John Linton
.......and, bizarrely, I have woken up in the Land Of The Long White Cloud having taken an evening flight to Auckland arriving in time for a couple of drinks before watching Auckland's version of a 'firework display'.
Anyway - Happy New Year - may we all achieve our 2009 personal and business objectives and thoroughly enjoy every moment of the coming twelve months.
With the year starting with the usual public holiday (and with a larger than usual section of the population in no condition to involve themselves in anything to do with decisions on communications services) I thought I'd take the opportunity of having a preliminary look at what happens in the NZ communications industry and whether, despite the whole of NZ's population being around the same as that of NSW, what opportunities may exist for Exetel providing the lowest cost service model in a 'foreign' country.
I did some 'research' from Australia and also talked to various suppliers about wholesale buy rates in Auckland and Wellington and gained the impression that Exetel could leverage some of our Australian buying to improve the small initial quantities we might start with if we did in fact set up a service in either or both of the main population centres. I also arranged to talk with two possible 'JV' companies that might make an NZ presence for Exetel much easier to establish and much quicker to grow. Like many 'last minute' plans I failed to actually get agreements on mutually suitable times with the two companies I contacted but I'll have a closer look than is possible in Australia at the residential broad offers here.
We almost certainly won't proceed with an NZ 'venture' in the immediate future but it is something that we will more seriously consider later in 2009 - mainly to cater for our business customers who require VPNs that include NZ offices but if we set up PoPs to do that we may as well also offer residential services of one type or another. As it's our intention to both increase the number of business customers we provide services to in 2009 and also to increase the size of the customers my view is there will be a greater need to provide connectivity to Auckland and Wellington branch offices than has been the case so far.
There is so much to do in Australia, and Sri Lanka, over the next few months it will take all of our very scarce management services. Apart from the ongoing processes of improving every aspect of our support services and ensuring the knowledge transfer required to expand the number of back office services provided from Sri Lanka continues to grow we have to establish sales forces for our business SHDSL/Ethernet services as well as sales forces for our new HSPA services and a third sales team for our VoIP/Mobile/Wire Line services.
Setting up and providing the ongoing management and training of one sale force is quite difficult - setting up and training three sales forces simultaneously is at least an order of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately, having operated Exetel without any sales people for five years, we have created that problem for ourselves. It is a very difficult challenge but I am quite looking forward to playing a part in making it a success.
From the little I've seen of 'account managers' selling communications services to business customers over the past 20 years my current opinion is that very few communications companies have much success in recruiting, training and managing an effective sales force. When I look at the people who endlessly try and interest Exetel in their various products and services their failure to generate any interest always seems to come back to their almost total ignorance of the technical and engineering capabilities and aspects of their product/service if they are from a "sales" background or the unfailing ability to say exactly the wrong thing if they are from a "technical" background.
I've seldom made that mistake in being part of or the sole decision maker in a hiring process (with one or two notable exceptions) and have a very good track record of hiring people generally (Exetel has a remarkably low rate of personnel loss is one manifestation of this ability). However its been a long time since I've recruited trainee sales personnel so I view the next few weeks with a great deal of trepidation tempering my excitement of taking this, for us, very bold step and risking a great deal of money.
We have to make a success of this 'next step' in Exetel's development to ensure that we can increase our 'buying power' with our key suppliers to ensure that we can reduce our end user pricing to the levels planned for 2009.