John Linton We now have 51 personnel working in the Colombo office and the operation is beginning to 'mature' as an overall company as it continues in to its third year of operation in the World Trade Centre offices as opposed to the 18 months of operating as two then four work from home support engineers it was before that. One of the highlights was presenting two of the inbound sales people with their first sapphires for making 500 residential sales so far this year.It is a pretty good achievement in the circumstances that have prevailed this year and several other members of the inbound sales team will almost certainly reach their targets before the end of this calendar year.
Exetel has moved a long way from having no sales people as it did for the first, over, five years of its existence to having 30 out of its, almost, 100 employees today (ten in SL and 20 in Australia). Current plans will gradually move the percentage of sales personnel within the company from around 30% to over 60% by the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 as we continue to find new ways of dealing with the changing conditions in the Australian marketplace and continue to move towards a business model that will meet the different demands of the second decade of the 21st century - always assuming that we are able to do that of course. Listening to the SL sales girls/ladies dealing with incoming enquiries is a pleasure (when not in meetings I sit close to them). The knowledge they display and the 'sweetness' of temperament, courtesy and voice timbre with which they deal with the people calling in is quite extraordinary.
When we moved to the new offices earlier this year we fitted the floor out to house 95 simultaneous 'seated' employees and reserved the remaining 20% of the empty floor space on a first refusal basis to be take within 2 years. The extra space would give us room for 120 people without 'hot desking'. When we took the additional space the WTC (East tower where we are) was barely, if that, half full. Now it seems to have filled up very rapidly with new tenants taking whole floors or in at least one case multiple floors as the positive effects of ending the civil war filter through to the international business community. There is a lot more building work going on around the central areas of Colombo and even more solid rumours that the new freeway to the airport may be completed within my life time.
We finished reviewing most of the current issues yesterday (less than 2 or so hours needs to be spent on the remaining issues) and will begin revising the CY 2011 business plan today with the aim of finishing it by tomorrow. We will concentrate mainly on the areas of outbound sales, programming services and higher and wider levels of support. We will also discuss how best we can supply call centre services for other companies as we are getting a slightly increasing number of 'nibbles' each month in Australia from 'semi serious' enquirers (I am excluding the idiots who think we are stupid enough to give them information on what we have learned). One of the semi serious enquiries was from a company that wanted to look at us undertaking a 2 year contract to establish and manage a 350 seat call centre in the WTC for them. Early days but it a 'core expertise' we now have that very few other people/companies possess.
So, while none of these opportunities may prove to be realities they are solid indications of how we need to change the current operations of the company moving forward to address the difficulties currently extant in the Australian marketplaces and the even greater difficulties that will come in to existence over the next 12 to 18 months. It should be an interesting day.
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