John Linton It's a very pleasant sunny, perhaps a little too windy to be described as perfect, summer Sunday morning in Sydney which amost certainly shouldn't be spent gazing at a computer screen but then that is one of the joys of being part of a small business - there is never a time that can't be spent productively addressing some aspect of the business you are involved with.
My sister headed back to the UK yesterday to deal with the ongoing pressures of her job as the bursar of a private school that is being progressively badly affected by the results of the UK's very real recession which, unsurprisingly, results in a rapidly growing number of parents being unable to meet their school fee payments. While in Australia the 'wealthy' first seem to dispose of the remains of their share portfolio followed by the 'holiday house' and the motor cruiser then the second merc before pulling the plug on private education (possibly because they can't face telling their children how much of a financial mess they are in) they seem to do it in reverse in the UK - possibly English parents still put their children well down their prioriity lists.
As we were driving back from the airport it occurred to me that while there has been a lot of 'talk' in the Australian media for many months now there are, as yet, very few negative events occurring anywhere around the country that indicate that real people (not overpaid share brokers and merchant bankers) are losing their jobs as their employers shut down as is happening all over the UK and the EU. Sure there's indications that the WA miners arent employing cleaners at $1,000 a day any more and aren't proceeding wth the opening of new mine sites in WA or in QLD but they were always 'bonus jobs' that were/are very much regarded almost like 'seasonal work' (fruit picking/potato digging etc).
Two of my friends who run big companies with many hundreds of contractors are certainly scaling back their activities but contractors come and go either in Australia or move to other parts of the world and are used to periods of no work - which is why they charge so much per hour when they do work I suppose. So other than some major contracting companies (dependent of government contracts) and many of the financial institutions there doesn't seem to be too many obvious signs of financial discomfort that I can see. Certainly the roads to and from the airport were as crowded as ever with the usual range of cars across the price spectrum of Sydney's affluence and the airport was as chaotically crowded as ever with people clearly going on holidays or returning from holidays.
So it will be interesting to see what happens over the coming months. Exetel is doing its 'bit' by loking to hire 6 to 10 graduate trainees over the next month and we will also contract out the program development work for our own version of the 'fring' and 'nimbuzz' applications that we have been successfully using to promote the use of VoIP over HSPA via multiple manufcturers hand set impementations. Not that we have any probems with fring and nimbuzz but we would like to have local servers and haven't been able to get that to happen (despite a promising start).
So Exetel will add some 25% more employees in the first quarter of this year rather than laying off 'excess' personnel as the media constanty talks about. This is not the sort of action that indicates a recession but then I understand that we are acting 'counter-cyclically' to address 'opportunities' that are new to us while they are 'old hat' (and over staffed) for many of our 'competitors'.
I just have to believe that if we offer the same SHDSL service for $400.00 a month while our competitors offer the identical service for between $800.00 and $2,200.00 a month there HAVE to be opportunities in what many companies are seeing as difficult financial times. Surely some sort of percentage of commercial entities won't see 2009 as a time for wantonly wasting twice to five times as much money as they need to paying for a simple communications line?
.....though I guess they have seen no problem is p***ing away their shareholder's money in that wasteful way to date.