John Linton It came as a jolt to me when my on line reminder system pointed out to me last Friday morning that the first draft of the 2010 plan was due in one week's time. It was a jolt because I had completely forgotten about doing it and by now, in past years, I would have pretty much completed everything rather than, as in this year, not even given it even a preliminary thought.
I could make the excuse that financial year planning has been overtaken by the need to deal with the "GFC" and its day by day affects on business generally and Exetel's business in particular - but as I have repeatedly said I can't actually see any difference to Exetel's business except that it continues to grow month on month as it has since January 2004. I don't know what has occupied my time so completely over the last few months that I have forgotten to carry out the planning processes for the next financial year prior to mid - May but it must have been something/range of things including the ravages of advancing age.
Now that I look back at the past ten months they have passsed in the metaphorical 'blink of an eye' and I can see little real progress in either our business or in the general comunications 'landscape'. There are the obvious things:
1) Moving our first level support, provisioning and sales equiry functions to Sri Lanka
2) Introducing our HSPA services
3) Starting to build a corporate sales operation
4) 'Re-dimensioning' our network and 'distributing' it
5) Deciding to and then and commencing building hardware 'to our designs' in the PRC rather than taking what we can get from Australian distributors
6) Investing in our own owned premises
7) Investing in our own owned data centre
8.) Deciding and then building our own VoIP 'pabx' and implementing it in two linked countries and multiple Australian operations
9) Continuing to grow the business faster than all of our main competitors
10) Continuing to improve our operational 'world's best practice' measures
and simply growing the Exetel business and being involved with those processes over the past ten months have managed to take up so much time that I literally haven't given the planning for FY2010 a moment's thought and I'm pretty sure no-one else within Exetel has either.
So I started to look at FY2010 as a 'stand alone' 12 month period yesterday and mapped out some views on what I thought we could make happen in our tiny part of the Australian communications industry. It would be much easier to not do that and simply let the months roll by as quickly as they have over FY2009 but I suppose after all these years I'm a creature of habit. The problem with planning a new year is that you have to start by looking at the current year in terms of the original plan you put in place in May 2008. Not good reading in terms of looking at the objectives set and which were met and, much larger number, which were not met.
In summary, and without being overly negative, I can pretty much say that we have met none of the objectives we set in May 2008 and we haven't even got close to starting almost half of them. While it would be false written self flagellation (at least in planning terms) to say we missed every objective completely, what is true is that we commenced every task too late and have made nowhere near the progress we had planned for twelve months ago. While that can be equally truthfully said for most years of my personal planning life, and maybe my fading memory is faulty, I can't remember a year when we missed every objective by quite such wide margins. So, unfortunately, FY2009 is going to turn out to be the least successful year of Exetel's brief existence in terms of meeting objectives.
I suppose the only good news is that with such a low benchmark set in FY2009 it will be so much easier to do better in FY2010.
So what is it that a tiny communications company should attempt to do in the coming financial year (other than survive which is a given)? The objective we have been making glacially slow progress towards is to increase our business revenue percentage to 50% of our total revenue and to grow our HSPA revenue to 50% of our residential broadband revenue. Those are of course 'macro objectives' to be acheved over an undefined time frame but, nevertheless, with discrete actions put in place each year to move towards their eventual achievement.
So setting macro ambitions aside the objectives for 2009 need to be based around:
A) Continuing to build a much stronger Agent network in rural/regional Australia - 700 achieving agents being the target
B) Continuing to build a corporate sales force achieving $A2 million per month revenue targets by end calendar 2010
C) Building a residential user base of 100,000 HSPA customers, mainly in rural/regional Australia
D) Building a VoIP customer base of 250,000 users over both wire line and wireless broadband
E) Maintaining the growth/retention of wire line broadband services at their current levels
Pretty simple stuff - it took me hardly any time at all to sketch that out and poduce a convincing looking spread sheet - it looked almost as convincing as the plan for FY2009 in fact.
I guess I've got seven days to inject some reality in to it.