John Linton
Since Exetel “opened for business” in January 2004 it has maintained a steady growth rate from $0.00 as a ‘green fields’ start up to a company with revenues exceeding $A3,700,00 a month in the current month. September 2008 will be the 55th consecutive record month for Exetel and the 3 month period ending 30th September 2008 will be our 18th successive record quarter both in terms of revenues earned and new customers acquired.
Exetel has ten broad business offerings and nine of the ten recorded record customer growth in the quarter and three of the newer service offerings (VoIP, FAX via email and SMS via Email) all grew between 150% and 200% in the quarter. Both Exetel’s main revenue contributors (ADSL1 and ADSL2) also grew very strongly despite indications that the overall growth of these services in Australia had slowed overall over the past 3 – 6 months (recent ABS half yearly report).
We had almost 30 'major' objectives/tasks to complete in this first quarter of the new 2009 financial year and we have been able to complete all but one of them roughly on the planned schedule. That is a great deal of work for a company of any size and a very great strain on a small company with very limited personnel resources. The largest, most complex and easily the most difficult objective for the quarter was to get the HSPA service to the market on 15th September which, by the skin of our teeth, we made happen with the first 100 HSPA users now 'live' or at least able to connect when they decide to do that.
The second most difficult and complex task was to completely change the topology of our Australian network to move from a 1 gb based implementation to a 10 gb based backbone and to complete the decentralization to the six States and two Territories. We accomplished all of the work that was planned for the quarter (with the exception of the Tasmanian PoP which is still on hold pending resolution of back haul pricing) pretty much on time and without any significant customer down time which is a great tribute to the people involved.
The third of the major tasks was the bringing on line of the support facility in Sri Lanka which we have largely accomplished thanks to the dedicated efforts of the person we sent to manage the operation and a great deal of logistical work on making a communications network between Australia and a less developed country work at a level that we can now see is 'unusual' in less developed countries. This is an ongoing project with the current 10 personnel continuing to increase on a monthly basis for the next nine months.
So we have almost all of today to 'rest on our laurels' before we begin the processes involved in completing the 30 tasks planned between now and Christmas. We don't have the same weight of major changes to accomplish over the coming months as we had over the last three months but the changes we need to bring in to effect are of equal importance - principal challenges are making the HSPA 'numbers' we have set and the even more challenging changes to the structures of offering ADSL services (which I alluded to recently in these ramblings).Changing the out dated (but accepted) method of 'buying' an ADSL service will be a challenge given the dead weight of lazy thinking that exists in every aspect of that process. However, nothing like a 'paradigm shift' to shake up an old and tired way of doing business.
'Breaking into' the HSPA marketplaces in which we have decided to 'operate' is going to be very difficult to do as we will continue to use no advertising or 'marketing' processes. We need to get 1,000 customers for HSPA services over the next six weeks for our 'strategy' to work and that's a very, very difficult thing to do. As with all new ventures you begin them with a set of expectations (I won't dignify these expectations by using the word 'plan') which usually don't work out even close to what you had expected/hoped for. So, in launching' the HSPA service we have multiple 'paths' to pursue in the expectation/hope that one or more of them will produce the required impetus. However if that doesn't happen over the next two weeks we have no Plan B to fall back on.
Similarly, but less critically, I think that 'single handedly' attempting to make Australia's ADSL buying marketplace sectors see that a pay for what you use basis of choosing an ADSL service (against every other ISP's slavish 'follow the leader' approach to 'bundled download plans) is a fairly big ask. However as it is the only sensible way of both buying and providing an ADSL service it has to be appealing to the sensible percentage of the ADSL market. (mind you the mobile market has, for many years, born out PTB's observation that "It's impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the average buyer").
In some ways I think the events in the US congress earlier this morning (our time) may make these two 'impossible' tasks easier to achieve than I thought yesterday afternoon.
Yesterdays plunge on the NYSE and two more banks, this time in Europe, having to be bailed out by their respective governments together with the uncertainty as to just what it will take to stop the US, and therefore the world's, financial processes from collapsing isn't going to make life in Australia, at all levels and areas, any easier. It appears that there will be major misgivings and therefore a great deal of 'conservatism' in decision making in every part of Australian life as well as business in the coming months which, of course, presents its own opportunities for the more 'nimble footed' of the participants in any specific area of endeavour.
Interesting times are getting even more interesting.