John Linton A lot seems to happen in the day to day work involved in participating in the running of a small communications business but when you look back over the past day, the week, the month – even the year it’s difficult to actually see any real accomplishment other than you are still in business and, looking at the figures on the management reports you can see that there are more customers and more revenue and, as a meeting with our accountants yesterday to finalize our FY08 tax returns showed, even a little more profit than the previously year.
So all the work you did yourself, the many hours of it every day of the week (weekends are a non-existent concept if you are running a small business) in which you gave your very best in terms of creatively thinking through problems and developing new concepts plus all of the work done by many other very able, talented and dedicated people seems, at first glance, to be only reflected in some pretty meaningless numbers.
These somewhat negative thoughts briefly crossed my mind at the meeting with our tax accountant when he said “well, it’s been another really good year with such impressive growth and pretty soon you’ll be a $50 million company. To which I replied before I thought – “and what will that mean, that our problems will just involve bigger numbers?” He was a bit flustered so I quickly apologized and changed the subject.
Not being an accountant, I have no empathy with or even much interest in numbers beyond using simple arithmetic in many areas of the running of Exetel or, prior to Exetel, any other business or parts of a business. I look at them constantly throughout each day but, at least 50% or so of the time, I mainly see what the numbers mean rather than the numbers themselves – I don’t think I’ve ever grasped, from primary school onwards, any meaning in numbers or even their intrinsic logic and symmetry.
I participated in the start up of Exetel knowing it would be my last ‘job’ in any commercial sense in a long career in the Australian IT industry. I wanted to achieve something far more important than “having a few really good years of strong growth” (no offence Artin) and I certainly had absolutely no desire (or need) to make any more money than we had some five years ago – sensible investments and a great deal of luck had taken care of those requirements for our modest future needs.
My main, perhaps sole, objective in participating in Exetel was to use whatever knowledge, determination, drive and experience I may have possessed to attempt to make some parts of residential and business use of communications services better than they were five years ago and much lower cost than they would be if there was no change to the ways the then suppliers were going about making communications services available.
It was a very ambitious objective and one that, apart from the relatively few customers who currently use Exetel supplied services (less than 1.5% of the Australian total) has been very unsuccessful in being achieved. Perhaps it never was achievable. Looking back the major reason why it was unsuccessful is obvious and there is no chance of any greater level of success for as long as we pursue the paths we have been ‘going down’ for the last 58 months.
This may sound perverse, but I see the currently described “global financial crisis” as being a last chance of correcting the mistakes, basically one mistake, made from the inception and actually have some sort of chance of achieving the original objective. It seems to me that things will have to change in Australia (and probably in much of the rest of the world) and it isn’t only the banking business models that are clearly flawed – much of the way other industry sectors, including the communications industry operates are equally badly flawed and will need to change and change quite a bit.
Perhaps within these almost inevitable changes there will be a new opportunity for Exetel to make a real difference.
Annette and I will be leaving for the airport to go to Singapore and then on to Sri Lanka in a few minutes. Our objectives are to complete the last of the fiduciary and accounting tasks for the Sri Lankan company and to, of course, review the results of our hiring activities over the past few months and audit the status of the current telephone and data services and general operation of the Sri Lankan operation.
While in a totally different cultural and business environment I will try and reach a decision on what I will recommend Exetel does on some crucial aspects of its business to allow us to have the greatest chance of making the next five years of Exetel’s “life” count for a lot more than some ‘numbers on financial reports’ once a year.