Becoming the chief executive officer of a major company usually involves decades of corporate work, a lot of favors called in and, if statistics hold, normally results in a middle-aged White male taking the reins.
Wireless internet provider Nomad Internet is not your “normal” company, and its new CEO, Robyn Weber, is not your typical executive.
Nomad Internet is a wireless internet service provider that is quickly gaining popularity in rural and remote areas. The company offers high-speed internet access to customers who are unable to get service from traditional internet providers.
Nomad Internet uses a network of high-speed wireless towers to deliver internet service to customers. The company’s towers, which they lease access to, are located in rural and remote areas, where traditional internet providers are often unavailable. This makes Nomad Internet a great option for customers who live in these areas.
Robyn Weber, far from being a life-long corporate drone, was actually a customer of Nomad Internet before anything else.
“I’ve been with the company since 2020,” Weber said. “I was actually a customer before I became an employee. I found Nomad Internet basically on a whim. I was familiar with cellular internet, so I’d worked with it in the past for many years as an end user when I worked in the field in another industry. And there was just something that drew me to Nomad Internet and I wanted to be here. So I was a customer for about a month, maybe even less than that, and then I came on board working 20 hours a week as just a tech support rep and worked my way up to customer service manager and started dabbling in operations. And now I’m here.”
It certainly isn’t a typical journey. But it is one that aligns with Nomad Internet’s general “underdog” image. The company is taking on an issue, rural internet access, that many larger companies refuse to address but that is of paramount importance to making those areas competitive with larger, more urban areas when it comes to access to work, healthcare and education, among other elements.
It also aligns with how Nomad Internet has managed to grow. Minus a massive advertising budget and working in a sparsely populated areas, traditional evangelizing efforts were off the table.
So, Nomad Internet relies on a tried and true way to get the word out in a small town: word of mouth and referrals. And what better way to show proof of concept on a referral than to show that the CEO of the company both uses the product and knows how it works.
“One of the things that I have enjoyed about being here is we don’t put out a product that we wouldn’t run in our own homes,” Weber said. “So I have been heavily involved since the beginning in product testing and especially since we went to the fixed wireless access and the C-Band launch, spent countless hours testing modems in situations where our customers would use them and super proud of what we came up with.”
That mentality is what has allowed Nomad Internet to partner with Verizon Wireless, the United States’ largest cellular data provider. While Verizon may have the size and financial resources, Nomad Internet has what its customer want from their provider: A personal touch.
“The difference between getting a hotspot from a cellular carrier and getting internet through Nomad Internet is the support experience,” Weber said. “When you call Nomad, you get a person on the phone who is using these services, that knows how to optimize them for rural areas and knows how to optimize things for low signal areas. This is very familiar to us because the only thing that we handle is the internet and modems. And you get directly to our support staff.”
The approach is working. And perhaps it took someone with a less traditional path running the show to allow it to happen. Either way, Weber’s tenure as CEO has started off on the right foot and she looks to keep it moving that way.
“The rural landscape is changing quite a bit because folks are able to work from home now,” Weber said. “They were never able to work from home. A lot of folks didn’t return to the office after 2020. They moved out to the country to have more property, better places for their kids to grow up and things like that. I have a lot of customers that fit this mold, and I used to be the same. You don’t really care how much it costs as long as you have something that’s reliable when it works.”
Learn more about Nomad Internet here: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/nomad-internet-review/