HALIFAX – Just three months after his departure from EastLink, Dan McKeen’s career will continue in the same East Coast city in which it began.
The former co-CEO at Bragg Communications-owned EastLink was recently named senior vice-president of customer solutions at Bell Aliant. He left EastLink October 27, 2009 and begins his new job next Thursday.
In an interview with Cartt.ca, McKeen (who spent 24 years first at Halifax Cable, right out of university, which later was purchased by Bragg) is happy to be staying put, while looking forward to moving on. “This lets me work in the industry I’ve been in my whole career and allows me to stay in Halifax, which is great,” he said, later adding he’s hopeful he might emulate his uncle who worked 25 years for one company and 20 years for his next employer.
(And while departing senior executives often have lengthy non-compete clauses with their former employer, we asked McKeen about his, but he declined to comment.)
In his new role, McKeen (right) will be looking after marketing and sales, as well as customer service, across all of Bell Aliant’s products and services (except wireless, which is controlled by its parent, Bell Canada), through all of its territories, which is all of the Eastern provinces as well as rural Ontario and Quebec.
Obviously, his new company and his former one will be competing in many regions but for the first time, McKeen will also be competing against “Rogers and Videotron and Cogeco in areas,” he noted.
Aliant will be a bit different for McKeen, too. First, it’s a much larger company and while EastLink was very well established on the TV side and was working hard to grow telephony, Aliant is the incumbent telco in most of its regions which is trying to grow its IPTV service in some of them.
With such a long history in TV marketing and sales, one would expect McKeen’s new employer to lean on him for that expertise and try to dramatically grow its customer base on the video side.
“My main focus is to look after all the parts of the business,” said McKeen, “but certainly (TV) is one of the opportunities for growth for Aliant.”
As well, Aliant is a public company, where Bragg is not. “A public company will be a new, learning experience for me,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to it… there are a lot more owners to answer to.”
– Greg O’Brien
