Mike Gallagher is a 30-year telecommunications industry veteran who has the ability to both operate complex entities and devise strategic direction. Mike has proven leadership experience, having built several successful and highly performing management teams.

Mike currently consults for various Private Equity clients, many of whom were at one time investors in his entrepreneurial telecom enterprises. He is currently working as an Executive Advisory Board member for Pamlico Capital, based in Charlotte, NC. Mike also serves on the board of Pamlico’s rural broadband provider, Vast Broadband, and its healthcare monitoring venture, VRI.

Beginning in 2011, Mike served as CEO of IBBS Technologies, a DOCSIS provisioning engine for Tier 2/3 cable companies and VOIP provider. He restructured IBBS, and sold the company to Momentum Telecom in early 2014.  Mike then served on the Momentum board of directors until its successful sale to Court Square Capital in 2018.

From 1998 to 2010 Mike was the founding CEO of FDN Communications, which eventually merged into NuVox Communications in 2007. The combined entity was successfully sold to publicly traded Windstream in 2010 creating a liquidity event for Mike’s shareholders and employees. From its inception as a facilities based carrier, FDN Communications raised multiple rounds of bank debt and venture equity and became one of the few profitable and successful CLECs of its era due to an intense focus on internal operations.

FDN also acquired and integrated several competitors, including MPOWER and LeadingNet Technologies, which allowed it to achieve sufficient scale and EBITDA margins greater than CLECs many times its size. Initial FDN investors saw all of their capital returned with a modest gain, while follow on investors were able to achieve 5x returns.  Mike then became a board member at NuVox and ran the combined companys’ sales organization until the Windstream transaction.

Metro Access Networks (MAN) was Mike’s first entrepreneurial endeavor and immediately preceded FDN Communications.  Mike co-founded and ran this Texas focused local fiber venture, which built over 300 metro fiber route miles in the DFW, Austin, San Antonio and Houston markets. MAN was founded in 1993 with a $40M equity investment from CenturyLink and was sold in 1997 to Brooks Fiber Properties, netting investors an eventual 8x return.

The early part of Mike’s career was spent in direct sales, selling data or metro fiber networks to Fortune 1000 customers. At Williams Telecommunications (Wiltel), where Mike worked from 1988 to 1993, Frame Relay networks were pioneered. Mike sold and helped implement several of these early data networks to large companies in the southeast. Prior to Wiltel, Mike worked at Florida focused local fiber provider Intermedia Communications, which along with MFS Communications, was one of the country’s first Competitive Access Providers.

Mike has a degree in Mathematics and Physics from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and has attended a certificate level course in Data Communications from Washington University in St. Louis. Mike is currently the Board Chairman of the Center for Advanced Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Business at Rollins College and is the owner of a telecom focused consulting firm, Eldora Partners.