John Linton
....."someone dropped a bomb somewhere, polluting all the atmosphere and blackening the sky."
....and along with "In the year 2525...." Zager and Evans summed up the more depressing outlooks of the late 1960s in those two top ten pop songs.
Starting up a small business in a highly competitive and ever changing marketplace often gives me the underlying feelings expressed in those two songs of so long ago - everywhere you look there seem to be unexpected problems and difficulties no matter how late in to the night you work each day.
But then, every so often, in the stress and ever increasing workloads and the seemingly never ending stream of major and minor decision making and the even more steeply increasing minutiae of being a part of the management of a start up business you have a day where you feel that maybe, just maybe, you've actually finally reached a stage where its not going to take every second of your waking day just to keep the company 'alive' and likely to stay alive tomorrow.
I had one of those rare days yesterday.
I'm not sure what made me feel that way, I don't suppose many people ever do know why their 'spirits' suddenly lift, but it was certainly helped by completing next year's business operating plan, having a brief meeting with Exetel's tax accountants that gave us a 'clean bill of health', having a board meeting that was the shortest ever as there were absolutely no issues that took any time or mental effort to discuss and, finally, at around 10 pm last night reaching a record ADSL order day that showed we were on track to achieve our ambitious plans to double Exetel's revenues over the coming financial year.
Over the past six months the order volumes for each one of the ten different services Exetel offers has gradually increased month on month. Some of the services have increased dramatically - such as the SMS from email service that has grown to over 300,000 SMSs a month and VoIP which has more than doubled over the last five and a half months. There have been much more modest growth, but continual growth nonetheless, in every other product and service we offer with a significant steepening in new/churn ADSL1 orders over the past two months and a doubling of ADSL2 orders in the same time frame. We have also seen, after a very slow start up period, a rapid increase in the calling card service take up as we have sorted out the early issues and have signed up more agents.
If we get the HSDPA service to market on schedule (Septemberish 2008) and if our estimates of what the take up for that service are anything like accurate we would expect revenue from October onwards to increase by around 15% from that new service alone. Similarly we hope that our much more ambitious plans for high end business Ethernet services, Australia wide with the new PoPs, will add significantly to monthly revenues.
Of course a lot of 'water has to flow under the bridge' before any of those planned events become a reality but I am, momentarily at least, feeling very good about the success so far of the changes we have made to boost our monthly sales of all services - sometimes it seems the initiatives you take don't seem to make any difference but, as always, it takes longer to see the results than you might like.
Not that any of those nominated 'events' mean anything in themselves nor does the 'feeling' actually mean anything at all in terms of tomorrow's realities....it's just that I haven't had many of those feelings over the past four and a half years and it was so overwhelmingly nice to feel that relaxed and optimistic and even a little self satisfied.
In some ways I suppose it also clearly demonstrates just how much pressure and stress there is in developing a business from the ground up (even for people who presume that they have the mental 'make up' to deal with really difficult scenarios over lengthy periods of time).
Naturally the business sections of the newspapers this morning were occupied with the latest round of pessimistic views about the 'fact' that there is going to be a recession in Australia and one that will be worse than the early 1990s - but I read through the whole of the AFR and the business sections of the SMH and Australian without any dampening of the 'inner glow' of optimism.
None of the above in any way lessens my view that the communications business in FY09 will be anything other than even more difficult than it has been in the previous two years for Exetel. I just, and maybe only briefly, feel that we have 'turned some sort of corner' and that the light at the end of the tunnel that appeared some twelve months ago really is daylight and it's now noticeably brighter.
Maybe Exetel can afford to give the working directors their first pay increase in four year and a half years in the not too distant future?
....perhaps not.