John Linton ....and August will have ended in a 'blink of an eye' and a big bird will be winging us to Europe.
It's really good to have our delayed annual holiday so close but like most other people faced with that imminence all it really seems to do is remind you of how much you now have to pack in to the remaining four days. I didn't see much of Annette yesterday until quite late in the day as she made several shopping trips in between which she remained in her study trying to deal with the ever growing amount of business issues that only she can do. I remained chained to my key board for almost the entire day trying to finish the revisions to the September targets and the other trivia that takes up what passes for a life.
September is, usually, a better month than August for communications companies with the no disruptions due to school holidays and many business customers getting their new financial year budgets approved. For residential business (which is also usually negatively affected by school holidays) it is also the 'dog days' before the various large suppliers begin their 'Christmas Specials' which are always introduced to prop up any miscalculations of planning for the first quarter and to try and alleviate the non buying effects that Australia's annual shut down from mid December to mid January always brings.
So, September is usually a pretty nice month with sales increasing over the first two months of the financial year, assuming you've got everything right, and before the peak business sales months of October and November and the subsequent panic promotions of 'Christmas' by those companies whose targets for the first five months of the financial year are behind expectations. So, for most communication companies I have been associated with, September is pretty much a 'bell wether' month when, if sales don't lift from their July/August average levels you know you have some problems - if they do lift then all you know is that you will face increased competitive actions from those companies that are missing their planned targets for the then coming three months.
Hence the freneticism in one part of Mosman at the moment. Deciding just what the current figures may mean in terms of adjusting the September targets across the product/service range is a demanding set of tasks. As we consider whether or not to accelerate, and by how much, our investments in our business/corporate sales, provisioning and support personnel the current sales performance levels are a vitally important indicator - at the lowest micro levels. In other words the actual performance of each of the sales people we have hired over the past 2+ years needs to be assessed in terms of actual success (or failure) in revenue generated and how it has improved over successive quarters. Easy enough to do in simple sales/month and revenue/month so far terms but far more difficult to do for the real meanings in terms of future performance across a range of key indices.
So the next four days will be busier than usual - though sometimes I wonder how that can be possible.
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