John Linton's Personal Musings

Dear Dad,

I can’t believe it has been two short years since you left us.

Just as it was last year, you are still missed by so many people. Not just your family at home, and at Exetel, but also our suppliers, and frequently people I’ve never met, but who have been impacted by you, for the better, in your different jobs and roles prior to Exetel. To me personally, it’s always heartening to hear another story about you, as everyone who has met you, seems to have a funny John Linton story – normally filled with quite a few expletives!

Again, as it has always been, so many great memories of our times together, which I will always cherish, and I will be forever grateful for all the help you have provided me to be better at what I do, and I know people like Raymond, Brendon, and Clarissa (to name a few) share my sentiments regarding how you give people opportunities, and nurture them to be better at what they do, as you always believed in everyone.

Exetel as you know, is on the cusp of its ten year anniversary, and I can hear you saying “that’s a long fucking time”, but a lot has changed in the last seven months, and I’m certain you would be very happy with these changes, not to mention that the company as a whole had good revenue and profit growth, with the corporate sales teams smashing their targets! Moving into our tenth year, as the last major family owned and run ISP in Australia, there are some very exciting opportunities ahead for Exetel, specifically with the NBN now becoming a reality for residential customers. With Richard at the helm, we will see Exetel be a more major player in the NBN, and general telecommunications landscape moving forward, for the betterment of Exetel, its staff (in Australia, and Sri Lanka), and ripped off Australian comms users.

As always, I miss you, as do the rest of the family and many others, but I know you are at the equivalent of Aria/Quay in heaven downing some Dom and having a good time.

Your loving son,

James

Dear Dad,

Last February, I wrote and spoke about, the difficult days, the family and I faced at the time of your passing.

At this time, it was surprising to see the number of emails the family received about you, and also even the media articles, but what was most surprising, was the realization of the incredibly large number of people whose lives have been touched for the better, by either working with, for, or just knowing you over the years. I always knew you had an impact on people, just not this many!

Personally, this made your passing a little easier, knowing the positive influence you have had on so many other people, the industries you helped innovate, and also the small flora and fauna charities that received funding when larger charities and even government organizations would just ignore them.

A year on, there are still difficult days, and I still can’t believe you are really gone. I miss you more than ever dad, and think to myself, that this is just another one of the tests you have set for me. I see you everywhere I look, be it your usual seat in the board room, or at home sitting on the couch with your laptop working away. I still even look over at level 4 reception hoping to see you come over, and ask me your usual questions of “what will you sell today”, and “what have you sold”. Unfortunately reality sets in, and you are gone, but I still take solace that you went so quickly, enjoying life to the fullest, as you always did.

I am thankful every day for the relatively short time you were my dad. I could not possibly, nor could mum, Andrew, Catherine, Keren, or Vicki, hope for a more loving, caring father and husband. Despite the short time we spent together, I have so many fantastic memories of you and the time we spent together, which I will always treasure, and knowledge and experiences in life and business, far beyond what I could have ever hoped for. The knowledge and experience I have, would not have had possible without someone as unique and special as you were. You taught me well dad, and hope you are proud of me.

You left your pride and joy (Exetel) on a good course, and although we have had to make some changes to various products and services, it is still very close to the company you founded, with the same ideals of providing the best possible services, at the lowest possible prices, without compromising on quality. In fact, in the year you have been gone, revenues are up over 22%, and in the last quarter, corporate revenue was up over 65%, and this continues to track upwards. Regardless of any figures, it is certainly not the same without you, and I still hope, wish, and pray that you will come back, and I am certain that this is echoed by everyone else at Exetel.

I know you are looking over us all, as you always did, and I will always miss you, and know that everyone at Exetel, and countless others miss you too, but we are all better for having had you in our lives.

James

The last few days have been some of the most
difficult I have ever had to go through, and I know this is equally hard for
the rest of my family. However, dad always looked for the positive in every
situation, no matter how dire, and he certainly would want us to focussing on
the positives right now. In hindsight there was really no better way for dad to
leave us. He was the centre of attention at a lovely restaurant doing what he
did best. I really won’t be able to do a
great man like him justice, but for the next few minutes, I would like to tell
you a little about the man who I have had the absolute pleasure of calling dad
for the last twenty eight years.

My dad has always been there for my family, doing
everything possible to make all of our lives that little bit more special. As
well as my family, I see many people in this room who he has also affected for
the better. The most important lesson he ever taught me was. If you want to
succeed in business, you need those around you to be successful, only then will
you truly succeed. Just like at home, dad always did what he could, to help
anyone that worked for him, and truly believed in giving inexperienced staff
opportunities where others wouldn’t. He was always there when any of us, family
or otherwise, needed any help or advice, and nothing was ever too much trouble
for him, no matter how busy he appeared.

