John Linton ....it's a beautiful Sydney Autumn day and it's good to be home. A bonus of the plane arriving late was no queues at immigration or customs and our luggage was on the conveyor by the time we reached the arrivals hall - we were out of the airport less than 15 minutes after the plane reached the terminal which was a new record for an arrival at Sydney airport.....pity about the horrendous traffic.........a 20 minute trip took almost an hour.
For the first time I can remember since I was a child I didn't sleep well on the flight home so am not really prepared for 'return to work' as I type this over a late and light breakfast. I scanned the main business and industry news to see what might be new or different but didn't see anything of any importance. Same with the overnight emails and blog and news feeds. It seems most likely that the first days of the school holidays and the impending public holidays of Easter and Anzac Day are having their usual effects.I realise that Australia only has 10 (or is it now 11?) public holidays each year but the ones we do have seem to be able to punch well above their weight when it comes to reducing the effective number of working days in the months in which they occur.
In the remaining time In April we have a great deal of 'catching up' to do in terms of determining how we address the ongoing marketing depradations of Telstra Retail. Our efforts to date have been somewhat effective but are nowhere near effective enough. However they are encouraging enough for us to believe it may be possible to reduce the churn aways to Telstra Retail to a 'trickle' if we can just find the right combination of plus factors. The 'initiatives' we have tried so far this month have had minimal success and we need to re-examine those failures and 'turn them around' without further delay. The reviews in Colombo pointed out a number of mistakes and that was useful (in a discouraging sort of way). It's way past time to understand whether there is anything we can do or find better uses for the resources and money.
At the same time we need to increase the attractiveness of our wireless broadband, residential VOIP and SMS plans. We have begun to see more of the Siemens VOIP handsets being sold with unit sales gradually rising week on week. However we are not making the progress we had hoped to and we need to do something about that well before the start of the new financial year. VoIP is a very strong product as delivered by Exetel (highly reliable with no voice quality issues) and we should be able to make it available to far more customers than we currently do.
I don't know whether this is going to be possible to achieve in four days (minus the hours already lost today) but that's all the time available so its pretty self defining. Speaking of which - I need to stop talking about time shrinking and get on with doing something positive rather than talking about how difficult it is.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46