John Linton .....until the beginning of the new financial year....so much still to do.
We will have a very busy end of June with all the usual planning tasks as well as a more than usually busy amount of engineering work plus some extraordinary discussions with some surprisingly large, for us, third party discussions on a range of 'new opportunities'. We also have a fair bit of re-organisation to do both in Sri Lanka and in Australia to put ourselves in the best position to take advantages of the opportunities offered in the coming year. While every second half of June is extremely busy, this year seems to be busier than usual. Sales, virtually across the range of services we sell, continue to be strong in June meaning this so-so year will end up more strongly than it began - which is encouraging - rather than the reverse - but I am not putting too much emphasis on current performance as a guide to future happenings in this progressively less 'readable' set of markets in which we operate.
We will finish off most of the FY2012 planning work in terms of revenue targets month by month for each of the services we offer by COB this coming Friday with the final 'discussions' held with the relevant people over the next three days. After the past two very tough years we are, again, aiming very conservatively in all areas other than corporate and small business data and voip services. Just how aggressively we plan our business offerings has yet to be decided but the growth this year, when we were planning ultra-conservatively, allows us some degree of optimism. Overall we could look at FY2012 in very significant growth terms if we did a straight line extrapolation of progress in corporate and business markets over the past six months - but that is a dangerous (although very pleasant) thing to do and we will almost certainly opt for a much more conservative approach.
Like all companies that have invested very heavily in new employees over a period of time the real issue is to determine how much more productive the people hired over the past twelve months will be than in their first twelve months. We are just over two years in to the program of moving Exetel from a provider, predominantly by revenue,of residential services to a provider of corporate and business services. In our planning two plus years ago we had, perhaps optimistically, planned a three year period for this to become a reality.While significant progress has been made towards this objective we haven't progressed as much as we had originally hoped for and it is going to be quite complex to meet our original goals given where we will stand at the end of June. So determining how much our newer people have learned and how much their skills have developed over the last year is the final 'call' we have to make over the next few days as to what exactly we will aim for in 2012.
I am inclined to be more aggressive than we have permitted ourselves to be for the past three years.
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