For such a busy man, he was very persistent and
never gave up. His blog is a small demonstration of his persistence, and over
the last four and a half years he wrote 1,649 individual articles. He
originally started it after a bet with a colleague who bet him a bottle of the
whiskey of his choice, if he was able to write a daily blog of at least 700
words for a one year period, with five days grace for travel and other
eventualities. He well and truly won this bet. His blog is something my family
and I are so thankful for. It is a collection of his thoughts, and is filled
with advice, insights, and reminders of who he was. It is surprising the number
of emails I have received, and comments on his blog over the last few days.
From people who, although never met
my dad, felt like they knew him through his daily musings, and just like me,
their morning coffee ritual has changed forever.

As well as a collection of his thoughts, his blog
was also a place which will forever provide me with a laugh. Particularly his
commentary on Australian politics, the
people that make this up, and the nicknames dad had for his good friends in the
Australian Labor Party……

For someone who has worked in the technology
industry his entire life, he wasn’t the most technologically literate person around. Often having quarrels
with his various laptops at home, and the TV, and despite the fact he ran a
telecommunications company never used a mobile phone and thought Iphone’s were
a wank.

Speaking of entertainment, you might be interested
to know that my well read father, was a fan of action movies. Some of his
favourites included the first Indiana Jones movie. Where Eagles Dare with Richard Burton and a very young Clint
Eastwood, and the first two Terminator movies. He also really enjoyed a movie
called Fever Pitch, about his favourite football team Arsenal and their
championship winning season in 1988-1989. His favourite line from this movie
reminds me a bit of him, and it was. Please, just fucking fuck off, which is
what Colin Firth shouted out of his window when someone pressed his doorbell
during the last 60 seconds of a Liverpool Arsenal game. However, last but not
least, his absolute favourite movie of all time was Top Gun. I guess just like Tom
Cruise in Top Gun, both were Mavericks that finished on top.

He truly has been an inspiration to me. Not many
people can be given a choice of two different countries, and end up in
Australia a little younger than 18. Working at Woolworths Marourba sweeping
floors, dealing blackjack in illegal casinos in Kings Cross. To ending up
signing some of the largest deals in IT history during the 1980s, outselling
Apple, IBM, Dell in the 1990s, and lastly managing one of Australia’s largest
internet service providers.


Yes, he had a very successful life, but despite all of this, he was still the
best husband, father, and friend any of us could ever have hoped for. I will
miss my father, manager, and best friend. He always made time for me, and
pushed me to do better, without it really looking like I was pushed. I miss you
so much dad, and I’ll finish now with a George Bernard Shaw quote you used to
say to me, which I think best describes you, albeit with a few changes.

“Some men see things as they are and say why – John
Linton dreams things that never were and says why the fuck not.”

Continue reading "We Will Never Forget You...."

Yesterday my dad was doing what he liked doing best. Eating at a nice restaurant, drinking nice wines , and talking about the state of the telecommunications market in Australia, and the various companies that make this up.


At lunch he suffered what was thought to be a mild stroke, and was immediately taken to St Vincents hospital. He was conscious in the ambulance, responding to their questions, but when he got to the hospital he had trouble breathing and they needed to put him into a medically induced coma and put him on a ventilator to help him breathe. Unfortunately it turned out to be a very intensive stroke and there was nothing the doctors could do, without killing him in an operation or leaving him severely brain damaged. So last night, with most of my family present, his ventilator was turned off and a few hours later he passed away peacefully.


This is the saddest day of my life, I have lost my dad, my mentor, my boss, and one of my best friends.


However dad would not want us fussing over him, he would want to know what we have sold, which was actually one of the last things I said to him. He would also want Exetel to go on as he had planned for it to. He put in a place a strategic plan, so we need to move on as he had wanted us to, and remember him for the great man he was.


If any of you feel like buying my mum and family flowers, I would ask that you instead make a donation to his favourite charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; http://www.rspb.org.uk/

James Linton

January finished with a bang with 18 corporate sales on the last day and residential sales recording the highest monthly intake for 18 months - which is quite something for a January and a 260% increase over last January. All other products and services were well above last January and all but two showed very strong gains over last December. So an excellent month to start the new year in almost every respect. Now for the hard stuff.....repeating those excellent January results each month for the rest of the year.

The 'trickle' of fibre orders (NBN, Telstra and Opticom) has shown some sign of increasing over the past 2 - 3 months and we will re-look at what we can do to improve the 'look' of the services we offer to the small areas currently covered by fibre. Opticom has tried much harder than either NBNCo or, of course, Telstra to provide sensible pricing that might allow a wholesaler like Exetel to offer realistic pricing but many barriers remain in terms of set up costs and contract lengths. We will re-address these issues this morning to see what, if anything, we can do to improve our residential fibre offerings.

