John Linton
I was looking at Exetel's recurrent billing figures early this morning (Exetel bills for all recurrent services on the 1st working day of each month). It's one of the most enjoyable activities of the month as Exetel's recurrent billing has increased each month, without exception, since we sent out our first recurrent monthly bills on March 1st 2004. We chose to bill in this way, rather than cyclically billing a customer on the day of each month that their service was activated, for a number of reasons which included the need to make the customer's awareness of DSL monthly usage and therefore any excess charges easy to display and therefore control.
The new financial year has got away to a very promising start with the latest recurrent monthly revenues up 41% on the same month last financial year and the monthly figures displayed as a line graph have a pleasing unbroken Northward heading aspect to them. As I said, a pleasing way to start each monthly billing day. The pleasurable feeling isn't long lasting and the "fearful symmetry" (with apologies to William Blake for cheapening that phrase so crassly) of the last 44 months of that trend line inevitably introduces the thoughts of what has to be done to maintain it - which raises the further issue of "but - is it too late to be maintained?".
There is an inbuilt tyranny of trend lines that continue Northward over a protracted period and, to a lesser extent - but no less true, there is also 'deception'. The tyranny is easily understood in that no responsible manager wants to front up to a board meeting and try and justify why revenue has fallen from the previous month/quarter.
The deception is much harder to come to grips with. A continually upward trend is visually pleasing but it conceals the fact that the results for any current month are the results of the cumulative actions taken in past months, often years, with recent actions only marginally affecting the continually growing 'dead weight' of customer hopes, expectations and "punishment" accrued from all past experiences and actions. Like a giant container ship the actions needed to turn or slow it have to be taken long before any actual turning or slowing becomes apparent to an observer.
Similarly the actions needed by the manager of a business to grow (or prevent slowing of growth) aren't those that can be taken 'now'; they're the results of a whole lot of actions taken in the past with 'current' actions not yet affecting the total business in any meaningful/measurable way in comparison. So I take little comfort that Exetel is being 'run correctly' at any point in time because, in my experience, the correctness or otherwise of today's decisions (and tomorrow's and the next day's and so on and on) won't be known for some months in to the future and sometimes far longer than that.
Of course, a North trending graph is infinitely preferable to one going South or East!
So the monthly cycle continues; first check point that the planned revenue and profit growth is on target over the past month and then endlessly think about what needs to be done to ensure every aspect of the business (for which there are no simple graphs) is being run to continue to allow that trend line to be maintained at its planned rate of increase on 1st November.
The pleasure in reviewing the monthly billing results seldom lasts beyond the first cup of coffee before being quickly shoved in to the background by the considerations of buying better and developing new services. "Plugging" the actual results in to the business plan at the start of each month is the starting point to see how well/badly the assumptions in the overall plan were/are. Then the endless cycle of looking at each aspect of the business begins again.
I take some comfort from the trend lines but I'm still unclear as to whether they run me or I run them.