John Linton ....it takes at least three weeks each year to recover from the demands of the previous twelve months.
It's been a very 'long' period of time (January 1st 2004 up until now) to work the extremely long day on day hours that it has taken to get Exetel from a 'start up' operated from a 'back room' of our residence to the, still small, $A60 million dollar a year company that it is today providing services to over 125,000 customers with 100 employees operating in two very different countries in fiercely competitive marketplaces that constantly change. Big deal - you might, quite rightly, say. After all - over that time:
1) TPG has gone from being an unkown to the fourth largest communications company in Australia and has made David Teoh and Vicki Teoh many hundreds of millions of dollars each
2) iinet has 'swept up' a slew of comms companies to become the fifth largest
3) Internode has kept on keeping on to have quadrupled its size over that period
4) And I'm sure the last 6+ years have resulted in many other similar achievements of which I am unaware
All very true - Exetel has achieved nothing like such achievements. All we have managed to do is to survive the various 'disasters' that have beset us on occasions and still managed to grow our company each year while adhering to the base objectives we set when first offering services to Australian users. We have also managed to survive those critical first five years of starting up a new company while no other communications company that began operations around the same time has survived and many long established companies (OzEmail, Westnet, Netspace, Commander and, literally, dozens/hundreds of other such companies have failed or sold out or just disappeared).
I reflected on just how hard it has been to actually make the various things happen that have been required to 'allow' Exetel to survive when so many other companies have failed as I studied the current iteration of the FY2011 business plan. The first thing that is obvious is that it has taken an awful lot of effort by a large number of people to get this far and its going to take even more effort by even more people to achieve the very modest targets set out for the coming twelve months and the financial rewards for Exetel's investors will be even more modest than they have been in previous years. One thing must occur to any reasonable person at times such as this - "is it really worth working this hard for so little"? I have no choice as every last cent Annette and I own is invested in Exetel. Having no choice is not a bad thing - it makes wasting any time or emotion on considering such a question completely irrelevant.
The other thing that is becoming more and more evident is that Exetel has grown as far as it has to date based on very inexperienced personnel. With the exception of Steve and me, (and Rohan in Colombo since May 2009)) every other operational, supervisory or management position except one is held by people for whom Exetel is their first 'real' job since they left University and all the complex operations we now run are managed by people who, apart from their 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 years with Exetel have zero other experience of the communications industry. It's a strange situation and one I have never experienced before. This particular thought occurred to me because, for the first time, in FY2011 we will make a much greater effort to 'decentralise/devolve' the detailed operation of the various parts of Exetel and give more responsibility for day to day decision making to the operational managers rather than having every last detail being 'approved' by one of the directors.
Apart from being a sensible recognition of the development of many of our people it is just not possible for, at least me, to continue to work 80 hour plus weeks - my aging body and mind simply cannot handle such a work load any more. So Annette and I are going away for our annual break a little earlier this year and the plan for FY2011 needs to be finalised at the June board meeting which is three days before we go and there remains a lot of work to be done.
Roll on June 21st.
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