Over the balance of this week we will also look at what we can now do in Tasmania, New Zealand, Corporate VoIP and selling to the top 500 corporates as becoming major sources of new revenue for Exetel. None of whatever efforts were made last year resulted in any real progress but this is a new year and we need to do new things - and do them much better than we did last year. Planning, which I would once have considered an Exetel strength, seems to be 'falling by the wayside' as our current business volumes grow, and the demands on time caused by that growth, become greater. For whatever reason, we need to address detailed planning, in more detail, than we currently seem to be doing. Perhaps too many people at Exetel have got used to 'things just happening without understanding just how much detailed work has been done by other people to "just make things happen"?

Whatever minor 'successes' we may have enjoyed over the past eight years, and they have been few and far between in the wide sweep of telecommunications in Australia, we need to become far more successful in the immediate future and beyond. The 'landscape' we now confront is very, very different to what it was in January 2004 and so is Exetel, both in size and 'composition'. Over the past eight years we have developed some pretty effective capabilities but, equally, we have also lost some capabilities we once had. To meet some of our more ambitious objectives (and they are only modestly ambitious in the grand scheme of things) we will need to do many things much better than we do them today and we will need to develop far more 'doing' people to make the most modest of our ambitions become realities.

Like any relatively sensibly directed company we have far more opportunities than we have been able to develop people to address. Like any other relatively sensibly directed company we need to find more people who can take responsibility for new opportunites with the enthusiasm and dedication (and above both of those the competence) that our 'old' people have done to make whatever we have accomplished to date happen so quickly and so well. As with everything in commercial life "it's the people - stupid". A good January is something to be pleased about but that 'inner glow' flickers and dies almost as soon as it is engendered. Exetel's reality is that unless we quickly put the right people in place to make the most of the opportunities available to us we will have substantially wasted much of whatever we have managed to achieve over the past eight years.....

......I wish I was much better at my job and was a lot younger.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

......what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again - there is nothing new under the sun.Those 3,000 year or so old words are so apt they might have been written for today's Australian telecommunications industry financial reporting periods.

The last working day of the month with nothing to be done except to see just how much icing will be added to the cake. One of the new Sri Lankan sales reps has sold nine data links so far in January and it would be great if she could get to ten in a single month....an unheard of achievement in only a fifth month on quota. We have been told that we will receive the first 1,000 mbps pure IP order today - which will also be a major milestone in that newish sector of our business. There are also two other very large corporate orders that may well come in today as well as the end of much corporate order 'surge'. Residential ADSL orders have already broken the January record by a long way as have new wire line services - so well past time to focus on February.

February always poses challenges for reasons other than it being the shortest month of the year. In the corporate business these challenges are 'state of the buyer's mind'  mostly with the hangover of uncompleted work in the previous December being caught up in January and then a hiatus inevitably seems to follow. Partly this is due to 'new thinking' engendered by the Christmas break but mainly it seems to be due to budgets and revised pans and the belief that there is up to June to make any further decisions for the financial year. In the residential businesses competitors seem to assess what went wrong with the first half of the year (for those for whom it did go wrong) over January and start various programs to make more frantic attempts to reach their full financial year targets in early February. This usually results in increased advertising together with even more esoteric 'special offers'.

One of the 'changes' we expect to see is a renewed 'marketing effort' by Telstra Retail. Over the last three months their advertising and marketing expenditures seem to have dwindled with the ratio of churn aways to churn tos moving more and more in Exetel's favour. There is also a noticeable level of Exetel customers who churned to Telstra Retail returning to Exetel after their two year contracts are up and the financial and other freebies that 'encouraged' them to churn are no longer present. That is particularly satisfying to us as it indicates that Telstra doesn't have the money to continuously buy market share from a company like Exetel but it will continue to 'weaken' the higher priced ISPs.

The other changes that we expect to see in the very near future are to Optus own internet offerings and what they offer to their larger ISP/mobile wholesale customers. From the little we can observe, Optus, together with iinet and TPG, have had less than stellar achievements over the first six months of the current financial year. It will be interesting to see what those three companies report in the half year results - I expect the entertainment value I used to get from Eftel's half yearly tissue of misdirection will be more than amply made up by reading what Optus, TPG and, especially iinet's "spokespeople" are going to regale their investors with in their half yearly dissertations.

I am looking forward to February.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

I had a pleasant weekend and residential ADSL sales were the highest they've been on any weekend for over two years which contributed to the pleasantness. It is nice having Catherine 'home' from the UK on a two week holiday and catching up with her general and IBM 'news'. My years at IBM were always interesting and I've kept up with that company's progress ever since I left via people who stayed there much longer than my almost ten years and then via the extensive media coverage and shareholder news letters and annual reports - I never sold the shares I accumulated while being an IBM employee....easily the best investment I ever made. January will finish up tomorrow as the best start to any year that Exetel has been in business which also very pleasant.....we have already exceeded almost all targets - some by a very long way.

