John Linton ......or is it just my inability to properly understand situations in the first place?
Perhaps its just old age and all the failings that the decades bring - particularly in the technology industry where everything keeps changing - where everything continues to change, if not on a daily basis, then more frequently than I seem to be able to adequately deal with these days.
I keep dithering on when Exetel should start one or more of the initiatives for promoting the HSPA service in regional Australia. When we finally got HSPA operational last August (after an almost three year search for a wireless solution) we had plans to spend up to Christmas 2008 getting every aspect of provisioning, support and 'positioning' correct and then seriously promoting the wireless service in late January 2009. Well, as you may have noticed, it's late April 2009 now - very late April, and we haven't started.
This is partly due to the delay in finding a suitable Yagi antenna and mainly due to not bringing ourselvs to make the financial commitmets to obtain a sensible price for the modem. Pricing from Optus is far too high for us to be able to widely promote the service and compete with Optus Retail and Optus/Virgin (let alone Optus/Dodo with their 'free' approach to the market and their) together with those entities saturation advertising.
My friends in the EU can solve our modem price roblems but we don't have enough money to pay for 10,000 modems up front even at their very, very low asking price. We can get modems by buying direct from one of several factories in the PRC but their prices,while much lower than sourcing from Optus, aren't really at the point where it makes financial sense to base a major (for Exetel) promotional campaign on a price point that would hurt us financially but what is, we think, needed.
Some time in the next few days we will get the 'final' quotes for the units we are interested in and will, more importantly, get the delivery into Australia dates and then we will make the tough decision of whether we are brave enough to invest heavily in buying in bulk for our own needs (both aerials and modems) and also fund the cost of promoting the services. As the total costs will be somewhere in the vicinity of $A2 million over the period of the promotion it isn't a decision we will find easy to make (while $A2 million is probably only a week or so of advertising for our competitors it is a huge investment/risk for us).
The other risk is our view that we will concentrate our 'promotional' activities in the 700 (of 1,013) regional/rural areas that fall outside even the most exaggerated version of the Krudd NBN2 wild fantasy. Our thinking is summed up here - but we reached this conclusion amost a year ago:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25389258-7583,00.html
While making perfect sense as a strategy we are struggling to develop interest in terms of finding suitable agents in those areas and have now got to decide on a Plan C for making that a reality - if in fact it is possible at all which based on our lack of success to date is a pretty big question.
So, perhaps I'm not the right person to be playing a major part in making these decisions to risk so much money and resources attempting to outperform the other 'me too' offerors of HSPA services around Australia? In the 'old days' I wouldn't have given these problems a tenth of the time and 'thinking' I now do and would have made a go/no go decision months ago. By dithering and procrastinating all I've managed to do is to waste any 'early bird' advantage Exetel may have had and also given away much of the 'novelty' value.....
,,,though we have learned some new methods of procurement which, if we are to sustain a wireless business over the coming years, will be essential to build and then widen our 'lowest cost provider' abilities to always provide the lowest end user plan prices which will be very necessary to deal with the 'me tooers' that will soon infest the HSPA marketplaces in the ways that the ADSL marketplaces now operate. To maintain a cost advantage in the HSPA marketplaces will need something that should be impossible for a very small company like Exetel to achieve (and something we could never achieve in the ADSL marketplaces we operate in).
So having already made the brave, financial and operational, decision to invest in an operation in Sri Lanka and yesterday parting with close to $A2 million of our scarce personal resources to settle the purchase of new office space for Exetel in North Sydney is added another 'brave' decision on the future direction of Exetel in the residetial marketplaces in which we operate (not forgetting the quite considerable investments we have started to make in building a corporate sales and support business).
Sometimes there are just too many major decisions (on top of the myriad day to day, but significant, decisions required to operate a small but growing business) for any one of them to get the required concentrated and detailed attention required.
Then again it's more likely to be a slowing metabolism and a fading mind.