Checking Egos at the Door

An obvious challenge of merging three agencies is the melding of different leaders who previously left the corporate world to run their own companies.

“I think it’s a difficult road to toe, and we were very fortunate in being very friendly with one another in having the same type of values and being able to kind of check the egos at the door,” DeStefano said.

He said the leaders sat down for a two-hour call to structure a pro forma organizational chart. The call only lasted an hour.

“Because we all knew what we were good at and what we weren’t good at, and we knew our people well,” DeStefano said.

DeStefano served as a senior account executive at AT&T before going to run Presidio’s carrier services practice. Passacantilli won the President’s Club three times at XO Communications before founding Blue Front in 2002. King and Kuzman were both at Global Crossing before co-founding allConnex.