John Linton
I attended the Australian Deloittes "Fast Technology 50" awards lunch yesterday. I seldom go to these 'networking' functions but I figured this one would be useful if only to hear the key note address. This proved to be a correct assessment with the key note speaker (a person who'd built a company from ground zero and sold it within ten years for $A300 million) giving a good address and making some telling points.
A lot of the information provided by the Deloitte speakers and the actual "Technology Fast 50" publication was also of value and interest as it was always likely to be. It was also good to spend a little time in an 'atmosphere' and with people completely different to those you spend every second of the day with - with the best will in the world you have to lose objectivity in doing that.
As at all such functions I got to talk mainly to a Deloitte staff member but, for once, I got some realy good ideas and was impressed enough to request a follow up meeting to see if it would be practical for Exetel to put in a novel version of an employee share scheme program. We have been trying to find a way for our key personnel to share in the profits made by Exetel, now there is some real prospects of there being some real profits to share, and I'd never heard of 'shadow share' schemes and other versions of profit sharing programs.
The other thing that impressed me, and you may well say "no sh** Sherlock", was the fact that the real money to be made by small companies, such as Exetel, is by not doing what we are doing - re-selling someone else's services and giving almost all the money from our activities to those few suppliers while carrying all the risk and working so hard for a bit better than a break even resut. There were so many examples of that in the one room it was a little bit overwhelming.
So many of the companies there were started up with a good idea and if they sold something then all of the money was gross profit as the 'product' cost nothing other than the time and effort of turning the idea into something someone else would pay money for. One of the original intentions of building Exetel was to develop the management software for both the technical network functions and the actual major business 'indicators' that would, of themselves, become a saleable 'product'
By and large, over the past four years, we've done that with not really that much to be done to 'prettify' our main control and management tools in to a suite of highly advanced but very easy to use functions that would assist any other company better manage its network and server functions and, as far as I can see, the major 'health' issues of any commercial enerprise.
So, and ths may appear very odd, I almost certainly scrapped all of the in progress planning on new projects for 2008 (which have been part of the development of the Exetel business over the past 4 years, in a time of less than 15 minutes and reminded myself that the original objective of building a 'perfect company' wasn't to become and remain a reseller of someone else's services but to sell our own unique servces using 'Exetel' as the 'demonstration product'.
Doubtless there will be some 'middle path' to be found but, at least for the moment, I am again more closely focussed on what attracted me to going through, one more time, the hellish events, back and mind breaking working hours and the nightmare problems that are invariably involved in creating a new company from a 'greenfields' starting point.
I came away from that lunch more focussed, encouraged and happier than I've been for some time....and I haven't said that on many Fridays over the past four years........