John Linton It has been such a 'slog' participating in the Australian communications business for so long now that when you have a week without any 'downs' and so many 'ups' you begin to remember why you have spent so much of your life involved in it. Not that anything particularly good happened but nothing bad occurred and everything else was very positive. I haven't had a week like that for a very long time. We even got the new NTT IP transit installed after more than two months of 'delays'. We had the first week with over 30 new corporate sales and had our best week for mobile sales since we began that program. There were many other small, but very pleasing 'wins' of that type which seemed to increase the 'smile levels' round the company by a fair amount.
Perhaps it was the generally happy and optimistic atmosphere around the company, both in Australia and in Sri Lanka, that allowed us to make two fairly important decisions that we had been hesitating about for some months - increasing our floor space in both countries. Such decisions are obviously based on what we see as our future needs and our business plans have always shown that Exetel has to grow in new directions which will need more people than our Sydney space can sensibly accommodate. The Sri Lankan decision was more complex because we have enough space to accommodate our current and planned personnel levels until later this year but the end of the civil war has seen a rapid increase in multi-nationals returning to Sri Lanka and business office space of the standard we need is clearly becoming scarcer.
We also promoted two of our longer serving people to positions of much greater responsibility in anticipation of a more rapid growth of the overall business. Larry was promoted to Director - Sales of the rapidly expanding Colombo based sales operations and will return to Sri Lanka at the end of this month. He will become responsible for over seeing the growth of the SL sales teams from the current 20 people to a planned 108 people by this time in 2012. This will be a fearsomely challenging but very exciting time in the development of the SL company generally and equally exciting for everyone involved in it. In many ways I envy Larry this fantastic opportunity.
We also promoted Paul from his longstanding position of Manager - Provisioning to Manager - Operations taking over the role and workload that I have carried for most of the past five years. Paul's knowledge of our interfaces to all of our suppliers and all of our customers who have some sort of problem with the infrastructure they use is extensive and he has a more intimate knowledge of those procedures and processes (and the people involved in them) than anyone else in the company. He will now be given responsibility for all other similar processes within Exetel. Apart from recognising the really excellent work that Paul has done over the years it will be an immense relief to me to get some time back to do other things that need a lot more attention over the coming months.
Now we have had some time to analyse the latest billing figures we also achieved a very important milestone - the 'profit' we make from business services slightly exceeded the profit we make from residential services for the first time. This coincided almost exactly with the two year 'anniversary' of the current program to intensify our efforts in business services and their various marketplaces. We have steadily built that capability from one corporate sales person two years ago to 24 people today - almost half way towards the original plan of 48 people by late 2011. In many ways a gratifying sign of planned progress.
So, a much more enjoyable week than almost every other week since October 2008.
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