John Linton ....and the early orders from one second after midnight are off to a bright start.
The 'old' year finished very strongly with a new record for business data sales in a month being smashed by a last day flood of new orders reaching 130 new services by COB - 10% over the 'old' record. Business VoIP services beat the 'old' record by around 300%, mobile orders exceeded the previous record by a long way and even residential ADSL registered the best month's orders for the 'old' financial year. Overall June was an excellent month and there is no reason to believe that the first few months will not continue the current trends. So all is well with the world, as it usually is when one year ends and the new year has not yet had time to show any deviation from the plans that have been put in place for the new year.
When I reflect on it - I hadn't anticipated that I would still be working now. While I had long ago been forced to realise that I would not 'retire' from full time working life at 45 as my father did, nor did I expect to be still working late in to my 80s as my grandfather did, I had thought that I would not be working more than most people's understanding of a 'full time job' so late in my life. Like so many poorly organised people, particularly those who have old fashioned views about their obligations to those nearest and dearest as well as those for whom you have some resposibilities for in terms of employment or services provision, your obligations tend to leave you little or no time for considering yourself. However the overwhelming influence is that while you are enjoying what you do you tend to give no thought to not doing it - why would you consider stop doing what you enjoy most and swap it for something less enjoyable?
The only reason, at least for people I know and who come from roughly the same old fashioned era, is that body and mind begin to fail in ever more intrusive ways preventing you, on the one hand from physically being able to work the hours you once found no problem in doing, and, on the other hand your acuity is not as razor sharp as you once thought it was. Both those reasons are beginning to remind me that I cannot do as many things in a day as I did at some point in the past nor can I reach conclusions on what to do as quickly and as correctly as I once may have done. Age definitely does weary the living.
It's therefore a good thing that we have largely completed the extremely burdensome 'pioneering' work on changing Exetel's operations and directions. It was extremely difficult to set up our Sri Lankan operations and it was equally difficult to build our corporate sales force from 'scratch'. On top of those difficult and time demanding processes, managing an ISP over the past three years as the market reached saturation point and the predictable results of that situation which changed the Exetel business we started in January 2004 completely took an enormous amount of time. I am not saying those difficult and long working hour days have ceased to exist - but there is now different, and hopefully less time demands in managing the coming year's requirements. Perhaps that is a forlorn hope but there seems to be some basis for thinking that might be the case.
So like Pandora's box - when planning is not enough there is always hope as the last bastion against the sea of ills that it sometimes seems is the Australian communications business.
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