John Linton
....when you have too much to do in any given time frame.
Annette and I will fly to Sri Lanka later today to do the quarterly personnel and business reviews and to follow up on some new initiatives. We now have approaching 40 people in the Colombo office ad have completed the transfer of all residential services to the Colombo office as well as half of our internal programming and development functions. We have come a very long way since we started to 'explore' the possibilities of using work from home engineers in another country to offer 'extended week day support' hours up to 10 pm back in December 2005 and then hired the first two engineers in Sri Lanka in January 2005.
In retrospect it was a very brave move by three people who had zero experience in establishing an operation in a third world country and who were already over stretched in struggling to establish a start up business in Australia. It is less than two years ago (February 2008) that we went to Colombo for the first time to, with the aid of the Australian High Commission, meet the various people we would need in this endeavour and to, most importantly, meet with the people within the Sri Lankan government whose permission and contract approvals we would need to operate a business in Sri Lanka. That was a very fraught week with the guns and tanks everywhere we drove, the extreme heat, the barely understandable English spoken by many of the people we met (we couldn't speak a word of Sinhali) and the prevalent poverty.
We had between 7 and 9 appointments each day with different government departments, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, equipment providers, communications providers, banks, office fit out contractors and possible jv partners. By the time we left after six days of that we were mentally exhausted and quite bewildered but we had selected an office, picked a fit out contractor, signed an HOA with the Board of Investment, appointed lawyers and accountants to act for us and opened a bank account. All we had to do then was make it happen within 4 months and recruit the various people we would need to start up the operation and find the people from the Australian company to 'spare' to go to Sri Lanka to manage the training and knowledge transfer.
We went back in May 2008 to progress all of the various issues and, to our dismay, found that very little had progressed as far as our continual emailed correspondence had assured us it had - which we had thought may very well be the case but hoped it was otherwise - we didn't expect to find that so little had been done and by the evening of the first day back in Colombo even two very stiff scotches could not engender any sort of hopefulness. Nevertheless, over the next four days we managed to get everything back on track and managed to find an apartment to rent for the imminent arrival of the appointed Australian Exetel manager. By the time we flew out we had, somehow, managed to get all of the legal paperwork signed and had some hope we would make our July 1st dead line which we only missed by a week or so.
Our Australian appointed manager flew in at the end of June 2008 to manage the completion of the fit out and the installation of the communications services and to, most importantly, hire the first 4 people to be trained. Over the succeeding 15 months months we have grown the Sri Lankan establishment by an average of 2 nett (we made mistakes in hiring and we have had to get used to a very different 'culture' in terms of attitudes to careers and employment conditions generally) new people each month and have expanded our initial office space. We have succeeded in meeting the overwhelming majority of our objectives and while there is a very long way to go the successful operation of residential support facilities outside Australia has been an essential element in the continual growth and financial well being of the Australian company.
Hopefully, over the next 6 - 8 months we will succeed in meeting all of the remaining objectives and this month's business and personnel reviews are focused on achieving that.
We have come a very long way in well under two years in establishing a viable and highly contributive "off shore" entity that makes Exetel Australia more competitive than it otherwise would be.