John Linton
......God, I hope I've got this right......
Exetel has taken the first small steps aimed at more than doubling the 'size' of our very small company over the coming year or so. I have mentioned this before in terms of changing Exetel from a purely engineering company to become a more conventional sales and engineering entity by building a 'sales force' roughly equivalent in size to the current total number of employees (a little over 40 people if it all works out).
Our 'sales only via web site' processes have served us very well over the past five years and have allowed us to concentrate all of our very scarce 'management' resources on the engineering and administration processes that are the 'engine' and 'backbone' (to horribly mix metaphors) of any service business. For someone who has spent the vast majority of his commercial life in purely sales related activities and responsibilities the last five years of building automated process systems and exercising financial controls over a rapidly growing business has left no time for sales related activities which, to be quite honest, I hadn't really missed - until this week.
It was only this week when I fully turned my mind and most of my working days to the more detailed planning of how we could achieve a $A100 million annual sales target that I realised how much I enjoyed, and childish though it may seem, and was excited by 'talking sales' to prospective employees and how very 'proud' I was of what Exetel had actually achieved over the past five years and how compelling the 'story' was of the benefits to an end customer of our services, their low prices and the incredible efficiencies and competences of the systems and above everything else, the personnel, who deliver and support that array of services.
For the first time in many, many years I couldn't actually think (let alone type) fast enough to list the new ideas and tasks related to them that were 'spilling' out of my 'mind' at a furious rate. Now that may sound really stupid but selling is really 'liberating' particularly when you have spent 12 hours a day for over 1,900 consecutive days devoted to the fearsome slog of the nuts and bolts of building a business where no detail is too small not to catch your attention and then take your time to understand and address it.
The other great excitement you get from selling is in thinking about how to describe the advantages and realities of your services and your company and the intense pleasure that gives you if you have played a part in developing what you now try to describe to other people. Again - you are probably thinking - "how childish" - and you're probably right - though perhaps children do get more pleasure and enjoyment out of their days than financial controllers?
The other great pleasure, that I have been fortunate to have played a part in several times in the past, is recruiting/creating a sales force from 'scratch' and needing to do that from highly diverse resources and to know just how you need to plan ahead to make your initial personnel choices not only effective for the 'start up phase' but ensure they will develop in the ways they would need to develop through each of the subsequent phases and overcome the heart aches and disappointments that individuals within sales forces always go through. For me - a far more enjoyable version of chess where the fifteenth move is determined by the first and subsequent moves and you have to have that 'road map' in your head before making the first move.
Balancing the engineering and technical knowledge of a communications consultant with the self discipline and inter-personal skills of a highly successful communications sales person is not the easiest task to undertake. In fact, thinking back, it's quite difficult. But as with all difficult tasks it only requires breaking it down in to smaller achievable steps and then selecting the people able to reach the required end point from diverse starting points - and, of course, being able to design and manage that process.
We have appointed six people within Exetel to the three sales teams that will be responsible for meeting the different sales targets in our business plan for the remainder of FY2009 and then for FY2010 and have made the first job offer to an 'outside' person. Over the next two months or so we will add another 4 or 5 people in this initial phase and, depending on how successful the knowledge transfer processes work out, we will then add additional personnel at a rate of 4 a month for the balance of calendar 2009.
It will be a major challenge.
So - a start has been made to this complicated 18 month program and I feel more 'invigorated' than I have for quite a while....and not a little 'frightened'.