John Linton ........with still a lot to do to ensure 2011 gets going at midnight on 1st January 2011 in the best possible ways to ensure Exetel has the best possible chances of meeting the objectives we have not quite set for the coming year. So, the challenge is to get everything in place to begin operating while the majority of Australians are just getting their second wind at their various New Year's celebrations - not an easy set of tasks as we won't have the last of the 'bench mark' starting point data until the January bill run is completed in the early hours of the morning of January 1st 2011.
We have many operational difficulties to overcome if we are to first survive 2011 ans then grow our business in ways that will continue to strengthen it after the various depredations of the past two years. While our challenges are many and various, two stand out as being the most difficult. These are increasing the prices of our current residential ADSL offerings and reducing their costs so that they are no longer a financial and managerial drain on the company and finding a much faster way to recruit sales trainees and more experienced personnel for our corporate services. Everything else we do, or have currently planned to do, depend on addressing, correctly, these two major operational issues. I suppose the good news is that thee are only two issues to address instead of the dozen or so we have been confronted with in previous years.
There is still a way to go to address the first issue but the time to do that is now very, very short as we will need to advise our current out of contract residential ADSL customers of what their options are by no later than 2nd January. In 'gross terms' we have no real option but to increase our residential prices by $10.00 per customer as of February 1st 2011. We have looked at how this can be done most easily by us so that the customers concerned have the clearest possible choices and the simplest possible actions on their parts. We have been thinking about this for most of the past six months and have yet to finalise how best to accomplish this - this has to be done over the next four days. We have one scenario which will be the likeliest to be implemented which is:
Increase all ADSL2 Optus Bundled plans by $X.00 and include $10.00 worth of local and national calls and calls to Optus mobiles in the increased price. In addition offer the choice of bundling a low cost mobile plan which will provide a $10.00 discount to the current ADSL plan. This has considerable merit for those Optus ADSL residential users because their average usage of local, national and calls to Optus mobiles is around $10.00 a month on those call types so, for those users there is no actual billing increase with the 'extra' $10.00 for the ADSL plan resulting in a $10.00 decrease in the telephone call charges. If they then also take on an Exetel/Optus mobile they are actually $10.00 better off each month. So those are the sorts of things that we have been trying to put in place.
The on time and successful recruitment of 40 corporate sales and support people over the next ten months presents a problem of equivalent difficulty to resolving the ADSL pricing issues without the chances of some relatively simple to execute solution. It is an obvious truism that any company is only as good as each individual of which it comprises and therefore any company is only as good as its recruiting policies and the execution of those policies. Truism or not it remains an even more very, very difficult scenario when the recruiting is based on growing a new 60 person 'hierarchy' from the ground up with the ongoing development of the first people recruited an essential ingredient in building the three tiered 'structure' that will be required to ensure the last person recruited is as effectively inducted into the organisation as the first one was.
These two issues alone need more that the four days remaining to put in place the actions that have to be in place by 8 am on the 1st of January.
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