- Verizon CEO Dan Schulman acknowledged the company was ceding market share to AT&T and T-Mobile when he agreed to take on the CEO role last year
- His turnaround strategy involves some tough decisions and somewhat “brutal conversations,” but he says they’re off to a good start
- Network excellence is at the core of Verizon but it needs to focus more on customers
Verizon was losing market share and its market cap had gone from first to last when Dan Schulman contemplated taking on the CEO role.
He was enjoying spending time with his wife on their ranch in Montana and said “no” to the board twice. But out of a sense of loyalty and a desire to revive an iconic American company, he agreed to take the job.
That involved some very tough decisions early on, including 13,000 layoffs just before the holidays in an effort to right the sinking ship.
“We're off to a good start. But to your point, you know, it involved a lot of hard decisions and a lot of very honest but somewhat brutal conversations,” he said at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Bloomberg previously reported on his remarks.
Verizon CEO: Back to basics
Part of the company’s problem is Verizon’s been steadily losing the “network superiority” game to T-Mobile in the 5G era. But it’s also been putting the network ahead of customers and that’s got to change, according to Schulman.
“We're very engineering focused. Network excellence is at the core of Verizon, but it's not enough,” he said. “We probably do have, objectively speaking, the best network, but the differential on that is less than it used to be, and we now need to do all of the basic stuff.”
That “basic stuff” means that when somebody calls, “we’ve got to take care of the problem the first time, right away… We need to simplify promotions, we need to simplify our plans and just make it easier for people to do business with us,” he said.
There’s an initiative within the company that says: Every customer has a name.
“We need to think about how do we satisfy customer needs better than anybody else can and establish a brand that stands for trust and that’s really the ultimate goal,” he said.
During the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call in January, Schulman hinted at a new “value proposition” that the company plans to launch in the first half of this year. He didn’t reveal any details, however, saying all will be revealed on the day it launches.
Verizon trying to reclaim leadership
Schulman on Wednesday said one of the first things he did when joining the company as CEO – he had been on the board for about seven years prior to that – was to let everyone know the reality they were dealing with.
“There’s a lot of pride inside big companies all the time and … what I basically said is it’s going to be very hard to hear, but we’re losing. We’re losing customers. We’re losing confidence. We’re shrinking and that has to stop. Like that is not going to be the way forward. We’re going to play to win and we’re going to try to reclaim our market leadership,” he said. “We need to invest back in our customers.”
Verizon reports Q1 2026 earnings on April 27, when we’ll find out how much progress Schulman is making in the turnaround.