John Linton .......but then it almost certainly never was.....even outside baseball in the major leagues. So the second day of the new calendar year passed quietly enough with no surprises and the obvious 'tidying up' will have to wait until tomorrow with the first three days only useful in pointing out the more obvious inadequacies of the most obvious 'mistakes' made in the very short term 'planning', or lack of it, with the major assumptions untestable at this early stage. We will do some minor adjustments tomorrow and then get on with the rest of the month attempting to make the first month's target in the new scenarios we have put in place - always a very interesting time of the year.
I have some personal objectives that I need to achieve over the coming months of this 8th year of Exetel's existence - some of my choosing - some enforced on me by circumstances and 'domestic' influences. The major personal objective is to reduce the punishing working hours that have been involved in being part of a start up business and then a barely beyond start up business in a set of the most difficult marketplaces I have ever experienced. This has meant working 80 to 100 hour weeks for all of the past seven years with very few breaks throughout that time. I hired a 'researcher' at the beginning of 2010, who has worked out very well, but that didn't lessen the working hours despite removing those tasks - all it did was to provide more and better information on which to make decisions which because of the higher quality of the information took longer to make.
I am hoping for more positive results from hiring a Sales Director as those tasks take at least one third of my time and I am aware that the time I give to these key activities is nowhere near enough and of nowhere near the quality that's required. To hand over these responsibilities (and the authorities that go with them) to a 'newcomer' is going to be very difficult and helping that 'newcomer' adapt to Exetel's speed of decision making and then implementation will be a challenge that will need to be well managed.....because I don't think it happens in many companies in our industry; and this will be a year of making more decisions than usual and then needing to carry them through more quickly than many people will have experienced in their previous working lives.
We have an immense of amount of work to do based on our business plan changes and if we are to accomplish what we have set for ourselves then it will need the transformation we have been making to the general operations of the company over the past two years to 'bear real fruit' over the coming months. Growing a management capability from basically new graduate hires over the past seven years has been a major challenge all by itself. However, from my 'insider' observations it has slowly come in to existence but the real tests are yet to come. I am confident that the individuals concerned have the intellectual and personal abilities to perform successfully in more demanding environments ad that the 'culture' that has developed within our small company is conducive to more rather than less success than may exist in other, very differently, managed companies.
As always, time will tell.
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