John Linton It was a very interesting week and, largely, very positive in many ways....considering the various 'challenges' of these difficult times. One of the things that really impressed me in several difficult circumstances and three difficult situations was the calmness and effectiveness with which different people, both in Australia and in Sri Lanka - perhaps my concerns at the speed of development of our very young personnel is misplaced and they will all live up to their potential for which they were hired in the first place. At the end of the day high intelligence combined with effective training is an unbeatable combination though not always easy to sustain in terms of hiring policy and 'forgiveness' in the early stages to make such a policy work in most environments.
Personally, I had several interesting meetings with two major suppliers a potential 'partner/investor', a major new customer and a very interesting potential new supplier........in between the multiplicity of tasks and reviews that tend to fill every available minute in the day. Although we have invested a considerable amount of money, at least by our own modest standards,in Exetel (which is everything we have) we have never had any money at all to promote the company in any meaningful way nor have we had the money to even make operating the business 'comfortable'. This has never mattered in any real way but it has meant that our growth of an average in excess of 25% each year for the past 6+ years has been via word of mouth augmented in the business markets over the past 18 months by growing an outbound corporate sales force.
So, I was particularly interested in discussing a possibility of working with a 'partner' who has the money that we have never had and a lot of experience in retail marketing. It may all come to nothing but of the approaches we have had over the years it appears, at first sight, much more sensible than most. It would be nice to have the 'promotional dollars' we have never had and to use a totally different approach to promoting our services to a very different set of market places. It's far too early to tell whether their is a real match between the two, very, very different, organisations but for once there is some sort of chance.
The meetings with the suppliers (one over a very pleasant lunch) were not specifically productive but could result in some new/better opportunities. We will have a meeting with the third major supplier next week and then be in a position to decide if there are any 'different' things we can do or approaches we can take in dealing with the difficulties in the current residential marketplaces we currently operate in. We were unable to find a way of providing lower priced wireless broadband services because we couldn't bring ourselves to do "what everyone else does". However we think we will be able to lower the cost of ADSL services by bundling an Optus mobile telephone offering fro those customers who like those sorts of bundling ideas - apparently a lot more than I would have thought. Whether our current users of the Vodafone network will want to change suppliers is something we have no idea about.
So a week of talking about major changes in almost every area of how Exetel does business with the rest of the time more than adequately filled in with the work required to run a $A60 million dollar business in difficult times. Although it was mainly talk we will begin to implement the first of the possible changes before the end of September.