A: The biggest challenge we're facing is the change in our operating environment. We're seeing a complete shift away from what businesses were buying from communications and data companies just three years ago. It's pretty much an about face especially in the networking world from traditional point-to-point old-school networking to “What's the Internet and how do I make it work best for our employees?” We've had to overhaul our network. Our network was like many communications companies' built for a world that was primarily voice, point-to-point data circuits and direct point access into the Internet, as opposed to something that really can release the power of very flexible centralized brains if-you-will network that will allow for much faster communication, prioritized services, whether someone wants to put video over their network or put voice, or CRM tools.

Q: What's the one thing you didn't see coming?

A: The biggest one we missed the boat on is, the government would roll back the advances that were made in developing the competitive framework, the change in the government's perspective. If you asked the FCC a few years ago would AT&T ever be allowed to be recreated, the answer is "no," now the answer is "sure."

Q: What's the most innovative thing you've seen or heard another company doing?

A: What Jet Blue does with home sourcing. Rather than the folks that are always sending their labor force overseas, they found a way to use employees based in their homes very effectively to keep the jobs in the States, provide a highly motivated and retained workforce. What they've done there is one of the more interesting if-you-will evolutions of the business world that isn't unique to telecom or anything else. They way they do it and manage it and train and monitor it they're finding it a means of acquiring a very loyal and trained and customer-focused employee base. It's a management tool innovation.

Q: What about your own company?

A: The most innovative thing we do is we try to have a culture that rewards people regardless of whether they're in sales or not in sales. Almost every organization has recognition programs and incentive programs, big trips at the end of the year, bonuses for their sales force. We actually have a very distributed view of that. We have all of our reward and incentive programs, whether it's our equivalent of a frequent flyer program or people who are repeatedly named, our incentive trips, our bonus programs, our recognition of employees and teams and offices of the month, extend across our workforce. …We have an incentive program called US LEC Rewards where employees can build up what we call partnership points for, you know, somebody thinks you did a good job, your director thinks you did well, was your team exceeding its goals, is your office the top performing office. We then can distribute points to them and they can cash those in [for] anything from gift cards to mountain bikes to digital cameras to big screen TVs to cruises. We try to really focus on how do you keep the work force that constant pat on the back if you will. This program lets us pat people on the back repeatedly throughout the year.

Q: Who or what is your biggest competition? Why?

A: The biggest competitor is probably BellSouth, not AT&T. They have similar services but also we operate in 16 states and nine of them are BellSouth states.

Q: Should the state give incentives?

A: We built a company that employs over 1,100 people, is as high tech as you get, is headquartered here in North Carolina, is publicly held and we didn't require any incentives to get here. The thing with incentives is they look like a slippery slope if you start off with them then the question becomes: Do you have to pay companies to stay? If you create the right environment, and the legal world, and the employment world, and is-it-a-good-quality-of-life market, businesses will develop, businesses will be attracted. The reverse is what I worry about. Now do you have to start paying businesses to stay?

Q: What's the biggest change in business today compared to when you started?

A: Offshoring. We see it in our customer base. We have 25,000-26,000 medium and large businesses in our customer base. We see it in our competitors, just more and more jobs moving offshore.

Q: Why should an investor invest in your stock today?

A: One, we are a double-digit growth company and have a proven track record of growing at that pace. Second, we are on the cusp of profitability. We believe our stock is artificially depressed by balance sheet issues that we can address. We are actually in our ninth year right now. We've always been in a growth phase. Our objective was to build, grow, generate our own cash, and now we turn our attention to our bottom line.

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