites in smaller neighborhoods such as Wahiawa, Waimanalo, Kalihi, which is where our core demographic is.

Q: This is kind of a marketing question, but why would somebody want to hook up with Mobi instead of one of the national companies like Sprint or AT&T?

A: Mobi's niche is offering flat-rate, unlimited access for a fixed, monthly cost. There's no contracts, there's no credit check. So people can control their costs by going with Mobi. And because we've aggressively deployed, we have a very competitive network, and people can use their phone literally as much as they want in a month for one flat rate.

Q: When you visit an existing cell site, what typically would you be doing there. Would it be a maintenance visit or something?

A: Once a site is up and running, my visits tend to be checking to make sure everything is in working order—not so much maintenance as property-management inspection.

Q: Are there any tools of the trade?

A: My tools are usually for new sites that haven't been built yet. I'll typically have a laptop, a GPS, a compass, binoculars, a camera ... One of the great tools that has come along is Google Earth, which we use nearly every day. And now that Mobi has launched its Hele broadband wireless data service, I can actually get onto the Internet from my laptop over our existing wireless network.

Q: Have you noticed that some of those Google Earth photos are several years old?

A: The photography available on Google Earth isn't always current, but what it does have is great tools for mapping, as well as getting latitude and longitude information and elevation data.

Q: Do you do a lot of driving every day?

A: It varies tremendously. There are times when I need to be in my office, and then in Makaha, and then in Waimanalo. Those are days with lots of driving.