BILLIONAIRE SUCCESS STORY: Craig O McCaw - Communications

Hometown: Seattle, WA.
Net Worth: $2.1 billion.
Source: Communications, McCaw CellularInherited and growing.
Marital Status: Married, 3 children
Education: Stanford University, Bachelor of Arts / Science.

Reading and learning are the two things that determine the success of a child during his school career. First he learns to read. Then he read to learn. But a child with dyslexia battles to read, he is therefore also hampered in the leaning situation. What is dyslexia? What are the symptoms, and cause of dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a very dangerous disease because it afflicts children when they are at the formative years of an impressionable age. And how to identify if a child is dyslexic? The criteria most commonly used I assessment is that the disparity between a child’s intelligence and his actual achievement. In other words, the dyslexic child experiences a huge amount of failure. They cannot read and spell. Many would be forced to think they are dumb and stupid.

But one such dyslexic child later became Craig McCaw, a proven leader in the communications services industry and a pioneer n the fast growing wireless communication business. Medical science is ensuring whether it is a gift or affliction. Because, geniuses like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Auguste Rodin, George Patton and Woodrow Wilson were reportedly to dyslexic. Going by the story of Craig O McCaw one is inclined to think that Dyslexia is a sign of genius.

Ever since he was a boy, he saw the moneymaking potential of public airwaves. Because his father, Elroy McCaw built one of the first rock and roll radio stations in The New York country side.

Craig O McCaw was born in Centralia, Washington, the second of four sons of Marion and John Elroy McCaw. Over the course of his career, Craig’s father would buy and sell dozens of radio and television stations. He often incurred large debts in the process, but the family live well.

As teenagers, all four boys worked for one of their father’s small cable television services: climbing poles, stringing cable, and selling subscriptions door to door. Craig soon took the lead in managing the company. Although Craig was dyslexic, he made an extra effort in both at his prep school in Seattle and at Stanford University, where he studied history. While at Stanford, he continued to run the cable company from his dormitory room!

When Craig was at college, his father died leaving a heavy burden of dept and taxes. Over the next few years, Craig’s accountant mother was force to liquidate all of Mr. McCaw’s holdings except for the one cable service in Washington which had been left to the boys in trust. After graduating from Stanford, Craig borrowed money against the company to buy other small cable operations in remote areas. He improved programs, raised rates and cut costs. In the next few years, Craig’s strategy for the cable TV operation paid off: while revenues quadrupled, the cash flow from operations grew eight-fold.

In 1981, McCaw began to research the cellular telephone market. The American government issued projections and statistics about the future of cellular market. It mentioned that 900,000 persons would use cellular phone by 2000. Many industrialists took this prediction with pinch of salt and looked the other way. But Craig trusted in the new technology of talking without wires. He was the first to get a license to use this technology. He planned a major expansion, but to do this, he needed more capital than McCaw Communications could ever earn from its modest cable television business. Throughout the 1980s, McCaw sold shares in his company to larger enterprises; Affiliate Publications, E.W. Scripps Co., and finally British Telecom. In each case, the McCaw brothers kept control of the company in their own hands and in some instances bought back the shares.

The local phone companies, called Baby Bells, cropped up when a federal court order broke up AT&T’s monopoly on phone service. At this time, they were shock to find that an unknown cable television operator from the Northwest had already acquired the license they needed in strategically chosen markets. McCaw borrowed massively to buy more and more licenses. He sold the licenses that he couldn’t use at a profit, and rolled the money back into purchasing more, gradually putting together the pieces of a national network. In 1986, MCI Communications sold its cellular and paging operations to McCaw for $122 million and McCaw Cellular emerged as the industry leader. The McCaw brothers sold their cable television business outright for $755 million, to concentrate solely on building a national cellular phone network. They took the company public, putting 11 percent of the company in public hands while the brothers retained roughly 40 percent.

In 1989, McCaw outbid Bell South for control of LIN Broadcasting. It cost $3.5 billion, but McCaw had acquired license in the markets that he needed to consolidate his system. It would now be impossible for a serious competitor to enter the field.

Wall Street looked with horror at the company’s gargantuan dept, but McCaw knew he could resell individual cellular licenses at a profit to any of the regional Baby Bells. Meanwhile, revenues doubled, operating cash flow rose, and the number of subscribers exploded. McCaw himself earned $54 million 1990, making him America’s heist-paid chief executive. Less than one percent of this was paid in salary; the rest was due to increase in the value of his shares in his own company.

In 1994, the McCaw brothers sold their company to AT&T $11.5 billion. When the AT&T issued the tracking stock for AT&T Wireless Group in May 2000, it raised $10.6 in the largest initial public offering in U.S history! In the process, Craig McCaw himself became one of AT&T’s largest shareholders, but he refused to sit on the Board of Directors because he can’t stand log meetings. Before selling his company, McCaw personally took over one of its subsidiaries, Teledesic, with the intention of building a global network of 840 low-altitude satellites to provide Internet-like transmission of digital data to the most remote places of the Earth.

Away from the office, Craig McCaw is an avid aviator who routinely pilots his own jet. If a dyslexic boy could establish a telecommunication company, and later sell it to $11.5 billion, what stops us from doing similar feats when we consider ourselves ‘healthy’. For a man who is driven by passion and ideas, nothing, including a deadly disease, could stop him in his tracks. Craig O McCaw’s life highlights tat it is not brawn but brain that