John Linton .........easy enough to to do for any sensible company's planner(s).........pity we don't have any.
Planning is a crucially important element of running any start up business
and continues to be the most important element of then running any small
business that manages to survive the start up phases and reaches the fifth and
subsequent year of operating. With two days to go before Exetel completes its
sixth year of operating a data communications business in Australia our
planning remains as inadequate as it has always been. Self evidently our
planning has been sufficient to have allowed us to have survived and to grow
over the past six years but equally self evidently it hasn't been remotely good
enough to have allowed us to take maximum, or anything close to maximum,
advantage of surviving longer than 95%+ of start up companies.
I briefly reviewed the Exetel current year operating plan with our CFO as I
do at the start of every business week and it continues to show that we are
'tracking' pretty much on or above our key objectives right across the
'spectrum' of our planned activities which is very reassuring as we complete
the first six months of the current financial year.....always the easiest to
achieve as, obviously, they are 'closer' to the end of the planning process
that established the targets than the second six months. However there are two
glaring problems with our planning that will impact our next six months efforts
if we don't resolve them very, very soon.....and they relate to the very
simplest of issues - lack of floor space which is made so much worse in a
planning sense because we moved in to our new Sydney premises on 1st June 2009
and we expanded our Sri Lankan premises on 1st August 2009! Score ZZZ for
planning for Exetel.
We can solve our Sri Lankan problem by simply renting more space although we
have only just completed the fit out of the additional space there - so we will
lose some money and have the inconvenience of re-locating within the same
building with all the hassles that entails. The Sydney problem can't be
addressed so easily. Firstly we have purchased the current floor in North
Sydney and secondly there is no floor space in the current building for rent
let alone for purchase.....so we will have to find additional space somewhere
else which gives us the inconveniences, if not problems, of running our
Australian business from two locations in the same city.....not any sort of
problem for a larger company but a pretty serious set of inconveniences for a
small company. So while the overall business is performing admirably in meeting
the targets set in June 2009 our ability to maintain that performance is now
very seriously threatened by the disruptions caused firstly by inadequate floor
space and then by the problems of moving 80% of our people in both countries to
new locations...a set of problems that we can well do without in what looks
like being a very difficult six month period.
The major aspect of this poor planning that deeply concerns me is the amount
of money we will have to commit both to the costs of moving as a one off but
more importantly the ongoing operating costs of double the floor space we
currently have and the associated operating costs. This would be difficult for
a small company in stable times but it is a quite different consideration in
very unpredictable times - particularly as we continue to move Exetel's
business foci so significantly. It is going to be very difficult for us.
I have no idea what we will do beyond the
obvious....we have to do something in both locations. We will need to make the
base parameter decisions within a few weeks and then plan to move all of the
Sri Lankan personnel and half to two thinrds of the North Sydney personnel
before the end of April. To me, that's a daunting set of tasks and time
commitments that now have to be fitted in to a period where we are already
severely stretched in terms of management planning time and resources. I
suppose that's what happens when you don't plan effectively.