There are 525,600 minutes in an ordinary year. Scott Behn liked the number enough to give it a job. At Aureon, where he served as chief executive, “525,600” became an initiative for discussing uptime and downtime in the same unit customers experience them: the minute. Networks are usually sold in grander language - miles, capacity, clouds, transformation. Minutes are less theatrical. A minute is simply long enough for a shop's payment terminal to stall, a school lesson to freeze, or a rural employee to vanish from a meeting.
Behn had the temperament for this arithmetic. He entered telecommunications around 1980 as a chief engineer at Time Warner Cable in Wisconsin's Fox Valley. By the time he retired in April 2025, he had traveled through nearly every layer of the business: engineering, field operations, regional management, cable systems, rural telephone service, fiber networks, cloud infrastructure, managed security, data centers and the executive suite. Technology changed its wardrobe several times. The operating question stayed much the same: does it work when someone needs it?
and 525,600 small promises that the network will be there
The engineer learns to run the room
Behn's career began with machinery and moved steadily toward people. After his chief-engineer years came a long run in Charter Communications operations. Public records place him as a district manager in Wisconsin by the late 1990s, fielding the sort of local cable questions that turn technical policy into a crowded municipal meeting. In 2004, Insight Communications hired him to lead its Greater Rockford and Dixon operations in Illinois, a system serving about 120,000 customers. Between those posts he had worked at Swanson Services and served as a senior vice president at Lazer Communications and Three-Sixty Networks.
The itinerary reads like a map of Midwestern telecommunications consolidation: Fox Valley, Wausau, Madison, northern Illinois, Minnesota, northwest Wisconsin and eventually Iowa. Each promotion widened the territory. None freed him from the consequence of an outage. Recommendations on his professional profile describe a leader who connected customer service directly to financial results and paid attention to staff development. That combination - service and the ledger, people and plant - is the operator's double vision.
At Mosaic Telecom in Cameron, Wisconsin, Behn found a smaller stage with an unusually clear public purpose. Local communications cooperatives had been laying fiber long before remote work made broadband dinner-table conversation. His case for investment was plain: when the market failed to supply what customers needed, local providers had to lead so their communities could compete. Under his leadership, Mosaic also learned to use subscriber data with more finesse. One campaign for faster service recorded an 80 percent take rate. The engineering company was learning behavior.
“If something our customers need is not being provided, we need to take a leadership role.”Scott Behn, speaking about local broadband providers
A new chief, then an empty office
Aureon recruited Behn in June 2019. The company was already a curious institution: owned by more than 100 independent Iowa telephone companies, yet operating a business that ranged beyond wholesale connectivity. It had technology, consulting and contact-center divisions. Its fiber formed a backbone for local providers. Its network carried traffic from cell towers. Its teams managed firewalls, found technology talent and answered customer calls on behalf of other companies. Behn once offered a charmingly odd example: open a receipt from a San Francisco chocolate company, call the support number, and the phone might ring in Iowa.
He had only months to learn the organization in person. The pandemic sent Aureon's workforce home before, he later said, he thought he had met every employee. The timing could have been much worse. Shortly before the upheaval, Aureon had increased bandwidth available to its member telephone companies. The decision was made to meet existing demand, without knowledge of what was coming. Then homes became offices and classrooms. Independent providers across Iowa had room to absorb the shock.
This is the rare corporate anecdote in which foresight and luck can share the same chair. Aureon did not predict a pandemic. It had invested before the need became acute. Behn's version of the story stayed close to the customers: many rural systems already had fiber to the home, and Aureon supplied the backbone connecting them outward. The infrastructure allowed work and school to continue in places that are too often treated as the last stop on a technology map.
Precision surfaced in small ways. During a 2023 interview, Behn was asked how many people worked at Aureon. He did not round vaguely. He received the report every Monday, he explained, and that week's number was 503. He described an internet-uptime standard of 99.995 percent. He knew why firewall patches were missed when a client's lone IT employee left. The chief executive's language remained full of racks, routes, backups and head counts.
A building designed for bad days
The most visible artifact of Behn's Aureon tenure is a building meant to disappear into the background. The 616 Data Center opened to customers in downtown Des Moines in March 2022. Construction had begun in 2019. Multiple power sources, backup generators and separate fiber entrances gave the facility the useful sort of paranoia. The structure was built to withstand an EF3 tornado. When the 2020 derecho battered Iowa, people inside kept working.
Data centers are warehouses for modern anxiety. They shelter the information a business fears losing and create the interconnection points where network providers exchange traffic. Aureon's facility expanded local capacity for both. It also expressed Behn's strategic argument: an Iowa company should be able to buy serious technology service without sending every dollar and every problem to a distant provider.
The building also joined old and new versions of Aureon. Its predecessor, Iowa Network Services, had once solved a statewide interconnection problem by bringing long-distance service to rural telephone companies. Decades later, the equipment was different and the traffic immeasurably richer, yet the role was familiar. Gather many local networks in a dependable place, connect them to a larger world, and keep someone nearby who understands what happens when a green light turns red. Behn saw a data-center mentality in the company's earliest history. The 616 facility gave that inheritance new walls.
He described Aureon's ambition without ornamental fog. The company wanted businesses to operate “better, faster, smarter with a local flair.” It wanted clients focused on their own work instead of worrying about the technology underneath. In 2024, that strategy widened when Aureon acquired cloud and managed-IT clients from Northwest Communications, adding businesses in northwest Iowa and strengthening a footprint that included Des Moines, Kansas City and Omaha.
The local case extended past paying customers. Aureon's charitable grants and its work with Iowa economic-development groups supported projects in the towns served by its telephone-company owners. Behn's examples ranged from day care and grocery stores to business studies and playground equipment. The scholarship program backed Iowa students pursuing science, technology, engineering and mathematics. By 2024 it had awarded more than $100,000 since its 2003 launch.
Such programs can look peripheral on an income statement. In Behn's telling they belonged to the same system. Fiber helps a community only if the community remains a place where people can work, raise children and imagine a future. A day-care opening and a network upgrade solve different problems, though both can decide whether a family stays.
“We don't just want to have businesses survive. We want to be their partner so that they can thrive.”Scott Behn on Aureon's role in the Midwest
The last handoff
In December 2024, Aureon announced that George O'Neal would become chief executive on January 13. O'Neal arrived with decades of network experience and a record of moving a Texas communications provider from copper to fiber. Behn endorsed him publicly, praising his strategic vision and his ability to inspire teams. When the change took effect, Behn called it a new era. He stayed close for the transition, advising O'Neal and Aureon's board as he moved toward an April retirement.
There was little theatre in the goodbye. He wrote that serving for five and a half years had been an honor, wished the company success, and expressed confidence that it was in good hands. The conclusion suited an operations career. A clean handoff is another form of uptime.
Across roughly 45 years, Behn watched the signal change shape: cable television, long-distance voice, broadband, fiber to the home, cloud computing, remote work and managed cybersecurity. The machines became faster and the vocabulary more expensive. Customers kept asking the oldest question in the business. Will it work?
His answer was a number small enough to live inside a clock and large enough to fill a year. There are 525,600 opportunities to keep the promise. Then the count begins again.