Friday, April 24. 2009You Know What Your Trouble Is Don't You......John Linton ....you're much too aware of far too much detail about your customer's problems. ....said to me yesterday....believe it or not.......by a senior executive of a major supplier to Exetel. It had never occurred to me before as we built Exetel over the past five years on the basis of providing second by second information systems that, in my opinion, are the basis for being able to manage any commercial endeavour and used as many of today's modern 'business tools' and processes to complement that information system that "too much information" could be a very bad thing. That 'snap your head back' comment was made in response to a, I admit, fairly tersely worded email I had sent and a subsequent telephone conversation addressing my communication. It was made by someone I have known virtually all of my business life and whom has never had any problems with speaking 'frankly' (and truthfully) on any subject - perhaps why we have remained in contact for such a long time. After we concluded the conversation I thought about what "being aware of too much detail" meant and I can see how it can be a problem in a business - I had just never noticed it as Exetel has 'drifted' into placing itself in that position. My complaint that elicited that response, and I can't be specific, was that it very much appeared to me that the supplier was not taking enough care in its provisioning policies and, it appeared to me, was obviously not provisioning various services across different parts of Australia to levels that were appropriate. I cited a list of incidents across several different areas as observational support for this contention and concluded by saying that he must be aware of this situation (via his own reporting systems) and if his own reporting systems were so inadequate then he must have had similar complaints from other wholesale customers....to which his answer (which I believed) was that until I had raised the issues he had no knowledge of any problems of the type to which I was referring at all and certainly no-one outside or inside his organisation had raised any such 'problem'. I believed him when he said that he wasn't aware of any such problem and that no other wholesale customer had made raised the issues with his company. His comment was that no senior executives of any of his wholesale customers ever raised operational issues at such a 'trivial level' and he was pretty sure they had no interest within their own company of dealing with such matters. Fair enough - it was his closing comment that caused me to question what I have been doing for a fair while now. That comment was - "why was I concerning myself [at my "level"] with what were obviously transient operational issues that either were already being addressed or would be addressed over time and were an ongoing, never to be resolved at any particular moment in time, part of provisioning an ever growing network with constant fluctuations in demand". ...and of course he was quite right. If we had never put our forum in place (and then closely monitored it) or if we had never put in place the ticket/fault resolution statistic trends I, personally, would never have become aware of the current issues or all of the other (and yes many, if not all, were transient - depending on your definition of transient) issues that have been the cause of so much 'friction' with our suppliers over the years and even within our own small company - we certainly wouldn't have spent so much time communicating with our customers about them. In simplistic terms it's very easy to decry this view (that all problems will get solved as quickly as circumstances and resources permit by the people responsible without any interference from "higher management") with the management school idealism of "a customer's problem is everyone's problem" but, anyone who has been in a commercial enterprise for more than ten seconds understands the limits of the validity of that view. The real issue is that in a business such as one supplying network services to residential users there is a very good case to be made for no 'senior executive' involvement in operational issues and any 'large' company would certainly not have this problem. Small/tiny companies like Exetel will have this problem because 'senior management' is the same as 'operational management' in many if not all parts of our operation so we can't have the 'luxury' of (highly competent and therefore very expensive) management 'layers' to divorce the owners/'senior management' of the company (who also work long hours in many of the operational aspects of the company) from almost every detailed problem that occurs within the company. It is a problem - the problem being that owners of small companies such as Exetel do react to customer problems (real and imagined) too directly and do spend too much time on doing that. I'm sure there's a solution if only that we grow too tired to keep doing it and take the 'punishment' that will involve. Perhaps now is the right time to do that? Trackbacks
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Sometimes the problems that affect your customers are simple technical issues that any technical support person can address, that is easy.
What happens though, when to get to a solution someone has to make a 'political' decision, either based on ideological or financial criteria, on behalf of either the customer, your supplier, yourself, or a combination of the afore mentioned players? In the big companies the technical support people don't feel that they have the ability to make the decision and there is too big a gap between them and whoever does have the power and inevitably the problem does not get fixed. Your small business model solves that problem, while you remain small. As you grow to a medium or even a large company, the secret will be to make sure that you have processes in place to make sure that everyone "cares' about every customer's issues, and that if they need a political answer to an issue , that they know how to deal with it. In this way, John will be able to pass on the 24x7 responsibility of micro managing the business and begin to enjoy the fruits of the labours of the last 5 years, in building a successful 'small' business, that we love to be customers of. Over the last few months, your blog has hinted at you being tired of the effort that you have to put in. Please don't decide to give it up by selling the company. No-one else understands your business philosophy (you say that yourself), but rather, like you have installed a sales team to help you, please start delegating some of the responsibility to a management team and teach them how to run the company for you. Please, please, please....... Comment (1)
lawrie, selling the business now is a wise business move, the NBN is going to destroy a lot of exetel's value. I am sure that exetel will continue to grow with the proper financial backing.
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I have never had any intention of selling the Exetel business - personally I doubt that it's actually worth anything to the sort of people who are currently involved in the communications industry in Australia.
I found the comments of an employee of a large company to the owner/operator of a tiny company incongruous in that the statement itself indicated how little the person making it actually understood the various imperatives of busines models. Yes, I am aging faster than the faster years account for - it is extremely tough running a start up business at any time and even tougher at my advanced age. However, I am not naive, I did understand what the issues would be before starting Exetel and have not been 'surprised' at how much more difficult it is to 'play this game' in your 60's rather than your 30's. No fool like an old fool. Comments (2)
John, At our age can we change that much? would we want to change that which is part of our basic nature (& strength). Lawrie has some good points, particularly his last sentence.
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I also think your dedication has lead to more die-hard Exetel customers. Personally, I can say that if it wasn't for your dedication you put into resolving those Optus backhaul issues a few years ago (up to and including sending out a Unwired modem till the matter was resolved by Optus), myself and the rest of my extended family probably wouldn't be with Exetel now...
Having said that, like Lawrie said above delegation of certain aspects of your business running to others within Exetel may be in order if you feel worn out by it all. I know James in his Exetel blog is doing a bit of soul searching/wondering what he'll do next within Exetel after leaving Sri Lanka and getting married... Food for thought. T. Comment (1)
I have been looking for an "assistant" for almost a year now but have not been successful in that 'search'.
I am very aware that I need someone to look after some of the aspects of the business that I am beginning to find simply too much to fit in to even a very extended working day. The issue is simply this - I care deeply about, and fully understand the importance of, the 'trivial'details of operating a small business - I have never found a suitable young person who feels the same way. Comments (2)
Criticizing attention to detail by whom ever it was you were talking to is all well and good, seems to me attention to detail and "doing it right" will in the end win out, what your friend didn't say I bet was how many customers have walked because of some minor stuff up and no one cared!...look after the cents and the dollars will take care of themselves....
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