John Linton
As a migrant to this country who got here, by myself, with less than $A100.00 "to help you get settled" and three months before my 18th birthday I've always had a migrant's different view of their adopted country. Despite my many failures and set backs I've always wanted to give something back to a country that gave me so much opportunity and so much welcoming help to a bewildered and lonely, very young for his age, boy.
I've always particularly liked regional Australia having spent so much time in my early working days as a sales rep with some customers in the Central West of NSW and later with IBM with a territory that was basically Ballarat (with frequent trips to the SA border and up to the NSW border towns. Later in life, first at Osborne and then at TPG I spent a lot of time building an "Australia wide" network of presences in regional towns and cities that pioneered delivering internet and WAN services that were the equivalent of the services available in Sydney or Canberra at a time when NO other company was doing anything about servicing regional Australia.
So it was great pleasure that I, by accident, turned on the TV this morning at the start of a segment on "Business Sunday" that show cased the successes enjoyed by two regional Victorian companies started up by people in the 'middle ages' of their lives that have not only done well as businesses, helped the economies of regional Victoria but have done it very differently. The companies were:
http://sharpairlines.com/
and
http://www.borderexpress.com.au/
There may have been other companies in this segment but I tuned in after it started and had to leave after a few minutes of the Border Express story. Apart from the concept of a couple of 50 year olds starting up new businesses in regional areas and delivering services deemed 'uneconomic' by the major 'payers' in their respective industries the ways they did it was so refreshing.
Not only did they do something very dificult but they did it innovatively, not being deterred by solving problems that other, larger, businesses deemed 'too difficult'. Two main examples were that Sharp coudn't find enough pilots for their expansion so they trained their own and Border couldn't find the software they needed so they designed and wrote their own. If you can get hold of a copy/see it on the web I can recommend you invest a few minutes of your time seeing if that short program lifts your spirits as much as it did mine.
It also made me think about why small companies always seem to be able comparable services to their marketplaces at lower prices and with greater efficiencies than the entrenched suppliers that existed before they started up?
It really makes you wonder why Australia needs Telstra at all - if Telstra were any good at anything at all why do they charge more for every single service they provide? How unbelievably inefficient and totally incompetent in terms of network planning and personnel management do you have to be to have to charge MORE than EVERY other service provider for EVERY service you provide? Surely 'economy of scale' MUST" allow Testra to provide services at LOWER COSTS than every other service provider for at least ONE service and still make a sensible profit?
Apparently not - best solution for Telstra has always been to try and drive any service provider who offers lower costs out of business so it doesn't become obvious that they are the most uselessly run operation Australia has ever seen. What other explanation can there be?
Like Sharp and Border Express, Exetel has gone the path of developing and writing its own software and training its own people and, hopefully, like those two companies will continue to benefit from the efficiencies those key business decisions provide. Another lovely morning in Sydney - unfortunately we have a lunch time board meeting but in a location where one of Austraia's millions of magnificent outlooks/views will be more than partial compensation for working on such a great day.