John Linton
Back in Singapore after the ghastly 2 am take off from Colombo and the three and a half hour flight that gets you in to Changi at 7.50 am feeling like you have just died and been resuscitated. Singapore's usual frightening efficiency saw us walk from our gate to an empty immigration hall and then walk to the carousel which delivered both our bags within two minutes of us reaching the belt. Our courtesy car driver was holding up a sign with our name on it and 11 minutes after exiting the aircraft we were on our way to the hotel....as I said - almost frighteningly efficient.
We finished up the SL review an hour earlier than planned and then had a long lunch with Steve over the Hiltons curry selection mulling over what might have been achieved and what we now have to do to ensure we meet the early 'mile stones'. Steve is staying on to work with the SL general manager and the head of customer support to continue the development of the video training/testing program on which we are going to base our hiring/training and development of the planned 100 new personnel we plan to add this year. It will be a tough ask but we see no other alternative right now.
Overall I think it was a successful trip in terms of company development and I am glad I participated in the sales training in Colombo. This is probably going to be the most important year in Exetel's history (if you don't count managing to survive in each of the past three years major achievements when so many other companies didn't). To make the transition from providing telecommunications services to mainly residential customers to providing services to mainly business customers is a very big change but we are on track to do that before the end of 2012.....of course a lot can happen over the coming twelve months and it would be very foolish to count any chickens prematurely.
I remember when we looked at the Australian market in late 2008 and first made the decision that we needed to move away from being dependent on residential sourced revenue (in the early stages of Telstra's assaults). It was an almost impossible to conceive decision as our residential revenues in those days represented well over 90% of our total revenues and it seemed like a pipe dream fueled by exceptionally virulent weed to think that we could develop the required presence in the business marketplaces that we believed we needed to do in the required time frame. Three years in to this series of programs/projects (and a whole lot of heart aches) we are looking at the start of the final phase.
We are still missing the last, totally vital, piece of the puzzle and of course have a huge amount of consolidation to do in the structures (both physical and personnel) that we have set up over the past 36 months. So I am going to take a brief three day R and R in the Lion City to try and write the blow by blow operating plan for making three years of extreme efforts turn in to a real investment rather than just a poorly thought out giant expenditure.
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PS: a knowledgeable sysadmin solved my blog problem.