About Ventera
Leadership TeamChris Ford — Executive Vice President: Commercial Services
Mr. Ford is Executive Vice President at Ventera, and Director of the company’s Commercial Services business unit. He has extensive experience in the telecommunications industry, having spent many years with AT&T, and the past seven years with Ventera. Chris started his work at Ventera as the client manager for Nextel (since merged with Sprint), and later established the Communications business unit.
The Commercial Services business unit is responsible for more than a dozen distinct projects at Sprint, T-Mobile, Fannie Mae, and other commercial clients. These projects include the design, development, and ongoing enhancement of major enterprise applications; business process redesign; IT strategy; and more. He is responsible for every aspect of Ventera’s support to commercial customers, including client liaison, business development, delivery execution and monitoring, quality assurance, and customer satisfaction.
In addition to overseeing the execution of client projects, Chris is responsible for the overall operations for the business unit. This includes growing and managing the P&L for a multimillion dollar professional services organization. The growth has come from leveraging Ventera’s reach into existing customers and expanding its reach within the communications and finance industries. Fueling the growth in the communications industry has been the maturing of the group's experience in cell site management and spectrum management. Chris has been able to strengthen margins by developing a delivery organization that enables the group to repeatedly delivery on fixed price projects. This organization leverages a combination of project management best practices, management project oversight, and Ventera’s exceptional hiring and employee retention programs.
Prior to joining Ventera, Mr. Ford was the Director of Client Services with Doceus, a small local consulting firm. While there, he built a project management and sales team that increased revenue by more than 400% in each of the two years he was there. Chris elevated the market segment that Doceus was targeting, strengthened existing alliances with AT&T, and developed partnerships with other leading technology firms.
Earlier in his career, Chris served as an Account Executive and Internet Specialist with AT&T. He was responsible for business development and customer support for a group of 100 AT&T customers, achieving a 183% growth rate. Chris’ techniques for doing this included building solutions that integrated telecommunications and electronic commerce, transforming customer’s perception of AT&T from strictly a long-distance provider to an IT solutions provider, partnering with third-party vendors to enhance AT&T’s value proposition, and implementing a customer newsletter and a territory management database. Chris’ accomplishments at AT&T earned him a 1994 “Rookie” award, 1995 Winners Circle award (Top 5%), 1996 Leaders Council (Top 2%) as well as “Far Exceeded” performance appraisal, and 1996 and 1997 Gold Club Winner.
Chris holds a BBA from James Madison University.