John Linton ....because, for whatever relatively 'anal' reason, Annette and I are
going to Sri Lanka next Saturday to do the quarterly reviews and
business review and when we do that I feel compelled to do all the work
scheduled for while I'm away before I go. The reviews and other
activities in Sri Lanka are very time demanding and there is not a lot
of time available to deal with Australian issues and what time there is
is impacted by the time difference. The Sril Lankan operation has made a
great deal of progress over the past 2 plus years and it has essentially met
all the objectives we had for it and exceeded more than a few. I was
always concerned about the obvious difficulties of setting up such an
operation (recruiting good people, then retaining them, transferring the
knowledge, and then making sure it had been transferred correctly,
building the supervision/management skills) and the 1001 other issues
involved in setting up a complex operation 'remotely'. This time we will
begin the process of the "next phase" which is far more difficult than
what we have done to date and will require doing things I have no
experience in.
In the mean time we have to accomplish a significant number of
things over the coming 5 days the first of which is ensuring that we
meet our September targets. We had slightly over target months in July
and August and it will be very important in this, the most difficult
year I have ever seen in my business career to get September 'over the
line' so that we can 'lock away' an on target first quarter. I
understand that it makes very little difference numerically/financially
whether a number is slightly above or slightly below 100% but the impact
on 'morale' is quite another thing. So our first 'order of business'
each day is to do whatever is required to make that happen.
We also need to finalise the new mobile offerings (which is dependent
on getting documentation from our supplier) so that we can offer $10.00
off ADSL plans for each mobile a customer transfers to Exetel. This is
proving strangely difficult but I am hoping to resolve the outstanding
issues before the end of this week. While the actual number of ADSL
customers who may want to do this is completely unknown to us - we have
to make some attempt to reduce the ADSL churn aways to Telstra who use
bundling to a good effect in persuading customers to move to Bigpond via
discounts from bundling.
Although I have rejected cheating wireless broadband customers by
under provisioning the HSPA interconnects I will give our supplier one
more chance to show why "what everyone else does" is actually ethical by
agreeing that two of our personnel would meet their 'marketing experts'
to go through the mechanics/numbers in detail. If they are persuaded
then we will re-look at the plans and see whether or not our collective
'consciences' can be salved. I doubt we will find a way to do this but
it seems prudent as well as courteous to make this time available.
The two most time consuming tasks to be completed are our responses
to the two companies offering different degrees of 'partnership'
opportunities. This may be very difficult because of the amount of
detail needed and therefore the time taken to double check the
information to be provided and to understand the detail provided to us.
As I said previously the amount of 'marketing budget' and retail
expertise on the one hand and the amount of customer base on the other
hand are very attractive to us - if the actual scenario works out to be
workable - something all previous such 'offers' have signally failed to
do.
So a lot to do in not a lot of time.
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