John Linton
......... and I have to repeat the same quote as I did the other day .....the more things change etc.
It's board meeting day today - obviously the last for 2009 and it's a reminder to me of just how 'regulated' your life becomes when you become 'immersed' in running a small company. 'Billing', 'Board Meeting'. 'Plan Review', 'Product Review x 10' "days" become permanent calendar entries each month and you try and fit everything else in your life around those activities. There are also the permanent daily review event schedule that starts with a two hour 'review' of the world technical press and the RSS feeds from favourite commentators and writing this musing before you get around to driving in to the office. Developing a new business has always involved a fairly 'punishing' daily, weekly and monthly regimen and in very 'dynamic' times it seems that there is very little time available to anything very creative - though perhaps that's simply a sign that I have less mental capacity than in the past.
One of the issues that continues to present a problem in these more interesting times is the pricing offers of our major carrier suppliers (Telstra and Optus). We have had no problems with AAPT/Powertel yet though their unlimited 12 hour innovation on ADSL2 was something that is difficult to deal with. Of course there is no way for a company of Exetel's size to deal with Telstra's marketing practices and their recent changes to their ADSL1 and ADSL2 pricing for retail customers was simply something that monopolies do - live with it or do something else. I was annoyed by Optus reducing their wireless broadband end user entry pricing to below the wholesale pricing they provide to us but then, again, all you can do is shrug your metaphorical if not your actual shoulders and move on. Perhaps we have grown mentally lazy over the past few years as it had become easier for us to avoid making a loss in our small business and will have to go back to the old disciplines of finding ways to stay in business on the slimmest of margins while our suppliers try and recover from their stupidities of the past two years.
When all is said and done it simply illustrates that there never can be any period of 'easy living' for a small company and that you will always have to face up to the fact that larger companies, particularly suppliers who operate wholesale and retail operations, are always capable of pricing you out of the market whenever they need a pay rise for their executives. Times are clearly much tougher for our large suppliers than they have become accustomed to - presumably their 'planners' didn't realise that the ADSL market had a finite limit and that wireless broadband would become as competitive as mobile telephony - either that or the planners they do have are so stupid and uninformed that you might as well have none. In a week or so Exetel will have been in business as a data communications services supplier for 6 years....and we find ourselves facing the same supplier pricing uncertainty and ambivalent supplier attitudes as we did back in January 2004.
We are a far stronger company than we were six years ago and we have the twin 'protections' of no desire to make much profit and far better operating efficiencies across every aspect of our business that six years of constant process automation development will deliver to any organisation with strong enough management to insist there are no barriers to its creation - our systems are so much better than each one of our providers (who are our major competitors) that there simply is no comparison. Having said that we have only survived the slings and arrows of outrageous suppliers because we have been prepared to sell at little or no profit across our whole range of services for considerable amounts of time. Balancing the losses on some products/services with the slim margins on other services has been a constant 'tight rope act' for almost all of the time we have been in business with the exception of the last 12 - 18 months.
Our other 'protection' is that we are no longer dependent on residential ADSL for 100% of our revenue (and small profits) as we were back in early 2004. While still in the very early stages of development (although I suppose it has taken five years) our business data link revenues are growing very quickly month on month and we are starting to see the 'returns' from our business VoIP offerings start to make a meaningful contribution to total monthly revenue. In many ways Exetel is a very different company than we once were and it will be a challenge but we will make the transformation from a supplier to mainly residential users to a supplier mainly to business users in the not too distant future without the need to put undue emphasis on growing our number of residential users beyond 100,000 or so to balance the use of the bandwidth utilisation and therefore ensure the cost of IP is kept to the lowest possible $/mbps ratio.
It seemed to me as I, very reluctantly, reduced the price of our entry level wireless broadband service to 'break even' late last night that we were going to have to re-run Exetel's first 4 years all over again...but I was very tired then and, at least for me, dispirited at the thought of wasting so many years of my life dealing with people and issues that produced so little in return. As always, the dawn brings a different and brighter perspective and we will have to find ways to change Exetel to deal with the current issues and then move to more sensible business parameters. I guess today's board meeting will be a place to begin that process....yet again.