John Linton .......but good managers of people are required to build good bigger businesses.
We held our October board meeting yesterday and noted the easing in 'pressure' of the effects of the Telstra/etc marketing campaigns on our overall residential business results continue to be more than offset by the increased revenues (and therefore profits) from business data links and VoIP services. We had a particularly nice white and red wine which I couldn't participate in due to the ongoing effects from my violent illness in Sri Lanka some three plus months ago. It was a very pleasant lunch and we covered all the usual topics noting the general slight improvements that had been achieved over the past month due to our concentrated efforts.
Our main preoccupation at this board meeting was the continuing personnel expansion of Exetel in both Sri Lanka and Australia. Depending, of course, on what happens in the Australian market places we will need to acquire some 60 - 70 people over the coming 9 - 10 months which is a very, very difficult thing to do of itself (we currently have around 100 people which have taken us almost 7 years to acquire).The real problem is acquiring/promoting the managers this growth will require which our particular flat business structure makes more difficult to develop than more wasteful structures or different personnel acquisition processes. I have referred to this problem in the past but, obviously, have done nothing sensible about it and, despite my fervent wishes the problem didn't "just go away".
We discussed this and related issues for some time yesterday without making any more progress than we have made in the past - none. There is a possibility that we are being a bit too 'precious' in our definitions of what constitutes a good 'manager' but, even if we are, there remain pretty difficult situations to overcome. Whatever is wrong with our current views and attitudes we now have no more 'shillying shallying' time. We agreed to at least start our personnel expansion program 'immediately' so that we can make more rapid progress towards completing the overall changes to Exetel's business by the end of 2011. These changes include quadrupling our Australian VoIP sales and business support personnel and doubling our current Australian data link sales force as well as building three new outbound sales teams in Sri Lanka and adding two new Sri Lankan support groups......very, very ambitious and very, very difficult.
Acquiring personnel can never been done in a hurry and it is the most difficult of all business activities.We have been fortunate in the calibre of people we have 'acquired' to date and even more fortunate in our very, very high retention rates. We will need to use different methodologies than those we have so successfully employed to date to acquire/train the sorts of people we need now and I, for one, am not at all sure how to go about these tasks. It will be interesting to see whether we can maintain those two key attributes as we attempt to grow the number of people that comprise Exetel.
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