John Linton ......although that has to be a key starting point - the real problem is having predicted accurately being able to achieve what is required in those accurately predicted circumstances.
I have spent most of this week going through the preliminary steps that are required to produce an operating plan for the coming financial year. In my methodology, which is quite simplistic, I go back to the equivalent time last year's assumptions and decisions and examine what happened to those assumptions/decisions in terms of actuality versus forecast. The most disturbing result of the last few days was that virtually every assumption we made a year ago has turned out to be very accurate but the plans we made to address those assumptions proved to be, largely, inadequate. While we already knew this having slogged through this most difficult year in Exetel's existence, it is chilling to see that while you can pretty accurately define future market conditions and likely 'events' you are so powerless to address them in any ways that will mitigate their impact.
So it was a 'sobering' week for me and not encouraging in believing that the next six or seven weeks will be any more useful than the equivalent period last year. Without plunging too deeply in to the 'gloom and doom pool' it was significant that we actually managed to grow the business, pretty much in the directions we wanted to over the almost 12 month period but not, by any means, as much as we had planned and we certainly failed to achieve our planned targets in residential ADSL and residential wireless and only really 'marked time' in residential mobile and voip services. The 'bright spots' throughout the year were the business market developments which, although not meeting the targets planned for them in May 2010 continued to progress month on month throughout the period.
In beginning to make decisions on what could be possible in FY2012 the major issues remain pretty similar to those of a year ago. While it would perhaps be overly pessimistic to consider things might be as tough or tougher than over the past twelve months that is, at least, a possibility and any sort of planning would have to assume that could be the case. So a pretty big down side to any sensible business planning for the coming year. On the positive side are the fact that the company is a 'year older' and the initiatives we took two years ago have generated more experience in our inexperienced personnel new hires over that time.......and well over half Exetel personnel have been with the company for less than two years. Another 'plus' is that there are significantly less competitors than there used to be but that carries the negative that the remaining competitors are bigger than they were two years ago.
Overall, I don't think we made any progress over the past week or so in determining the key objectives for FY2012. Worse than that though is that such thinking tends to become increasing conservative as you assess the likely problems that may be encountered in the future. It very much depends on your mind set at any particular time when you try and address future issues and if you allow yourself to become too conservative then you will almost certainly fall into the 'self fulfilling prophecy' situation where you anticipate the worst and therefore 'plan' to make it happen. Conservatism should never play any real part in planning anything - apart from anything else it is demotivating for the people who will be involved in carrying out the plans.
One of the things that we may use with residential ADSL plans is to not meter downloads in the 1 am to 9 am period. The new plans we currently offer just have very large download allowances for the month which are more than 99% of our users download but I continually hear about "the negative effect of not offering free downloads like every other ISP". ( a bit galling for Exetel who pioneered the whole off peak concept back in March 2004). I don't see how it appeals to anyone with a 200 GB down load plan but it might be worthwhile.
The only benefit in considering things from a conservative view point is to be able to see just how dull things would be if you ever planned anything with a conservative outcome.
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