February is a difficult month in some ways - mainly by being the shortest month of any in the year though there will be a '29th' this year. We have a large 'prospect list at the moment and our new SL based corporate sales force will begin to contribute to corporate sales more strongly as February develops. We are also in the final testing stages of the new 'SME/Soho' marketing program that should be completed by the end of this week. We will then evaluate what we need to do to address that, theoretical, 2 million user marketplace and then put in place the program to do it. We have put in place the sales people who will commence this program and will develop the training processes to assist them address this new, for Exetel, set of market places.

Our main engineering objectives in February are to prepare for a change of major IP provider and to begin the year long process of the next upgrade to our core network. We have used Optus to provide the majority of or IP connectivity for virtually the whole of Exetel's 'existence'. However, for whatever reasons, Optus' pricing, which we have always been happy enough to pay a premium for, has now become far too expensive compared to other IP sources and come 31st March we need to replace all of the Optus links with something different. We will retain the Verizon and NTT links for the time being as we can never base the core network on a single IP provider (for all the obvious reasons). So that will be a big task(s) for our engineers over the coming two months and one that I am very concerned about.

Our other key February 'task' is to put in place a corporate/business sales program in Tasmania and New Zealand. We have had a PoP in Hobart for over four years now which we originally justified on the basis of the 'NBN2' project that we, at the time, believed would have to have presented a competitor to Telstra and we needed to be part of that development. In that respect it has been a total waste of money and had it not been for a couple of very large corporate sales we could not have continued to justify the costs of continuing to operate in Tasmania. So we need to significantly grow our revenue from Tasmania, if that is possible, and the only way we can do that is via business customers. We need to do the same in New Zealand (for similar reasons) - with a little more urgency because we need to establish 'new country guidelines' to allow us to open an office in the UK some time later this year and, if we can make a success of that, an office in Chicago late 2012 or, more probably, first quarter 2013. Many 'ifs' attached to those objectives....

....so a very busy and demanding month ahead.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

......now thats a unique scenario - end of life marketplaces getting saturated....must be a real and 'sudden' surprise to the brilliantly informed people providing internet and other services.

I read some of the submissions on whining about Telstra to the ACCC yesterday to see if there was any general information that could be gathered - there wasn't. I found TPG's submission of more interest than the others:

http://www.accc.gov.au/content/item.phtml?itemId=1028701&nodeId=b09d738f5016447f2a3d999591b4b494&fn=TPG%20-%20Public%20submission%2025%20January%202012.pdf

if only for what the figures they cared to include indicated about marketplaces in general and what sort of scenarios TPG may now be facing. You can read the quite brief report to make up your own mind as to what any of the comments/numbers may or may or may not mean but what they meant to me was that the people at TPG who compiled the response were either being mischievous or running such a tight 'misinformation agenda' they were being downright illogical.

By conforming to the line run by the few other ISP's submissions I bothered to read (Telstra must give 'unfettered' access via whatever infrastructure it possesses at the lowest possible price to every end user irrespective of where they are located) they make total fools of themselves and attempt to fight a 'battle' they, or any other ISP, hasn't any chance of winning....and, if you are a rational person, neither should they have any chance of 'winning'. I am no fan of Telstra's business practices (I think I may may have made the odd comment that would give that indication over the years) but I definitely see no requirement to allow competitors to build DSLAMs where it is easy to make money and then bitch about Telstra's practices where that isn't the case. I have no firm figures but I would think that having access to more than 80% of any market and being "excluded" from the 20% where you choose not to compete is hardly a draconian burden on any commercial enterprise.

However, I am sure the ACCC will produce some edict on what will happen and that will be that - from what I read in the various submissions nothing has been submitted of any insight or value. My understanding of the submissions is that the ISPs who made them are deeply concerned that they have already reached a point where not only are they no longer growing but that Telstra has taken back some percentage of their current ADSL customers and they are actually shrinking (in TPG's case this is not yet the situation but it appears to be approaching). The other point, based on observing ADSL pricing to the various ADSL marketplaces, is that the financial models operated by all the submitting ISPs are not working as well as the used to in a set of 'saturated' marketplaces. So - that's commercial life over the cycle....get used to it.....adapt or die.

Perhaps its the current state of nannyism in Australian society in general - always be looking for a 'government' hand out that now applies to commercial life as every other part of 'society'. Personally, I think trying to further 'regulate' ADSL in its post sunset years is as pointless as trying to get a better deck chair on the Titanic after 11.40 pm on 14th April 1912.....but maybe it's a sign of the increasing desperation among the remaining residential ADSL providers.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

.....all monthly targets exceeded or far exceeded and still much to come over the last two 'working days' next week......if the current forecasts are to be believed. So a very successful month in terms of new sales and a really satisfying start to the new calendar year and the last sx months of the financial year.

