John Linton .......not something I'd ever thought of in the whole of my career to date.
I finished reading the Saturday Financial Review earlier this morning along with the other weekend business news media and I began to seriously consider a very different scenario. I had noticed a couple of items in the SMH the previous day which had caused me some surprise and during a call to Steve to discuss the issues with the IP transits earlier in Saturday morning I briefly raised the issue of looking in to buying other companies with him - albeit very 'lightly'.
Then, this morning, I read two other articles and there was a similar item on CNN which I was watching in the background' over breakfast.
I suppose its ironic for someone who has always been totally dismissive of the stupidity of companies who attempt to grow by buying other companies to 'confess' to actually giving some, not a lot by any means at this stage, thought to doing something I always been scathingly dismissive about.
Why consider such things?
Well, firstly, it would never cross my mind to buy any form of ISP business or ADSL 'customer base'. I continue to regard that as being totally stupid.
However I have been admiring the way that several of our agents run their businesses in terms of providing 'full service consulting' to business customers and buy SHDSL and Ethernet circuits, and sometimes other serices, from Exetel to 'bundle' into a complete communications offering.
The articles that triggered this train of thought yesterday and again today were referencing how difficult the 'busines consulting services' market had become with the current and likely near term future financial constraints causing mergers and 'disposals' at the high end and 'changes in direction' at the lower end.
In Australia of course some of these pressures are caused by Telstra, and to a lesser extent Optus, doing ever more 'sweetheart' pricing deals with business customers - semingly finally abandoning the long term Telstra attitude of "you're a business - you can afford to pay too much" - at least 'selectively' and for the moment.
Exetel is by no means immensely profitable, and Exetel's owners are by no means in a position to limitlessly make investment money available to Exetel to buy other companies but both Exetel and Exetel's owners are 'debtless' and are capable of borrowing several million dollars from our banks should we decide to do so (we had already made the arrangements to borrow up to $A8 million when we were contemplating deploying our own wire line or wire less infrastructure.
So, in considering,ways of more rapidly growing our 'business' business, it may well be worth considering doing that via acquisition or 'merger' if we can find suitable companies with whom we share similar views in operation and future outlook and who might be feeling the cold winds of a tighter financial environment a little more acutely than a debtless company such as Exetel is doing, at least at this stage of those events.
I will look into what may be possible in terms of smaller consulting companies that specialise in VOIP/Data services and have a good client base and good sales people. Also a specialist telephone PABX installer would be a sensible 'target' as would a small 'outsourcing' company.
It is part of our plans over the coming 18 months to put a lot more emphasis on providing business services that we have done to date and, looking not to far in to the future, it's very sensible for Exetel, and many other companies like Exetel, to reduce our/their reliance on wholesaled services on which, however you look at it, there's never very much 'flexibility.
I never would have thought that I'd ever seriously consider such courses of actions but I guess I'm not yet quite too old not to be 'flexible in my thinking'.