John Linton ........is 'spirit reviving' after all.
Due to mix up in dates we found ourselves in the Blue Mountains overnight with nothing to do but enjoy Darley's excellent cuisine and eclectic wine list and chat amongst ourselves in on of the small dining rooms with the Edwardian decor and a real open fire crackling away quietly to itself. We had worked up an appetite by walking down to Echo Point and admiring the views of the Megalong Valley while resisting the idea of undertaking the trek out to the Three Sisters so late in the afternoon.....we hadn't left Sydney until after lunch and had the normal problems with the short stretch of Parramatta road forced on anyone trying to use the motor way out of Sydney in the general direction of the mountains.
It was quite col and the brisk breezes added wind chill to ambient to redden the cheeks and make the fire in our bedroom and the dining room not as de trop as it may seem. We had chatted about the usual long term married couple type things on the drive up to our hotel and over dinner we talked more about the business which is an inevitability between people who work together as well as live together. We re-hashed the board meeting topics of the previous day and re-discussed the needs of moving Exetel towards new objectives at a much faster pace than we have been able to achieve so far. Annette has always held much harsher views than I have/do about many aspects of business life but we both agreed that our major problem remained the development/acquisition of 'visionary management' who would see and act beyond the immediate needs of their positions.
The impositions and restrictions that are obviously present in any start up from 'day one' through and beyond the first years of any company's life are well understood by both of us - this is not the first time we have tried to build a company that is very different to the ones it competes with.....and we failed to find a sensible way round this issue/problem in the past. This time we have incorporated at least two differences in approach; but so far at least we have seen no real changes in the circumstances in which we find ourselves and Exetel. That re-assessment took us through to the main course by which time the effects of the pre-dinner aperitfs and the wine had more than begun to weave their magic effects of dissolving all difficulties and making any suggestion sound infinitely more promising than the cold light of dawn would subsequently show it to be.
Over the past few months there have been three other companies that have approached Exetel to buy us out (for effectively zero of course). One of the things that has interested me is that each of the people who have approached us have shown an almost insouciant confidence in their ability to take over running Exetel and do it infinitely better than we currently do. Now, I don't dismiss the possibility that anyone of any business common sense could take over the operation of another company and run it much better than we, with all our limitations, have been able to do over the past almost seven years. When I have asked them why they think they can do a far more effective job they haven't been able to be specific in any respect except to mumble about economies of scale and inherent synergies - in other words - nothing at all.
So over dessert and coffee we drew up a list of all the current aspects of the company that were really wrong and needed fixing immediately. Over the best part of an hour we came up with nothing - except a large capital injection would make life much easier but as we didn't have any more 'spare' cash we scratched that off the list....leaving us with no 'action items'. It's obvious what this means. We either run a perfect company - which we know is simply not true - or we lack the objectivity to sensibly analyse Exetel's and our own failings. Perhaps the second point is valid.......except we seem to have done OK for almost 7 years so why would we have suddenly lost the abilities that have allowed us to achieve whatever it we have achieved?
The excellent food, the superfluity of wine and the drowsiness inducing effects of an open fire all contributed to a very pleasant dinner and discussion and I only wish I had written down some of the more brilliant sounding ideas which this morning's gentle drive back to Sydney have failed to reproduce.
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