John Linton
.....so completely changing Exetel will make up for no "Christmas Break".
Our Christmas visitors left yesterday evening on their next leg of their Australian trip (the NT) and our house is once more the calm 'retreat' it has always been - at least since the children all grew up. It's surprising how, however welcome and charming guests may be, they seem to make living in your own home uncomfortable. Another sign of increasing old age I suppose.
So I was able to open my lap top for more than a few minutes at a time without incurring disapproving glances and began the final changes to the Exetel business plan for the first six months of 2009. One person I briefly chatted to on Boxing Day asked me what my views on salary increases in 2009 was going to be as he was under a great deal of pressure from his regional head office to significantly reduce his Australian and NZ company's personnel costs. I had no views on changing Exetel's salary review policies except, perhaps to be slightly less 'generous' in the scale of increases, but it seems that more than my friend is facing such issues according to this in today's UK Times:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5404502.ece
One view I took from this article was that Australia is 'lagging behind' the EU and the US in terms of being affected by the ongoing financial problems afflicting almost all countries across the globe and that what is reported in the previously referenced article and here:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5404351.ece
may be a pre-cursor of the conditions that Australia may well face.
I still see no 'downturn' or any other adverse affect on our order intakes or our new business enquiry levels with business this December running ahead, and in several products well ahead, of December last year which was itself a record December order intake. So, apart from the conservative measures we have already adopted, I can't see anything that is going to cause us the sort of problems that several of my acquaintances who manage the A/NZ 'arms' of US and EU multi-nationals are being pressured to deal with.
Perhaps it's the calm before the storm?
Right now my view is that every aspect of business and personal life will get tougher as 2009 progresses and for some people and for some businesses there will be very severe levels of 'distress'. I would think that there will be less impact in the communications industry than generally for all the well know reasons that as businesses cut travel (the first thing they do when tough times arrive) they increase telecommunications and as individuals tighten personal budgets they look for less costly options rather than reducing the volumes of their mobile minute usage or their data downloads. I have no 'statistics' to support those views but they make sense from what I've observed in the past.
So the current plan will remain - to actually almost double the number of personnel employed at Exetel over the next twelve months which would be far and away the largest personnel increase we have ever planned and quite 'dramatic' in terms of a change in our methods of operation. I'm not sure whether to regard this plan as brilliantly "counter cyclical" or just plain foolish but it seems to me that it can only succeed because any failure will be self correcting in that we won't continue to hire if early success is not achieved.
It seems to me to be a better idea to spend any profits we may continue to make on employing additional people to grow the overall business at a faster rate while the markets we operate in are in various states of uncertainty and therefore our 'competitors' are unlikely to be as 'aggressive' as they might normally be. I also think that more than one or two of our competitors may well be overstaffed with 'under performing' personnel and their pre-occupation over the coming twelve months will be to lock themselves in to the most harmful, unproductive and distressing activities of 'down sizing' which, from my observations over several decades only ever manages to get rid of the more useful and hardworking people in any commercial organisation while retaining the least productive (and higher paid) personnel. Too cynical? Perhaps - but too often true.
I will start the interviewing process tomorrow to build a 30 -40 person set of 'sales forces' and, depending on early results will continue that process throughout the first 6 - 9 months of 2009. Hopefully I haven't lost my abilities of selecting successful sales trainees - otherwise it's going to be an expensive and unhappy few months.