John Linton ....and the decison making capabilities I once thought I possessed seem to have atrophied in to uselessness - or worse.
June continues to finish strongly in almost all areas of the business and hopefully that is a good omen for the new year that begins this week. I have spoken with several of our suppliers, our banks and various people involved in this industry over the past two weeks on business directly related to Exetel in most cases or business generally. The overall view has been that the past financial year has been at best forgettable and in several cases the worst they can remember and I share those views completely. If there has been a harder year in my commercial life then time has mercifully obliterated it from my memory. Undoubtedly getting older doesn't help and I think I am suffering from that increasing disability more than I had expected to. Whatever the reasons(s) I will be very glad to see the end of FY2011 on Thursday night.
So what does a really hard year actually involve? For me the past year has been very difficult because it seemed that every decision I made, no matter how much knowledge and thought I brought to bear on the decision making process, turned out to be at best ineffective and more often than not - just plain wrong. I cannot recall any period in my commercial life where I made so many bad decisions in such a relatively short period. So it seems to me that while general business decisions were very tough the key difference over the past twelve months was my inability to understand what was really going on in so many aspects of the industry generally and our small part of it in particular. Something that I cannot recall ever being the case at any time in the past.
Fortunately for all concerned, the way that Exetel has been constructed allowed my many poor, bad and just plain awful decisions to be corrected before they could do very serious damage. I have never thought of myself as someone who 'cracks under pressure', quite the reverse, but I have begun to wonder whether the past two plus years have been just too hard to have been effectively dealt with by companies and managements and financial resources of our size? Perhaps there really are problems that are too big to be dealt with by any but the largest and immensely strong organisations? I am a fair along the path of believing that is the case despite the fact that whenever I review the many things we have done over the years I don't see, even with 20 x 20 hindsight that we would have been better off making different decisions.
So, as we 'tinker' with the last bits of next year's planning it seems that business is slightly easier than it was at this time last year and that at least some of the people and service decisions we have made and invested very heavily in are beginning to produce positive contributions rather than just drain our scarce financial resources. I really hope that's not wishful thinking. How many of the decisions we have made that comprise this year's plan are as wrong as the ones we made over the past year? We will soon know.
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29 - the age my favourite aunt remained throughout my childhood