John Linton
........a bit like the (later interpretations) of the mythical "curate's egg" for the first three months of this financial year.
We will complete the review of Exetel's business plan next week which is something we do at this time each year just to check the 'sanity' of the assumptions we made when we embarked on the new financial year. In terms of the various services we offer the assumptions appear to be pretty much on track except for the continuing anomaly of ADSL1 sales continuing to exceed ADSL2 sales for the past 6 or so weeks.The October 1st plan price changes did boost ADSL2 sales, particularly the SSS based plans but it also, strangely boosted ADSL1 sales although the changes to those plans were extremely minor.
As we have in past periods relied quite a lot on ADSL2 growth (though not as much recently as other parts of our business become much stronger) the current trend is a little disturbing and, so far defies at least my ability to reach some sort of understanding of why it's happening. I have looked at the figures in all the usual ways I know how to do but I can find no reason, let alone reason, why there should be a slow down in ADSL2 growth. I have little doubt that the APPT 'unlimited' 12 hour offer has probably played a part and maybe that is a bigger part than I ascribe to it but I would also expect that to be shown in the 'churn away' figures which it isn't - though because of the uncertainty of transfer in both actuality and reporting I can't rely on the figures I have seen.
September was a record month for business SHDSL and Ethernet sales and our 'investment' in university graduate trainees and the 'unique' mentoring system we continue to perfect to rapidly train and make the stream of new hires effective has worked really well so far. Six of the first nine trainees have successfully passed their probation period (by making ten sales each in their first four months with Exetel) and, while we are a little behind our hiring targets due to the time of year, we have been able to make a very substantial difference to both our sales numbers and our geographic coverage and also, based on the feedback from the accounts we have won, are beginning to shake up other companies who have allowed complacency to creep in to both their account retention processes and their rip off pricing. Based on the escalating stream of absurd lies being told about Exetel to prospective customers by several competitors (including two of the very largest business data services providers in Australia) our minor successes to date are causing an unexpected amount of pain. Goodness knows what they will say if we actually reach our planned business targets over the coming months.
The other quite rapidly escalating growth has been in VOIP with a slightly higher percentage of our broad band customers using our VoIP service every month and a slightly higher average revenue per user each month. We are also seeing an increase in business VoIP usage and more business customers approaching us to install VoIP solutions which then also require an Ethernet or SHDSL service rather than the other way round. Our internal experiences with developing a very sophisticated VoIP service for ourselves that has 60 users in two different countries and 7 locations has given us a very solid 'body' of practical experience in 'delivering highly reliable and highly innovative VoIP solutions that not only save significant amounts of money in terms of call and line costs but provide functionality that is impossible to be provided over 'conventional' PABX systems.
Our other services continue to grow pretty much along the lines in the business plan so the only 'bad' parts of the first three months are the ULL based ADSL2 Naked and ADSL2 including telephone service offerings which are performing below planned targets. I will re-look at the ULL ADSL plans over the next couple of days in more detail than I have done over the past week but I need to find somewhere to start.
I think the real problem may well be that Exetel has grown beyond one person's ability to devote enough time to the overall management and design of the sales processes and the detail of the pricing and 'product presentation' and the reality has become that simply not enough thinking time and analysis is being devoted to each of the different services as was possible in the past when there was only 2 or 3 different services and every nuanced detail was constantly examined. If that actually proves to be the case it will take longer to address than I think we need to do and Exetel may well need to move towards becoming a much more boringly conventional company.