John Linton
2007 is a few hours away from being over and I won't be sorry to see it go. Despite having a 4 week holiday in the middle of the year I feel more mentally and physically exhausted than I can ever remember feeling at the end of a business calendar year. Undoubtedly this is partly due to the passing of the years causing even greater wear and tear on my unfit and rapidly aging body and mind and it's partly due to the stress and srain of moving a start up company from the imminent demise phase of its 'life' to the no less stressful retain all that has been accomplished but still keep growing at an equivalent or better rate stage.
It's been an extremely demanding year and one in which we began the transformation of Exetel into the first stge of what we had originally planned it to be - assuming that we managed to survive the first three years when 90% of all start up companies cease to exist.
During 2007 we made a huge number of changes to Exetel and how it operates - the major ones being:
A) Engineering
1. We added a Queensland PoP
2. We added a Victorian PoP
3. We began the build out of a second Sydney PoP
4. We added a second GigE for Telstra ADSL1 users in NSW
5. We pioneered the use of P2P filtering with Allot
6. We pioneered the use of P2P caching with PeerApp
7. We doubled our customer connectivity bandwidth
8. We doubled the number of routers we deployed
B) Services
1. We provided 'equipmentless VoIP' for those users who didn't want to buy VoIP equipment
2. We added spam/virus filtering using the IronPort solution
3. We added SMS via email
4. We added FAX via email
5. We began to offer calling card services via retail outlets in 5 capital cities
6. We increased the 'free time period' to 12 hours each day
7. We increased the 'free time allowance' to 48 gb each month
8. We added 'naked' ADSL2 with 100 free VoIP calls to begin the move away from dependence on Telstra
C) Financial
1. We increased our revenue for each of the twelve months continuing the record of doing that for 46 consecutive months
2. We saw the first signs of Exetel making better than 'break even' monthly profits
3. Exetel now makes a profit on recurrent revenue without the need of a contribution from 'once only' sales contributions
4. Our revenue per employee increased by 16%
5. Our customers to employee ratio increased by 15%
6. We continued to fund all new asset and other purchases from retained profits
7. Exetel continues to have no debt and no leasing obligations other than premises
8. All growth was achieved with no expenditure on advertising or marketing (or 'acquisition')
A brief summary such as the one I've attempted above can't convey what all of those changes plus dealing with the running of a small communications company day by day in the incredibly competitive year that was CY2007 demand of the people responsible but perhaps it gives some idea of the amount of changes that had to be put in place each month just to keep Exetel operationally and financially viable.
I am relieved that nothing as 'life threatening' as has occurred in each of the previous three years occurred but nevertheless the stresses of so many aspects of running Exetel were always omnipresent and there was no period, with the exception of the 4 weeks Annette and I took off in the middle of the year, when each day didn't seem to go on for far too long and end with still so many things left undone.
I'd like to think that 2008 will not be as demanding but, based on what I see today, I doubt that will be the case. Hopefully it looks equally as difficult to everyone else in this industry.