John Linton
......or is it just me that has no future?
I was mulling over what had happened over the last, almost, twelve months wondering why a year that I started with so much optimism turned out to be such a dreary slog with almost none of the 'easier times' I had looked forward to actually materialising. The few people I share such thoughts with outside Exetel feel about 2007 pretty much the same as I do. What went wrong?
While I could take comfort in the increase in monthly revenues for another 12 successive months I don't see that as being either why we are in business or something that was particularly hard to accomplish in a growing market place(s). It appears to me that we somehow faied to build on what had been achieved in the previous three years almost to the point, but not actually to the point, of becoming one of the 'drifters' - those companies in any field that do enough to stay in business but not enough to actually make any difference to the overall market or to their employees, customers or themselves.
I doubt that I'm suffering from 'depression' or even the tiredness endemic at the end of a hard year - but perhaps there are some infuences of that. I really began to notice these feelings when I tried to re-write the 2008 calendar year business plan overview which I always do between Christmas and the new year every year for more years than I can remember. I think I started doing this just before my second year as a rep at IBM (a few years just after the dawn of time) when I set down the targets I intended to achieve in my business, financial and personal life and wrote myself a narrative of how I should go about achieving them.
At the start of each year I've been either responsible for a significant part of a business or a whole business I've, of course, had to do this with a lot more thought and planning and a great deal more care than I put in to my personal planning. I can remember the years I didn't exercise enough care/caution very clearly and never wish to go through such times again.
Probably for the first time I can recall in more than 10 -15 years I have no good feelings about what Exetel , in this case, will be doing month by month in 2008. I don't mean to imply by those words that I expect that Exetel will progress in any lesser degree than it has done in the past four sets of 12 month periods but that as I write the 'narrative' for the year, and I'm currently up to May, I get no sense of excitement or even any 'frisson' of anticipation.
This is unusual because there is never any more optimistic or pleasurable time in a business year than when you plan and write the detais of what you intend to accomplish over the coming 12 months without the impediment of any actual results to stunt your optimism.
Maybe I'm becoming bored or 'stale'(it's been a very long time of working with no real break) or maybe I just look at the daily workloads and the sheer grind of making so much happen for so little real progress with dismay. Maybe its just old age finally demanding consideration and a realisation that the demands of running a start up bsiness into a fifth year are beyond, or are shortly to become beyond, my physical capabilities. There is something about working seven day weeks that eventually becomes too much for even the strongest and fittest person and I'm far from having either of those characteristics/qualities. Probably all of those things are true.
Having thought about it for a while I have come to the conclusion that, at least for me, the real reason behind my lack of enthusiasm is that providing ADSL services presents no real personal challenges and also no financial or other rewards. It's not that "anyone can do it" (that clearly isn't the case based on the huge number of failures by people who've tried) it's just that it really isn't that difficult to do and there certainly is very little reward, financial or anything else, in putting in the enormous personnel and financial efforts that are required in to doing it.
So this morning I 'mentally' tore up my personal 2008 business plan and decided that I wasn't going to waste another year of my life putting in so much time and effort for so little personal and family reward.
I don't know what this decision will translate into for me as an individual, I see very little impact on Exetel as a cmmercial entity, but Im going to give it a lot of thought over the next few days.