John Linton There is always something that seems to prevent me from reaching sensible decisions about some aspects of Exetel's endeavours and these 'road blocks' are occurring more frequently than I can remember in the past. Perhaps its simply that my memory is even more unreliable these days? Perhaps there are more complexities about Exetel's business and the market places in which we operate than there once were? For whatever reason it is becoming very annoying that I seldom reach a sensible conclusion having spent quite a considerable time thinking through a scenario or try to find the answer to some particular problem. It all used to be so much easier - define a problem - think it through over a few days and get a solution. For whatever reason that doesn't 'happen' lately.
Clearly either the problems/opportunity developments have become much harder or our combined reasoning abilities have become more inadequate. While its almost certainly true that saturated or changing markets are more difficult to address it seems to be something more than that. The particular issue that we are finding difficult to resolve is providing a really 'attractive' offer of communication services to small businesses. Over the years we have had no trouble in 'attracting' small business customers who basically use our residential plans for business purposes and we have many thousands of such customers. We have had a steady growth in small businesses who use our 'B' (business) ADSL plans that include various business services such as domain name hosting, email, fax, SMS via email and /29s as well as ADSL and more lately mobiles but we have not found a 'killer' offering to address that particular market....which we believe is very important to our future plans.
In contrast to our current difficulties with developing small business offerings our ongoing results of selling data and other services to medium/medium large companies continues to be very successful and the levels of success being achieved each month continue to grow - month on month. Why is it so? The most obvious difference is that medium/medium large businesses have, for years, been outrageously ripped off by suppliers to those markets and Exetel's business data services are often 50% less for a faster and equally reliable service (if the business is using a Telstra service they are often paying three times more than a faster service from Exetel would cost). Perhaps because the small business uses a residential service for ADSL there isn't the obvious financial benefit of paying a similar amount to get a service with more inclusions? That's as far as I have got in determining why we are not selling more small business services.
Whatever the reasons are we need to find solutions to them in the not too distant future. Brave words and I don't have any ideas at all on how to do that. In the remainder of August we really need to come up with something radically different to what we are currently doing but I just can't 'spark' any new ideas. Suggestions would be very welcome.
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