John Linton
I looked at the February 1st 2008 billing report earlier this morning and was, expectedly, pleased to see that it showed that Exetel had recorded its 48th successive month of growth. The 1st of the month report has always been a pleasure to read since 1st March 2004 when our far cruder and simpler in house written billing system showed a figure of slightly under $A10,000. Today's report (which excludes the mid month telephone billing and the daily activation and hardware billing) was over $A2.8 million for the first time representing a 28,000% (correction courtesy CB) monthly business growth over exactly four years.
Money (revenue) isn't everything, especially in business - monthly profit is the only thing that will ensure commercial survival and is the only real measure of commercial 'success'. However, given the fiercely competitive nature of the Australian communications business and the major 'disasters' that Exetel has had to overcome in each year of its short 'life' to date it gives me a great deal of satisfaction in playing a part in continually growing Exetel against so many difficulties.
I suppose it is also true that the markets in which Exetel has operated for the past four years have all continued to grow so it should be unsurprising that any company operating in those markets would grow each month as a natural result of overall market growth - and that is undoubtedly true. It's also true that many company's operating in these same markets that were in the business before Exetel started and commenced in business after Exetel started no longer exist or have exited those markets over the past four years.
It was timely to be reminded of the disasters we have been faced with over the last four years, any one of which could have caused Exetel to cease to exist given the magnitude of the difficulties, as we are going to spend some time this morning looking at possible new business premises as our current office lease will be up late this calendar year. Annette has been looking at something to buy rather than continuing to spend money renting and her conclusion is that we could possibly buy the strata title to a whole floor in the Sydney CBD. We looked at a couple of really nice buildings late in 2007 but the settlement dates were too soon and the price of our preferred building was far too high (and the floor space too large) for our needs.
Annette has now found a couple of 425 sqm or so options that could be possibilities and would make economic sense if we relocated one of our two Sydney PoPs to a data centre we would need to build on part of the floor space. The preferred location is next to Wynyard station and a block away from our current CBD PoP. It woud suit our employees and would allow us to do many other sensible things based in the centre of the Australia's largest business district - a key future target marketplace for Exetel and a perfect location should we end up using our own wireless data network.
A preliminary quote from our bank for borrowing 100% of the sale price would be around $A23,000 and the commercial lease of the floor below the one we are being offered is slightly more than that so it is a relatively simple rent versus buy equation.
Our current lease for less than 300 sqm in North Sydney is a little over $A13,000 (which will increase to around $A15,000 before the end of this year and by more than that if we increase our floor space (which we will almost certainly do) with a further $8,000 being spent renting rack space in the CBD which will also increase each six months or so.
Many, many upsides other than the problems of relocating which is always far more messy than the best planning can make it.
One major downside of course - we have to come up with the better part of $A3 million to buy it which can only be done by Annette and I increasing our financial investment in Exetel to an uncomfortable level in this very difficult outlook. (I purposely haven't opened the paper yet this morning after yesterday's distressing string of negative articles)
So it will come down to Clint Eastwood's memorable phrase in his famous 1971 movie which can be partially rendered as "Well, do you feel lucky?"