John Linton Exetel had a very productive day yesterday - always a nice 'event' - and, for some reason, I feel a 'lightening' of the constant pressures that have been oppressing every aspect of the ADSL2 (and to a lesser extent the ADSL1) marketplaces. My experience in business is limited to IT/Communications and only recently with the residential side of providing communications services so the last two or so years have been a long and very difficult learning experience for me - and a set of very unenjoyable experiences at that. I cannot 'pinpoint' any specific instance/incidence/statement and perhaps its just the fact that I have moved on to giving more time to considering the other aspects of our business that has lifted the dead weight of constantly contemplating how much more money we can afford to lose providing residential services that has produced the lifting of spirits....what ever it is ...I'm grateful for it.
Perhaps it's just the fact that it's Melbourne Cup day which means the day 'ends' around midday as far as outside contacts with any business related matters are concerned. Exetel will have a mild lessening of work related matters with a late lunch brought into the office and a few drinks culminating in watching the race for most of us and the corporate sales people 'winning' a lunch out at one the fashionable restaurant/bars in the CBD by over achieving their very high October quota. So not much work will be done either at Exetel or at a remarkably high number of businesses around Australia today which is no bad thing when you consider how hard the vast majority of Australians work compared to their European counterparts.
I was considering the impact of the amount and the effectiveness of work done in the 'average' Australian business of Exetel's size after a meeting with the CEO of a company yesterday afternoon who approached Exetel about some sort of collaboration(s). I keep some rough and ready records that I use to measure the effectiveness of Exetel's personnel in Exetel's overall efficiency and have done since we started the business. Our peak, unsurprisingly, was our first months when Steve, Annette and I worked for nothing and we only had one and then two other employees and therefore all ratios of revenue to personnel costs were very efficient. Our ratios (revenue to number of personnel; revenue to personnel costs; revenue to total operating costs) continued to improve throughout our first five years of operation and have held pretty much at the highest levels we achieved for most of the past 2 years but have been declining very slightly since their peak. So, in quite specific terms I have a very good idea of how efficient Exetel operates and what causes the decline we have experienced over the past 18 months.
In talking to the CEO of a similar, in some ways, company to Exetel it became apparent that we might as well live on two different planets in approaches to efficiency aims in business.....Exetel operates between two and three times more efficiently than he does. How does he stay in business? He buys far better than we do and makes up for the much higher operating costs by buying similar services at $10 - $12 a month better than we do. So we were having a preliminary discussion on whether it would be remotely possible for us to provide operating services at our costs and us to receive buying cost advantages in return. A simple enough proposition but one that would almost certainly be impractical without one company assuming control of the other....something that is on neither company's current agenda.
It did cause me to consider just how far the work ethic in Exetel has declined over the past two years and whether or not this was both inevitable and even a good thing to have happened. Clearly, at least from my personal view point, Exetel is still a very highly efficient company and, at least compared to the few companies I have some knowledge of, is more efficient by quite a long way than any I'm aware of. However we need to become much more efficient in our buying endeavours before that operating efficiency becomes an advantage. Somehow I have obviously never learned to buy efficiently and therefore it seems that the least efficient person in Exetel is me.
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