We also moved in to our new floor space in Sri Lanka over the Australia Day holiday with all SL based sales personnel moving to the dizzying heights on Level 35 of the East Tower of the WTC (our 'old' floor space is on Level 25 of the West Tower). It is 'just in time' planning as we have five new engineers starting next week and when I was in Sri Lanka earlier this month we were down to one or two spare desks on Level 25 and that may have been because people were on leave. Despite starting five new sales trainees and three new engineers in Australia over the past few weeks we now have twice as many people in Colombo as we do in North Sydney. Exetel in Sri Lanka has come a long way since we hired two work from home support email ticket answerers almost five years ago to the day.

We have some quite frightening targets to achieve over the coming months of 2012 and it will be the biggest challenge of Exetel's 'short life' to complete the transition of the company from a supplier of telecommunications services to residential users to one with the majority of its revenue coming from business and corporate users. We have made significant progress in deploying ever more redundant and greater capacity infrastructure to deliver ever larger, and far more, business and corporate customer connections. We have an ever growing list of customers who now use Exetel for 100, 200 and now 300 mbps pure IP services and are getting closer to signing our first 1 gbps pure IP service. It wasn't that long ago when 1 gbps was more bandwidth than Exetel used to provide its then tens of thousands of residential customers with ADSL connections.

Our major challenge (among so many) is to get Exetel better known around Australia. We have never done any real advertising apart from 'playing' with the concepts every year or so and will probably never do any advertising in the future. We do need to get more people to know about Exetel than we have accomplished over the first eight years of our existence. As with every major 'challenge' in business life there are seldom, maybe never, "new ways of doing things". Perhaps all 'the new things' are done by people who have never done anything before so they actually think they are doing something new? So, either from having no 'new' ideas or because one idea (far from new) that I have used in the past on four occasions to rapidly build companies from the ground up to something relatively substantial (once with Exetel, once in the UK and twice in previous 'lives' in Australia) has worked very effectively we will use that as the basis for developing Exetel as a much better known presence around Australia.    

Perhaps there is nothing new in selling products or services to widely spread market places?

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

We had a very pleasant Australia Day, getting up late and then going to a pleasant restaurant for a family lunch - our small family was strengthened by Catherine's return from the UK for a brief holiday and weakened by Andrew's absence in Japan on a ski-ing plus other things holiday with his friends from school days. The RAAF was courteous enough to perform one of their fly by and zoom ups in full view of our table and the food and wine were very enjoyable. And that was as 'patriotic' as we got - probably like many other people who inhabit this country.

I have been very grateful to 'Australia' since I arrived here before my 18th birthday totally on my own (not knowing a living, or dead, soul). My gratitude was for the teenage girls on Maroubra beach, the constant sun shine and the large and amazingly diverse number of people who were kind to me as I adjusted from being a spoiled brat from an elitist English public school to something that eventually resembled  a contributing member of the areas in which I lived - that took a while. Being a sole migrant at an incredibly young age is not the easiest way of completing your teen age years but it was made possible by a benign country and many very kind Australians. I don't "Love my country" in that nauseatingly expressed American way - firstly because even after all these decades it can never be "my" country....despite my constant traveling and almost 50 years of living in Australia - England, that part of it past Junction 18 on the M4 to before you hit the Devon border will always be where my 'body and soul' yearns to be. But Australia has been, since those first days of total bewilderment, always the country I have recognised and understood I owe a great deal to.

For a male, I grew up at quite a young physical age - for me it was a little after my 40th birthday. I attribute that early 'maturing' to  a variety of positive and negative factors and experiences which aren't worth enumerating but they coincided with my decision that I should stop working for large multi-national companies whose only interest was in taking as much money out of the country as possible and try to apply my very limited array of knowledge and abilities to 'giving something back' to the country that had been so kind to me. So I began the process of trying to earn as much money as I had been used to receiving from large US employers and one Japanese employer but doing something that would make a positive contribution. I almost succeeded at least twice in making some ongoing positive contributions to the people who bought the products and services I was instrumental in proving before my hubris and incompetence caused those ventures to fail. I wish I could say I learned from those first mistakes but I don't think I did - age eventually did that.

Some eight years ago I decided to try to return some value to all the kindness and good fortune I have benefited from over the previous 40ish years and, with Steve and Annette, I became part of creating Exetel.  This was/is to be my last attempt at delivering some value to the country that has been so kind to me for almost five decades - before what remains of what  I have been told was once a first class mind turns to mush - if it will in fact last that long. If this doesn't work out well enough to achieve that minor goal then at least I did try to do something "for Australia" rather than simply accept inordinate sums of money from international paymasters to financially rape and loot the Australian people (which I unthinkingly did for many years).

