The Power of Pearce: How America’s top telecom service provider is leading the industry with quality and innovation

When telecom companies seek third-party assistance in maintaining their wireless field assets, planning and engineering their network, or maintaining data center infrastructure, they want a reliable maintenance provider with a proven record for providing innovative, high-quality support 24 hours a day, every day of the year. 

Pearce Services is that company. Founded in 1998, Pearce Services has grown to become the largest wireless maintenance provider in the U.S. Its 2,500-plus employees specialize in repairs, maintenance, installations, and engineering for telecom infrastructure. Its sister company, Pearce Renewables, was launched in 2021 and is now one of the largest renewable energy maintenance and repair providers in the country.

Together, Pearce Services and Pearce Renewables dispatched service teams to over 550,000 locations to maintain or repair critical infrastructures in 2022. They provided on-site support to wireless sites, data centers, electric vehicle charging stations, energy storage sites, and solar/wind power generation stations. “We also engineered fiber optic networks for more than 750,000 homes across the country,” said Bret Forster, CEO of Pearce Services.

The key to Pearce Services’ rapid growth is consistent, reliable customer support. “We continually work to be a better partner to our clients,” said Forster. “And we don’t just do on-site servicing: We help our telecom clients make sound business decisions by thinking their way through the true total cost of their network, and by finding innovative approaches to solve their problems. In our wireless tower maintenance business, we are seeing clients reprioritize quality as they bring Pearce in to clean up regions where low-cost vendors were undercapitalized and unable to meet our standard of excellence in response times, parts logistics and single trip repairs."

Solid on-site service

Pearce Services provides a full range of services to its telecom clients. First and foremost is the maintenance and repairs of cell towers and their complete suite of equipment. This includes air conditioners, generators, and transmitters, as well as the team of tower climbers who go up to fix cables, antennas, radios, and potential interference that occurs on the tower. All duties are fulfilled in a timely manner without compromising quality or system performance.

“We also maintain telecom cabinets,” Forster said. “Let's say a cabinet in the wireline network gets hit hard by a pickup truck. Our technicians go out with what is effectively a mobile auto body shop that'll fix both cross-connect cabinets and remote terminals, while ensuring that all electronic components are operational, and repaired if necessary.”

More than just maintenance

Providing quality on-site service is just one part of effective wireless maintenance. The most effective way to ensure exceptional site performance while boosting reliability and cost control is to engineer the site correctly from the onset during the design phase.

This is why Pearce Services has an engineering division that focuses on developing construction blueprints for both wireless businesses and fiber-to-the-home installations. Their processes have been integrated with workflow process technology and insightful data analytics in an approach Bret Forster refers to as, “Faster, Better, and Cheaper”.

“Our focus through Faster, Better, Cheaper is on creating more accurate designs for our telecom clients that have optimized routes,” he explained. “Our goal is to bring down construction costs for our clients, which happens when you don't have mistakes in the engineering drawings and you're deploying less equipment to pass the same number of homes because you've got optimized designs.”

This optimization is made possible by Pearce Services’ use of proprietary data analysis in their design and blueprinting process.

“We don’t just think about how to fix a generator at a cell tower; we think about the total cost of ownership for our clients,” said Forster. “To this end, we have developed a scoring system using regression analysis in which we determine what are the top 10 attributes that might cause damage at these sites to occur in the future. We’re also able to stack-rank the 30,000 sites we manage and give a client a very clear capital allocation list that says, ‘Here are the worst-performing sites to the best-performing sites in your network’. We know exactly which ones are most likely to break in the future and that's where you should invest now.”

People are the key

The key to this stellar service is Pearce Services’ highly motivated people. Their on-the-record job satisfaction led to Pearce being included in Comparably’s annual ranking of companies with the Happiest Employees. Gaining and maintaining top talent is a key component of Pearce’s success, and they continue to implement initiatives to engage employees in building a culture they can be proud of.

“Providing our telecom clients with the top-level wireless maintenance services they need comes down to getting the right person to the right place at the right time,” said Forster. “Our technicians are dedicated professionals who fix things right the first time. And because they love their work, they’re willing to head out at 3 a.m. when there’s a heat wave in Dallas and cell sites start going down left and right.”

"In 2023, we are excited to promote Michael Wolf to COO of the overall company.  Like many of our leaders, he started as a field technician and then moved over to engineering before quickly moving up in management positions.  Over the last two years, he grew our engineering business from 250 to 900 employees with a consistent track record of impeccable timeliness and quality ratings from our valued customers."

The best of both worlds

Pearce Services’ ‘secret sauce’ is its combination of small shop service excellence with the operational efficiencies provided by mass volume service providers.

“In the past, the telecom industry had two options,” Forster said. “They could farm out their maintenance jobs to small local players with really good quality workmanship in the field but poor administrative procedures, or large vendor managers who understood the white-collar side of the business but didn't do the actual work using their own technicians — and so you had questionable repair quality in the field.”

Pearce Services’ solution to this problem is to give its telecom clients the best of both worlds. “In our field services division, we have highly trained technicians working on our behalf,” Forster said. “The office and technology parts of our business are expertly managed as well, so that all sides are in balance and working in harmony.”

The bottom line: When it comes to telecom maintenance, Pearce Services is the reliable, consistent, and quality-focused choice for America’s telecom industry. To learn more, visit https://www.pearce-services.com.