John Linton We had a very pleasant 'planning lunch' yesterday which could be regarded as just an excuse to take a few hours off from the slog of trying to work out how to make the required changes to the operating plan by involving other people in a discussion about some of the key issues....there were certainly elements of that. The food was as good as ever at one of our favourite restaurants and, to suit the occasion, we had some very nice wine and also had a, largely, productive discussion on two key aspects of what we need to do next year....increasing the technical expertise of our sales force and making more of the large scale opportunities we develop but don't close enough of - for a range of all the more obvious reasons.
Training generally is very high up our list of issues to be addressed at the moment with hiring better people close behind - as we have to hire more people over the coming year than we have done in any previous year and by quite a large number. If we actually manage to execute our current plans we are faced with hiring 60 or so new employees (a growth of 50% over our current numbers) and of running an ongoing technical training program for 100 people throughout 2012. These are not easy tasks for companies much larger than Exetel and, for a company of our size, they are more than daunting. So yesterdays lunch was aimed at discussing these issues in a very relaxed environment to come up with the building blocks on which we could attempt these tasks. I don't think we got as far as I had hoped (but then my hopes almost always exceed realities by a fair margin).
Involving new people in any process inevitably means that you have to go over a lot of background which takes time and adds nothing to where you are starting from. That takes a fair amount of time before you can realistically get to a point where 'new voices' can add different views - no problem - an inevitable process. There were some new thoughts introduced in to the discussion and some previous thinking abandoned in the light of different views expressed. So some positive outcomes. The issues, always, with any discussion (wide ranging or tightly focused) is what actually gets done as a result of the discussions. My long experience is that very little gets done as the result of most discussions unless there is someone controlling the follow up from the meeting.We will try and put in place a video based training program together with a 'white paper' covering some 50 technical topics together with an 'exam' for each topic which will trigger one on one follow up if the person doesn't 'pass' each topic. If this can be done it addresses many of the issues of constantly hiring new people across a twelve month period in two very different geographic locations.
So it will be interesting to see whether the three 'new' ideas that were introduced in the last one third of the lunch are taken further by their proponents or whether they end up with so many other ideas just words that get forgotten amidst the need to concentrate on day to day issues. Whatever the case we have 15 working days to make two very big decisions and a plethora of smaller ones as well as to write and re-write a considerable amount of documentation. Though I still don't know how to ensure we can hire better than we have done to date and I'm not at all sure how to put in place the required training processes....and a whole lot of other things.
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