So - I hope everyone had a happy Australia day - perhaps we could all make some sort of contribution to making this country as generous and helpful to new comers as it was to me almost 50 years ago....who knows - when they eventually stop speaking with their funny accent and eating their odd food, if they ever do, they might even make a contribution to making the country even better than they found it...if not, then I am pretty sure their children will.....or perhaps their grand children.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

.

Two of our new Australian based corporate reps made their first sales yesterday on the 7th day of their employment and the third of the five 'newbies' in North Sydney will receive her first two orders on Friday (today being a public holiday) having been told the paperwork is in the process of being completed. The Exetel record for a new hire getting out of probation (making ten sales) is a little short of two months and the current intake shows very positive signs of giving that incredible achievement a real shake. In Sri Lanka the fourth rep to get off probation has set a new record for the number of sales made in a month by an SL based sales person and all but one of the 18 new hires since mid December has made at least one sale in the most difficult time of the year. With three working days to go corporate sales may well reach close to 150% of a very demanding January quota.

We have a very long way to go to 'convert' Exetel from being a company that mainly derives its revenues from providing residential ADSL services to a company that overwhelmingly derives its revenues from providing business and corporate services but we are now making faster progress towards that objective. More than half of Exetel's total personnel will be directly involved with corporate sales and support before the end of February 2012. This will have been accomplished over almost exactly three years from the start of our 'program' to transform Exetels 'business model'. The coming fourth year is the time where we plan for business/corporate revenues to become 50% of Exetel's total revenues - a very ambitious target and a very dangerous assumption as we become 'more visible' to the competitors from whom we are taking more than 100 of their customers a month - even in December and January which barely have two weeks of real 'selling time' in each of them.

I am, absolutely not, taking ANYTHING for granted but, right now, but I can see that we are far more likely to succeed in our ambitions in building a business/corporate presence in the Australian market places than at any previous time in my commercial life and, without remotely overstating the cases, I have been part of some pretty spectacular successes in such 'ventures' over the years. I can see now, as in retrospect was the case in the previous three ventures I have participated in, that success came from training, from the ground up, a dedicated sales force that was complemented by an highly supportive, and very good, engineering group. Growing Exetel up to date has been very, very difficult - almost too hard on more than one occasion over the past few years. Right now, for the first time in a long time, it is beginning to feel that it has been worth all the back breaking work and harsh experiences.

Australia Day is an appropriate day to consider one of Jack Kennedy's more memorable lines. While the urgers and nincompoops (who but Juliar Faustus could come up with a vastly overpaid expatriate movie actor as Australian of the year?) do nothing but leech off the work of others, real Australians make a real difference to this country and its future. So, perhaps the best way of 'celebrating' Australia day is to spare a small amount of time (in a completely non-jingoistic way) to contemplate "what you can do for your country".....by making the most of whatever abilities God and a non contributory heredity has blessed you with.

I wonder if anyone gives a toss any more?

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

......a recurring challenge that determines the level of success any commercial company is capable of attaining.

Stating the obvious? Undoubtedly. Does stating the obvious mean that every company that recruits new people does the absolutely best possible job of ensuring that the people it hires are the best possible it can attract for any specific position? Somehow I very much doubt that is the case. I read this article earlier this morning:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204624204577178941034941330.html?mod=WSJAsia_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_Top

which didn't surprise me but did remind me how careful any company, especially smaller ones, needs to be in constantly refining their methods of attracting and selecting new people and how every company, irrespective of size, seldom finds the best ways of carrying out  this "obvious" key function. So, if it stating the obvious, why do large companies need to try and do this job via software and smaller companies do it via very senior personnel (who are seldom good choices to select people) for the most part?

Exetel, being by no measure a 'large' company does continuously recruit and over the past year and especially over the coming twelve months will possibly recruit more people than we currently employ if our plans to double our personnel come to fruition. So recruiting really good people on an ongoing basis is very high on our methodology agenda. We would never use something as crude as software (although we are 'major fans' of automating everything possible) to do any part of the job. Nor would we use any senior person (actually any person) who does not have the time to do the recruiting in the time frame and detail that is required. We use much simpler methods that, over a very long time now, have proven to be more successful than any other methods.

We do the obvious. We establish a personal and business experience profile for each position we are looking to hire for and, using a human being, we match those criteria against the resumes we receive. My personal experience over several decades is that a 100% match of the resume to the established criteria will produce a 100% successful candidate. Anything else might not. It takes something less than 60 seconds to read a resume looking for the criteria matches. Sometimes no required percentage of matches can be found - so an hour or so has been 'wasted' in 'resume reading'. Not exactly an onerous burden. If you get lucky and find 100% matches for the number of positions you wish to hire then you only need to continue to on the process to find 'back ups' for those 'candidates' who although they have applied for the position you are advertising will find something that suits them better. Simple, quick and 100% effective.

