John Linton
......it's going to be very exciting and quite possibly be very different.
I finished my parts of the FY2010 business plan earlier this morning which is a little later than usual (a bare 48 hours to spare) but these have been a particularly busy few months and I am certainly not getting any younger and I certainly am getting more and more unfit - which tends to make things harder to complete in the time frames I might once have been able to achieve - at least if my rapidly failing memory recalls those times correctly. Our main objectives will not change over the coming twelve months as we have been working towards the same objectives since our first day of operating Exetel, but the ways we will operate the company will change progressively over the next eighteen months or so.
One of the major decisions we will need to make in the not too distant future is whether or not we establish a presence in the UK to sell HSPA services which we have been wanting to do for over three years - pretty much from the first time I was introduced to the concept of data over wireless for mobile users in the UK in July 2006. My initial views of HSPA services haven't changed; to me, they were the way to get away from the Telstra monopoly and the terrible attitudes Trujillo and McGaughie introduced to Telstra a year earlier than that. Exetel really didn't like being labeled a "parasite" by that duo and while we had no option but to put up with their rip off pricing and appallingly arrogant attitude to every aspect of their business dealings with Exetel we vowed that we would work towards not adding our pitiful financial contribution to sustaining their bloated Australian operations and overpaid management drones any longer than it took to find an alternative.
We have made a start in Australia and have over 3,000 HSPA customers with a TV ad being shot and edited over the next week or so for a country TV campaign scheduled to start in the last week of July and then run until Christmas. We hope to learn a great deal over the next six months about how to market HSPA services and how the Australian carrier and reseller/wholesale market will develop. Our concentration on rural/regional Australia is a major risk for such an inexperienced group of people like Exetel but it is a major emphasis for our next few years and is one of the reasons why we are in business at all of course. Anyway - I guess we'll soon know.
Annette and I, all things going to plan, will meet with our two different mobile contacts in the UK in late September to make a determination of just how possible setting up a company in the UK might be using either the Vodafone or T-Mobile network. We would prefer the Vodafone network simply because of the possible future 'appropriateness' of that in terms of joint volume pricing for the Australian company but the T-Mobile opportunity is always going to be more financially attractive. Our key determinant will be whether by operating in the UK we can get advantages for the Australian HSPA services in terms of buying hardware and associated peripherals and services or, perhaps, in buying the HSPA service itself if that is either possible or desirable.
So we will know the results of both the rural/regional advertising and the UK possiblities by early September and will be able to base further decisions on that information.
The other major new direction for Exetel that needs early emphasis and impetus is our more aggressive move into the corporate marketplace which we began by hiring the first eight trainees in the first half of calendar 2009. It's very early days for this key objective for Exetel but it has begun with very promising early results - far better results than we could have expected in many ways. It is, in most respects, a well timed and well executed project to date and hopefully the early momentum will be sustained in to the new year. Again, we are doing things completely differently to everyone we are competing with or, for that matter, any other company I have ever been aware of in selling technology services to the business market places.
I have done something similar once before and achieved results that far exceeded those of the 'conventional' competitors of those times and in those marketplaces so there is some precedent for what we will try and put in place for Exetel over the coming months. It's a very exciting 'gamble' and, personally, it is something that I am fascinated to see if we can make it happen. I have also, in very different marketplaces and a long time ago, done something similar in terms of ambition which for a number of years achieved amazing results - once again just turning the then accepted selling methods and processes 180 degrees and confounding the competition to the point where they virtually became irrelevant when we chose to compete for business.
We have spent a not inconsiderable amount of our time over the past five years building similar 'weapons' which we have had to do ourselves as this time we don't have the indulgence and ready and willing support of a giant Japanese multinational to 'bank roll' our wild dreams of total market domination. However if we have done our preparation work as thoroughly as I think we might have we should have more than considerable fun over the next 12 months making a great deal of progress in growing our corporate business in terms of the overall business done by Exetel. It's going to be a very interesting time for me personally and hopefully for everyone involved - not least the customers.
The third major project we will hopefully complete over the first few months of the new financial year is the completion of the second phase of the decentralisation of the Australian network with the commissioning of the Hobart PoP and the commissioning of the various customer direct interconnects to all of the State capital city PoPs - which should be done before the end of September if everything goes to plan. Then, of course, there is the issue of the Krudd madness that, because of his NBN2 "commitments" will require connectivity to the Krudd NBN2 in Tasmania before Christmas and the incredible scenario of actually seeing how this impossibility is attempted to be brought to fruition before they even appoint the personnel who will be given nine months (after appointment) to determine how things should proceed.
Exetel want to offer 100 mbps internet services to Tasmanian users before Christmas and Krudd has promised that will happen so it's going to be fascinating to get the technical details and 'negotiate' a connectivity contract with a non-existent company on a non-existent network. It is going to be a truly fascinating three months.
Apart from those 3 major new projects there is the small matter of increasing Exetel's revenues by 30% in July and.......