John Linton ........let's hope the coming twelve months all works out pretty much as we currently think it will.
I made the very last change to the FY2011 business plan a few minutes ago and do not intend to look at it again. We held an 'informal' board meeting last night to approve the plan and the slight change I made this morning will not make any significant difference to the end result and only recognises the additional effort we will have to make to attempt to retain our ADSL customer numbers above the contracted number we have agreed with Telstra in exchange for a slightly better set of buy prices - only notable for being the first price change we have had from Telstra in getting on for five years.....far too late and far too small to be of any real use to our end customers.....but much better than the nothing it has been in developing plans over the last four plans.
The numbers displayed in the neat symmetry of Excel always look impressive and the bottom right hand cell always gives me the optimistic feeling that we will achieve a sensible return for the efforts of a hundred people continuing to build a company of Exetel's size to a little bigger size by providing very low costs to several customer types in several different market places and therefore making a very small contribution to lowering the cost of internet services across Australia and therefore making Australia a slightly more efficient place to live and work. If only everything displayed in those thousands of cells would now 'just happen' it would be really great. Of course - that's not going to be the case; at least it has never been from January 2004 up until now.
As is always the case when you finish some fairly complicated, arduous and demanding set of tasks there is always, however briefly, a sense of accomplishment. In the case of developing a business plan that involves a significant number of services and marketplaces and a great many future 'unknowns' it also provides a degree of 'comfort' that you have carefully studied the current happenings and seriously examined the likely future happenings and have been able to produce a comprehensive view as to how Exetel may well perform in hundreds of different activities over a reasonably long period. Exetel is, obviously, a small company (therefore our planning tasks are far simpler than those faced by much larger organisations) and we have developed the basic structure of the plan over the past almost seven years so much of the detailed structure of the plan already exists and has been validated against each past month's actual results so there is a solid base of data on month by month performance over the past 78 months on which to base the succeeding twelve month's projections - but of course any future twelve month period in data communications is always different to any previous twelve months and the changes in all sorts of areas are unknown and can only be very roughly predicted.
So all planning represents a best efforts set of guesses and, as in every other year, has to be managed one day at a time and sometimes one hour at a time with changes to future months automatically generated as each month's actuals are entered in to the current month they project different results than those original 'shiny' and optimistic numbers change a long way from what you start each year with. Passing time is a cruel mistress to any optimism you may have allowed to have crept in to your original assumptions. However our financial plan has been a very good set of check points to guide us through the many problems and 'surprises' with which we have been confronted since 1/1/2004 and hopefully this version will be better than any previous version both because we have had a lot of previous experience and because more people have been involved in its development than in any previous year.
As could be expected, after operating a start up company into its 7th full year, there are more reasons for optimism than at any previous time. We really have, after so many years, managed to develop a better telephone support and problem resolution set of services for residential customers and will continue to improve the problem solving abilities of those services in each successive month. We have also completed the re-design of the residential network to provide almost complete redundancy in every 'node'....as well as completing the upgrades to the bandwidth to a level we have never achieved before.....and with the processes in place to continue to re-dimension the bandwidth at prices that are far lower than we have ever been able to achieve in the past. There are many, many other reasons for Exetel to feel more confident today than at any other time in our short 'life' and there are so many new challenges about which we need to feel confident.
So - the new year will begin while I am a long way away in some remote rural region of another country - I hope I feel as confident when I return as I do now when the temporary euphoria of completing the annual planning is not even a distant memory.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46