Despite what may be claimed by other people when addressing this overwhelmingly important issue the resume tells a 'recruiter' everything they need to know about any applicant. Sure, some applicants don't know how to write a sensible resume and will not be considered even though if they had written a better summary of their back ground and experience they would have been - but that is not something a 'recruiter' can fix. How many candidates who match the hiring criteria will not 'work out'? Virtually none and those that don't will not work out for reasons that are beyond any hiring processes ability to determine. So there is no need to read that many resumes - if you are looking for x number of people then 1.5x will provide you with a choice of new hires and allow for those who will decide not to accept the job having had the interview.

This process has always worked for me.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

......in any previous January and the Telstra induced fog that has suffused so much of the past three plus years shows some signs of lifting.

Yesterday was a pleasant enough day and, like most days this January, sales and order results were much better than expected. We had the best January residential ADSL order day 'ever' which adds to the other very strong January 2012 days pushing residential ADSL sleas to well over 250% more than last January with the increase trend line  continually growing stronger. Churns from Internode have now surpassed those from TPG making Internode the second highest source of residential churns behind Telstra residential....something you would never have expected to see prior to the sell out and plan price increases. VoIP sales have also been much stronger than in any previous month which is strategically more important than residential ADSL sales and indicates something or another that needs to be better understood.....actually understood at all.

We are also about to sign, I hope I haven't jinxed them by saying that, some very large corporate accounts and corporate sales for January have already comfortably exceeded those made in January 2011. We will re-look at our business and corporate pricing over the few remaining January days to ensure it is as sensible as we can make it but at the moment it seems better, on a like for like basis, than any competitors and our methods of adding 'incentives' are working well. The level of 'interest' in our business/corporate services has increased markedly over the past few months, almost in direct proportion to our addition of new sales personnel, and we will now add more 'promotional tools' to our direct contact methods from mid February after we finish testing two new ideas. One of those ideas 'solved' the problem of how to contact the alleged 2,000,000 small business customers in sch a unique and 'different' way it makes you very happy to be in the problem solving business.

In a time where so many ISPs (including Exetel) are really struggling to add any new ADSL customers at all it seems quite strange to contemplate serious plans to attempt to add 100,000 new ADSL users over the coming 24 months....maybe I've become totally delusional. However as I completed the 'arithmetic' (following finding the solution to contacting the alleged 2 million small business users) it didn't/doesn't seem too outrageous to aim at selling 5% of the total small business market given that we could provide the best solution, by a considerable margin, than those provided by any other competitor...and that isn't wishful thinking - it is solid point by point comparison. So we will continue testing over the next week or so to determine what offering will be optimal in appeal, at this stage, and how much more appealing it can be made - progressively over the coming months.

Perhaps its just the 'novelty' of planning positive things rather than just planning 'defensively' that is lifting the mood that has become part of 'business life' for a very long time now? Maybe that is just my minds 'rebellion' against so much dullness inflicted on the industry by Telstra's mega dollar 'promotional' budgets and their crushing ambitions? Perhaps it's all just wishful thinking? Whatever it is,or isn't, it's engendering a more pleasant set of feelings than I can remember in Januaries of the past few years.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

.....they continue out of habit with no major issue to bring them to either a revival or a conclusion.

The last 'full' week of January has begun and the 'new year' is well under way - before many commercial entities have properly returned to work. Even this week, with Australia Day turning it into a three day week for many 'working people' is still significantly affected by the Christmas Break scenarios so 'real work' will not begin in many companies until next Monday. I suppose January is our equivalent to the EU's August but never having worked anywhere but Australia I have no knowledge of other country's working habits - or lack of them. With a week or so to go, Exetel will have a very good January and that will get the new calendar year away to a very good start which is far more desirable than trying to catch up for the whole of the first quarter and beyond.

As I mentioned yesterday, we will complete whatever arrangements we can 'negotiate' in terms of revising our 'pure' IP and inter capital connectivity over the next few days to ensure we progress the development of that infrastructure before the March 31st 'dead line'. We have completed the re-structure of our supply relationship with AAPT via the partnership to develop the corporate and business sales capabilities in Colombo which got off to a 'formal start last week and is making some early progress. We now need to look at our long overdue for review relationships with Testra and Optus. We have gained very little from those relationships over the past few years and have only continued them out of 'habit' under the stresses and strains of Telstra's market assaults that left little or no time for strategic thinking let alone planning or actually doing anything about developing those key sources of services.

