John Linton
....even for the world's very largest businesses.
Over 75% of my 'formative' years in the IT industry were spent with IBM (from my early 20s to my early 30s) and they were also among the happiest years of my working life. I still own shares in IBM (bought via their employee share purchase scheme - one of their many, many enlightened policies) and I still follow their progress with a great deal of interest. My youngest daughter went to work for IBM when she completed university and three of my oldest 'acquaintances' are from my 'IBM days'. So this article caught my eye earlier this morning and I think it sums up how IBM continues to do so much better (despite some stock analysts future predictions) than virtually every other company around the world during the current financially difficult conditions:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124891414229992099.html
Few companies (other than current US automakers I suppose) would have the clarity of thought to sell off a (very profitable) $US9 billion turnover business and then spend the proceeds paying top dollar buying up completely different businesses and no company of any size around the world could have put in pace such purchases so well that in the "worst financial circumstances in 75 years" they could actually grow their profits while their revenue shrank so appreciably. IBM has always coped with change (included that forced on it by the US government) with amazing prescience and consummate business planning.
I learned nothing of those sorts of things at IBM (I was far removed from that level and sort of planning and execution) but I did learn the value of constant analysis of what was going on in the markets in which I operated and the need to plan for the future in detail and then constantly review those plans - pretty valuable lessons for a 'sales person' which allowed me to constantly over achieve my sales targets even in very 'challenging years'. So this coming year is set to be Exetel's most difficult year to date (and we've had at least two years which were 'life threatening' so far and a third that was more than 'life threatening' in a different sort of way.
Not very many people have heard the name "Exetel" and those that have associate it with the provision of 'low cost' residential internet services. However, from only a month or two after we connected our first residential internet service we connected our first business data service and we have been connecting business customers at a slowly increasing monthly rate ever since April 2004. We had no 'business sales people' nor any other form of marketing or advertising and virtually all of our early users (and many of our current business customers) come to us because the IT Manager uses Exetel for his/her home internet connection. While our corporate business is now growing much quicker than at any time in the past it is still a small fraction of the size of our residential business - which was an inevitability as a start up and still tiny communications business is not going to be seriously considered by many businesses.
More than five years have now passed and Exetel has a much larger number of business users than in mid 2004 and many of those users are quite sizable organisations. We began recruiting and building a business sales 'force' in March of this year and the first few sales people have successfully past their initial training phase with flying colours and are now carrying full sales quota responsibilities (having between them doubled our monthly business sales achievements) and we are now continuously hiring additional trainees with the objective, over the coming two years, of creating a sales force of 72 personnel (managers, sales people and engineers) with a separate annual revenue of almost three times bigger than Exetel's current revenue...an almost impossible task...but reading that article about IBM this morning one that I was a tiny part of achieving more than once while with IBM in the 1970s. Given that Exetel, in Australia, has only 30 employees the task of trebling that number over 18 months is quite daunting both in acquiring that number of very high 'calibre' people and also the training, supervision and management of them.
On two previous occasions I have done something similar in scale to this plan but that was a long time ago and invery different circumstances. I have no doubts at all that what we are now setting out to achieve is the most difficult thing I have ever been part of attempting in the whole of my business life......... but then what would be the point of still being involved in something as trivial as commercial endeavour if that was not the case? (if only I can actually find the time).