John Linton
...by everyone concerned.
I mentioned that one of the key reasons for going to Sri Lanka in February was to interview a short list of applicants for the position of General Manager of the SL operation. We did that and from a high quality set of choices selected the person we thought would be the best person for the position. He came to Australia last week for a week of 'familiarisation' both with the systems and processes currently being used by Exetel and, probably more importantly, to get some first hand knowledge of the different people with whom he will be working in the initial months in the position.
Being a 'brand new' employee of an 'overseas employer' there was an obvious, and totally expected, reticence to make any 'criticisms' of what he saw and an equally obvious bias towards being overly polite and 'praising'. Anyone, new 'foreign' employee or otherwise, wouldn't be expected to display any other attitude.Two almost certainly genuine observations he made were things that I have never thought about - that Exetel's 'key employees' were "so very young" and that an Australian company employed so few "Australians" with so many different ethnicities and countries of origin being very evident across the Australian office's personnel.
His background - long association with technology companies in Si Lanka and other countries in that region and his most recent tenure being the start up, growth and management of a small ISP in Colombo allowed him to contrast his last five year's experiences with our experiences over the last five years. In is, deferentially polite terms, the contrasts were very much in "Exetel's Favour" and some of that was almost certainly genuine. The major aspect, on which he continually commented, was the breadth and depth of automation and the fact that we had not 'bought' any 'off the shelf' software but had developed all of our provisioning, billing, support and personnel management systems from ground zero and integrated them from Day One into the data base that runs the company.
All very expected in many ways and it shouldn't have caused any reaction other than a mild degree of 'self satisfaction' which it undoubtedly did. However there were some things that were less pleasant to hear (although I'm sure he didn't intend to have that effect) and it did cause me to wonder why I hadn't taken the same view that he had so casually asked questions about.While the points he made weren't "Earth shattering' they were important and I, and other people, should have picked up on them long ago - extremely annoying.
We have always been very conscious about seeking our customer's feed back on every aspect of the ways in which we operate Exetel and have made, literally, over 1,000 changes to our processes based on customer feedback over the last five years. However, perhaps it has needed an in depth explanation by the key people in charge of the different parts of the company's operations to an intelligent, concerned (he is now going to carry the direct responsibilities) and experienced 'outsider' who is given access to the 'real' inside operations of the company to actually expose a number of things that we had better pay closer attention to in the future. Nothing 'seriously dramatic' right now but very definitely things that were beginning to show the negative effects of ongoing neglect.
So it will be good to have someone heading up the overall operations of the Sri Lankan company that has the in depth local knowledge of how things really work there and the people who can help you make them work - something we have never had any knowledge of and would never have any way of obtaining that knowledge. While we are still a long way from ending the program of sending Australian based people to Colombo to continue the process and system and product knowledge transfer we will be able to develop the future activities of the SL business with far greater knowledge and 'on the ground' presence and decision making.
We also now have a list of things we need to do in Australia brought into focus by listening to someone who has a different set of experiences but an equally sound knowledge of running a small company in a difficult market. Not that we lacked a very long list of things to do 'immediately' but perhaps our focus had begun to move away from things we thought no longer needed the same level and/or quantity of attention that they in fact do. It, yet again, reminded me that I have to reduce my involvement in so much of the detailed operation of Exetel and enhance the responsibilities (and accountability which I have always been very lax about) of the current Australian personnel.
At its very prosaic level it is a timely reminder that nothing ever continues to run perfectly without constant and insightful attention to detail.
...I'm disappointed that, yet again, I have had to be reminded of that elementary aspect of running a small business.