In Telstra's case we would never have entered in to a relationship with them in January 2004 if they behaved then as they behave today.There is simply no advantage to Exetel in dealing with their predatory practices and their stone wall supplier relationship methodologies. Our problem is that we did start dealing with them eight years ago and this relationship went past its 'honey moon period' within the first three years and is now a 'marriage' from Hell. How we arrange a suitable 'divorce' without hurting the 'children' is the only thing that keeps us in the relationship and that has become so expensive (to us) over the past few years it is reaching the intolerable stage.

If Telstra is the 'wife' then having a 'mistress' in Optus has long ago lost its  allure - on both sides. We are obviously not going to 'marry her' and 'she' long ago began to share her favours with other more likely candidates to the point where its hard to even arrange time together without the embarrassment of seeing signs around her apartment of other 'activities' that make you realise how far from that intoxicating initial  favour you have fallen. Is it possible to rekindle those first giddy experiences with either wife or mistress by actually sitting down and thrashing out where it all went wrong? For the sake of the kids I suppose we have to try - but I'm not encouraged by the chances of success.

My personal problem is that I am too old, perhaps too cynical, to believe anything either 'wife' or 'mistress' have to say - and I'm pretty sure that belief is mutual. Under such circumstances, short of another pregnancy, it seems to be something for the lawyers.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46

....was once the major cost of providing an internet service to a residential, or a business, user.

Back in the day (1995) when internet was delivered to residential and 'business' users over 28.8 kbps modems the cost of a 2 mbps link to the USA was around $US900,000 per mbps and comapanies like OzeMail charged up to $A10.00 per megabyte for downloads. Today current offers vary between $A15.00 and $A20.00 per mbps - one of the greatest improvements in industrial history - even if you remove the incredible price gouging applied to international telecommunications services throughout the past 40 years. Add to that the fact that even a company of Exetel's size delivers over one third of total end user IP though caching (Google, Akamai, Various peering points) the cost of delivering data to an end user is now lower than it has ever been.

It would be much lower than it is today if it weren't for the cost of 'back haul' - the cost paid by wholesale customers of the large carriers to deliver traffic from the end user to the ISP's carrier interconnect point....that cost varies between twice the cost of the IP traffic to four times the cost depending on which carrier is providing the 'back haul'. By far the highest cost of delivering traffic to a residential end user is the carrier's back haul charges followed by their 'port' charges. Many ISPs have addressed this problem by building their own DSLAM network which, courtesy of the ACCC, have allowed back haul and port costs to be reduced which, allied to the dramatic fall in IP costs should have allowed much lower prices for residential ADSL services to be offered than has proven to be the case....it isn't the case because of all the obvious reasons (Telstra less 10% remains the pricing mantra for the ISP industry in Australia).

Exetel will shortly make a decision on IP suppliers for the coming 12 month period starting April 1st 2012. We expect our 'pure' IP costs will fall around 50% from what they are today....we are already receiving the benefits of a continually growing percentage of IP delivery via caching which is saving us what would have been the previous costs of over 4 gbps of 'pure' IP bought from IP wholesalers. We will replace the current 'pure' IP bandwidth with 8 gbps of 'new' band width which will generate considerable monthly savings for us. However the port costs and back haul costs, particularly for our Telstra services will remain unchanged and will need to be subject to a review of whether we can continue to offer those services at their current costs going forward.

We have delayed, and then delayed again, more than once, making any decision on continuing to do business with Telstra while we tried to get some grip on when an 'NBN2' service might offer a viable replacement. Apart from the fact that 'NBN2' port costs and backhaul prices are even more expensive than Telstra's prices we were taking the optimistic view that they would at least be the same to every wholesale buyer (from Telstra's to Exetel's 'size'). That was always pretty naive, I admit, but it was the premise on which the 'NBN2' was promised. What is a Juliar promise worth? Nothing - but then I am as naive as the average person and did want to believe that particualar promise while always conceding it would not eventuate.

So, with some sort of real coverage delivery by NBNCo way in the undefined far future the decision on whether to continue a relationship with Telstra remains 'on the table'. We started a trial program yesterday to see if we could accelerate the change in 'balance' between our Optus and AAPT residential customers and our Telstra customers - we have never differentiated before - and over the next 2 - 3 months we will see if it is in fact possible to rapidly increase our Optus and AAPT residential ADSL customers as a percentage of our total residential ADSL customers. If this can be done then we could continue to 'hang on' to the Telstra relationship until the 'NBN2' becomes a viable alternative - or at least for another year while some definition is available on the future of the 'NBN2'. In the mean time the cost of back haul and port costs from Telstra make it very, very hard for a company lilke Exetel to continue to offer Telstra wholesale services and current negotiations simply, yet again, underline how difficult it is (for a company of Exetel's size) to deal with such a company.

Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2012
ABN 350 979 865 46