John Linton ......at least in a financial sense.
I added a 'news event' to the 'about Exetel' part of the Exetel web site yesterday commenting on the successful year, at least in terms of financial results, that Exetel has had in FY08. Steve, Annette and I also had a quiet 'celebratory' dinner to mark the end of the financial year and to congratulate ourselves for keeping Exetel alive, and increasingly financially 'well' through a very tough four and a half years. Very few start up businesses get to a fourth 'anniversary' and even fewer get much beyond that point.
June 2008 is the 51st consecutive month in which Exetel's revenues have grown (we issued our first invoices in March 2004 and therefore our first 'record' month was April 2004). I can't remember the exact amount we invoiced in March 2004 but it was much less than $A50,000. Invoicing in June 2008 wil be a little under $A3,500,000 and each month since March 2004 the monthly billing amount has increased in an unbroken succession. Of course, with every successive month being a record that meant that every one of the last 18 'quarters' was also a record as were each of the last 9 half years and the last 5 financial years. It is a pretty sight to see the bar charts of Exetel's revenue growth on a single page of the 'annual report'.
Exetel now has around 75,000 customers of our different services and the year's revenue will have grown 25% from the previous year to over $A36 million and we still retain the ratio of employees to revenue of 1:$A1,000,000 which, as far as I know, is easily the most efficient ratio of any company in our marketplaces/service types. Our 'experiment' in providing support from Sri Lanka has worked out well over the past two and a half years and our percentage of customers who buy more than one and more than two services from us has trebled over the last two years and has begun to escalate steeply over the past six months.
So we treated ourselves to a nice bottle of Champagne and an equally nice bottle of a very rare Margaret River red while eating a very nice dinner and briefly 'bathed' in the rosy glow of achievement while ruefully commenting on the fact that we hadn't given ourselves a pay increase since we started the business almost 5 years ago.
And that will be that in terms of the self congratulation and 'rosy glow bathing' as I was forcibly reminded earlier this morning when I updated my 'to do' list for between now and mid July and realised that I had more to put in place before I took off for a brief break than I could actually do. It was also quite 'sobering' to realise that there are only a handful of days before we start the new financial year with the much tougher (larger) month by month targets for all services and the significant changes that we will have to successfully put in place over the first three months of the new financial year to make those targets realities rather than a quickly amended downward set of wish lists.
At the moment Exetel has around 40 'major' projects to complete in 2008 in addition to meeting around 120 KPIs spread over the different areas of the business. As anyone who has been involved in managing a small business would know, you have to constantly change and improve almost every aspect of what you do just to 'remain where you are'. To grow, in any sense of that word, you often have to make significant changes to things that you are currently doing very well. So along with all the other operational and process changes we need to put in place we have to, like many other businesses, change some parts of our business that are already going very well.
Every aspect of any business can always be improved providing there are capable people involved in looking objectively at what is being done and then finding ways of truly improving how its done (as opposed to just doing it differently which, in my experience, has often been the case in past working 'lifetimes'). Probably the most important issue in improving things within any company is selecting the right person to make the changes - pretty obvious of course but there is a very big difference between a person who is great at making things work and a person who is great at making things work better - sometimes that isn't as apparent as it should be.
Exetel wil be managed via approximately 120 'kpis' in FY2009 and on top of that we have plans for almost 40 major 'improvement projects' in the coming year. If these projects are successful they should result in five interesting and easily measurable results for Exetel which, in no particular order of relative importance are:
1) Reduce TIO complaints from 40 per quarter in FY2008 to zero per quarter in FY2009
2) Decrease the cost of providing ADSL services by 15% by 31/12/08 from the level achieved at 30/6/08 and a further 7.5% by 30/6/09
3) Double the June 2009 revenue over the June 2008 revenue
4) Reduce the 'unplanned' personnel loss in FY2009 to 3% from the 6% achieved in FY2008 and the 9% achieved in FY2007
5) Increase the operating efficiency of Exetel from 1 person per $A1 million of revenue in FY2008 to 1 person per $A1.1 million of revenue in FY2009
Not particularly easy to achieve key management objectives and, right now, I think we will struggle to achieve them but they are my personal goals for the coming year.
I hope I'm able to write a blog with today's head line this time next year - come to think of it I will settle for still being here next year to write any sort of blog entry.