John Linton How time flies when you're having fun - or totally 'immersed' in building a commercial enterprise from ground zero which is seldom fun but you don't have any time to consider that sort of thing.
It's been 51 and a bit months since we put up the Exetel web site and started to receive phone calls, faxes and emails. I was the first, and at that time, the only person working for Exetel so I had a total understanding of everything that 'Exetel' did and everything that prospective customers, and a month later, actual customers felt about and needed from the single (ADSL1) service that Exetel supplied at that early time. Fortunately, for both me and the prospective and actual customers, additional people began to work for Exetel from early March and the number of people employed by Exetel has slowly grown over the past 51 months from 1 to 35.
Exetel now has approaching 70,000 customers who use one or more of 12 main service types and a monthly revenue of approaching $A3.5 million.
I'm still trying to run the company the way I have always done and, to a large extent, remain relatively successful in doing that. However, if I remember the conventional personnel management processes I experienced while working with major multi-national companies correctly, the maximum number of people any manager can manage is between 6 and 8 and the maximum number of 'disciplines' for which any single manager can be responsible is 4. Obviously there would have been flexibility in such simple numbers.
My, current, business day revolves around 'managing' some 300 different aspects of Exetel and I'm of the opinion that I have reached the end of my abilities to continue to do that. Apart from the obvious time limitations (the day still has only 48 hours in it) the degree of detail that needs to be absorbed to retain even a basic understanding of what is happening now, let alone what should be done about what you then understand, is now too much.
It's very sad, in several respects, when you realise that your tiny company has outgrown your abilities to micro-manage it but that time has come for me. I'm not, for one moment, suggesting that the other 34 people employed by Exetel don't do an unbelievably good and creative job in delivering the incredibly good results that Exetel has achieved each of the past 51 months or that, in any way, the results that Exetel has achieved are, remotely, solely due to my efforts - they very clearly aren't. It's just that I have come to the realisation that Exetel is now, in the immediate future, going to have to be run more like a 'conventional' company than a 'start up' and that, inevitably, Exetel's 'culture' will have to change and that 'culture' change will be very difficult to achieve.
Some time in the next 2 - 3 months Exetel will have a presence in Sri Lanka and over the following 18 months there may well be more people employed by Exetel (Sri Lanka) than are employed by Exetel in Australia. Managing such an operation that has two 'operational centres 15 hours travel time apart will be far from easy and impossible to do in the ways that Exetel has been operated to date.
If we achieve the 'wishful thinking' objective of growing the total Exetel business to 150,000 customers over the next two years then the Exetel of 2010 will look nothing like the Exetel of early 2008; whereas the Exetel of 2008 looks pretty much the same as the Exetel of 2004 by way of comparison.
So, having done such a thing twice before in my life I'm trying to ensure that what I perceived to be the mistakes made on those two adventures are not repeated over the coming 18 months - I just wish I had a clearer memory of what the major mistakes were. I'm pretty sure that 'hubris' was a major error in the past and has to be avoided in executing any Exetel growth plan. The other major error to avoid this time is 'competing' for the sake of 'winning' rather than addressing competitor weaknesses as a simpler and more profitable way to grow at a planned rate.
We still have three months of this financial year's plan to achieve and, at the same time, complete the more detailed planning for 2009 and firming up the estimates for 2010 and there are more than enough 'uncertainties' to make planning even 9 months in to the future a very difficult task - let alone trying to sensibly plan 24 months in to the future.
The most difficult part of that, if indeed there are any parts that aren't overwhelmingly difficult, is to put in place the people management structures and career development plans for each person without which all growth planning is pretty useless.
Maybe there is a way of stretching each day to 54 hours?