John Linton
.....and I'm really sorry to be going back to Australia after having had a wonderful three weeks of pure self indulgence and mental relaxation. However it's only the hard slogging work that pays for ability to have a holiday and hopefully the 'slog' content will begin to reduce over the coming months as more of the management and decision making processes are transferred to Exetel's developing management group.
One very positive sign was the August monthly figures that were developed while we have been on holidays which show a record profit for the month (by a very large margin) and the September forecast (with the month nearly over) indicate an equally good result. Exetel has never been run with profit in mind although we have made a small profit each full financial year of our existence - in fact we have made a profit each quarter since July 1st 2004 despite the incredible difficulties almost all small start up businesses face in their early years. As a company with an over riding business objective of providing any service offered at the lowest price/cost in the Australian market, Exetel will never make much of a profit from its base operations and it is a long way away from developing 'subsidiary' operations.
Our business planning to date has been based on meeting all financial demands as they fall due and to generate enough profit to pay cash for all equipment and other facilities that the company requires to operate efficiently. This has now also been applied to the office premises we operate in Australia. In this way we have operated the company with zero borrowings, of any kind, and therefore we have reduced our 'risk profile' in terms of our suppliers which has gradually helped us (at least with most of them) to get progressively lower pricing - probably better than our small size would normally allow us to get - paying your bills in full and on time for over five years is an unusual characteristic at the lower end of the Australian communications industry, and quite possibly, at the higher end of the industry based on some of the 'gossip' you hear along the way.
As we never plan to make much profit we have to be 'eternally vigilant' in terms of controlling all costs and that was recognised before we created the current version of the company back in November/December 2003. My personal experiences told me that people, no matter how trustworthy or how dedicated and competent, cannot be relied upon to do the drudgery day in/day out that is required to ensure that any commercial entity bills its customers correctly and, just as importantly, gets billed by its suppliers correctly.....this lead us to our never ending automation programs for every aspect of our business....which has served us very well to date. Automation has ensured our small company remains small in terms of administrative personnel and also has ensured we have not paid, literally, several million dollars in 'incorrect' supplier invoices.
Almost 6 years of unremitting attention to detail has resulted in a very, very strong operating company with exceptional operating efficiencies and, together with 66 months of unbroken monthly growth has now delivered a small company that makes solid profits each month and therefore, for the first time, gives us some sort of 'breathing space' to develop our business more rapidly - with one proviso.We need Exetel to take advantage of the efficient and profitable platform that has been developed by now growing much more rapidly than it has ever done in the past. To do that we need to recruit really good people who are not only capable of doing an 'immediate' job in a specific position but to be able to grow very rapidly into supervisory and management positions more rapidly than is generally prudent.
The major problems in growing for small companies is that all of the early employees work, of necessity, in an operational equivalent of a 'benevolent dictatorship' where the owner/operators make or 'review' all decisions from major to trivial and early employees are often/always constrained in their own development by getting used to that environment (of course if they find such an environment unsuitable then they leave). Exetel has been very fortunate with its employees in as much as almost none have left Exetel over the past almost 6 years and absolutely none who have grown into key positions with key knowledge. For Exetel to grow past the small company it is today (and in the new directions the current kerfuffle about an 'NBN2' makes essential) the current decision makers are going to have to let go an awful lot of control and involvement and find ways of keeping the company as efficient and as sharply focused as it seems to be today.
We need to recruit something like 36 net new employees in Australia over the coming 12 months (more than double the employees we currently have in Australia) and approximately the same number in Sri Lanka. The recruiting process itself will be extremely difficult but it will be relatively easy when compared to the ongoing training and management of the 'new look' Exetel. Personally, the only time I tried to do such a thing I failed miserably with disastrous results for all concerned - there were other circumstances but the major issues were my inability to make such a transition work. I look at what I have now got to participate in at Exetel with a great deal of trepidation if not outright fear - which is not an emotion I have any experience of - and is almost certainly an exaggeration of how a prosaic business process should be viewed.
So, it's time to pack and make our way to the airport with the relaxation and calmness that three weeks of idleness induce already beginning to fade.