John Linton We will be heading back to the airport in an hour or so having completed a hectic schedule of meetings and discussions with our own employees, our SL accountants, various government agencies, our landlords and different contractors and the twelve 'short listed' candidates for the position of Exetel SL GM over the past 5 days.
Any one of ten of the GM candidates would be suitable for the position and five of that ten would be outstanding. Making a decision between the 'short listed' five is not easy for many reasons with the principal reason being that two of the five would be ideal for where Exetel wants to be in 9 - 12 months time but would not be ideal for where we are now and what needs to be done while the other three would be superb for what needs to be done over the coming twelve months but would not be as skilled/'contact rich' as the two more senior in experience people.
Because of the very different tax and other payment issues that exist in SL we will ned to pay more than we had originally 'budgeted' but well within what we would be happy to pay. However there are some issues about how allowances and 'packaging' works in SL that we need to much better understand and then 'overcome'. We will obviously need expert advice on these isses as well as the preparation of the employment contract.
We will need to make a decision over the next day or so as two of the candidates have aready been offered jobs which they have delayed accepting while awaiting the outcome of their application to Exetel - which again poses no issue other than us needing to make a decision - I commented to the KPMG Personnel person who had organised the advertising and first interviews that if we put the names in a hat and drew one out we would be just as likely to make the best decision and save endlessly discussing the various pluses and minuses.
The same 'too many good choices' scenario arose from Annette's interviews with our current 16 Sri Lankan staff. She found each one of them to be of very high calibre and thoroughly nice human beings with a lot of enthusiasm and a desire to do as well as they could within Exetel. We needed to 'promote' two people to Shift Supervisors to relieve poor Martin of the need to go to bed before 8 pm each evening so that he can be at the office before 3 am each morning to be on hand for SOB in Colombo and to begin the transition to the SL company being fully managed by local personnel.
We also needed to select two team leaders - one to be in charge of 3 new people we will be hiring over the next week or so to be specifically dedicated to handling residential sales enquiries and another one to be in charge of 'escalated faults' once we hire a further three CSRs to handle the growing work load we expect to generate over the coming months. As we grow we will also need to select a person as the Provisioning team leader and further down the 'track' a Billing issue team leader.
With the additional six new hires the SL personnel will have grown to 22 local engineers by the end of March - some 9 months after we opened the Colombo office. So far we are 'on track' to meet our plans of having thirty people in the Colombo office before the end of calendar 2009 with no 'back office functions' being performed in Australia in 2010.
There are of course no certainties in any aspect of business in 2009 with SL beginning to suffer like the rest of the world from the shock waves of financial mismanagement throughout the world's banking and financial systems and the ever turbulent political situation togeter with the 'end' of the 25 year old civil war in the North East. Doubtless we have had our period of trouble free and incredibly smooth transition and may well face some significant issues over the coming months - but so far I couldn't be more impressed with what first James and now Martin (and the other Exetel people who have come to SL on specific knowledge transfer assgnments) have achieved in such a short space of time.
As usual we will be sorry to leave Colombo as it is a really nice place with truly nice people.