John Linton
....so hard that I'm having difficulty finding a place to even start planning..........
I've been thinking about how to obtain 20,000 new 3G broadband users a month by July 2009. While it may well be possible for a carrier to put in place pricing and features that make that possible and while some 'favoured son' third arty company with a great deal of money and very preferential pricing might be able to do that I don't think that a small company like Exetel can develop that sort of volume business.
I suppose the mobile carriers are used to finding people like 'Crazy Johns' who build a mobie phone retail store chain in a few years and sell that sort of volume of mobile telephone connections a month - but if memory serves me correctly Crazy Johns took 7 or so years to get to that sort of volume and they did it with a great deal of support in pricing and trading terms.
With the exception of Telstra I don't think ANY company, carriers included, have ever sold 20,000 ADSL new connections in a month let alone every month - though perhaps Optus has achieved that from time to time.
Selling 20,000 broadbad via GSM conections a month is a very, very big ask from my, clearly limited, viewpoint, experience and understanding.
The most new ADSL connections that Exetel has ever done in one month was a little over 3,000 and we've never repeated that achievement in the 18 months since we did that - once only - in four years. So nothing in our current or past experience gives any indications on how to sell and activate and then suport 20,000 new users a month which means, should we attempt to do that, we will need to do something, many things, very differently and whatever needs to be done will have no 'grounding' in anything we have done in the past.
The major issue that has to be faced is that there will be four carrier's retail operations attempting to establish a dominant/very strong position in the data via 3/4G marketplace and they will have tens of millions of advertising/promotion dollars to spend each month - and they have a long track record of giving away mobile handsets and everything else associated with mobile phone services and have been doing that for more than ten years.
Then there will be their 'favoured son/arms length' "associated" companies who they will use to do even more in terms of discounting than their own retail divisions will do.
All very daunting.
No problem - I have another two days to come up with a business plan that will be sensible enough to show how Exetel will get to 6,000 new Data over 3/4G connections a month by October/November 2009 which only represents doubling Exetel's current $A3,000,000 a month current revenues and we need to do that while also continuing to grow the current services revenue streams.
I don't know what the total marketplace is for these new services either at the moment or in 12 and then 24 months time and when I asked for some guidelines no assistance was forthcoming. So I've looked at the meagre information that I can get access to and come up with some figures that look like this for new Data over 3/4G activations in Australia by all carriers by the following months:
Mar 2008 - 20,000 - Exetel - 1,000
Jun 2008 - 60,000 - Exetel - 2,000
Sep 2008 - 90,000 - Exetel - 4,000
Dec 2008 - 120,000 - Exetel - 6,000
Mar 2009 - 160,000 - Exetel - 9,000
Jun 2009 - 200,000 - Exetel 12,000
...and that assumes there is network capacity to handle the traffic volumes which I have absolutely no idea about.
So for a small company like Exetel to reach 20,000 new activation a month in June 2009 we would need to be achieving a new marketchare of 10% of the total which is, just a teeny bit, ambitious and beyond anything that I can even make any sort of sense of.
What ever idea it is that makes such ambition even vaguely believable will need to be truly inspirational.
Any ideas anyone?