John Linton
....it simply must be wrong because there has never been a time in the history of commerce where any marketplace and product offering didn't continually change under the twin pressures of competition and growing customer sophistication.
I have spent most of my waking time over the weekend considering how to address the issues that are likely to confront our small company in the current uncertainties and the widely (almost consensually) predicted "much tougher times" that are "imminent". My personal views, which are not based on any real knowledge, are echoed by two articles in today's Australian:
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/beyond_the_g20_freak_show_protestors/
and
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25260080-7583,00.html
It really doesn't matter whether you voted for the current uneducated fools posing as a federal government or not - there is little doubt that the the glowingly 'pink' Albrechtson and the "hate Howard with a virulence mostly unmatched in Australian print" Ergas certainly voted Labor - their points are that Krudd and his unknowledgeable lackeys are only making everything worse and ensuring a difficult situation becomes a disaster with their stupidity/doctrinaire blindness that is unmatched in the history of the Federation.
So little to no hope to be found in "things getting back to normal" in the near future when even the commos, pinkos and fellow travelers (even with their preferred Labor PM universally adulated in the Australian opinion polls - just how stupid does that make the Australian electorate?) are writing about Krudd's destruction of the country not only for the present but for the ongoing future. Krudd's robotic defense, as promise after promise fails to materialise, is that of the true charlatan - "it would have been worse if we hadn't [fill in pointles action promised from your personal selection of over 20 by my count] - try starting with the 75,000 additional jobs that would be created by his Christmas cash giveaway which, breathtakingly, has become 20,000,000 jobs planet wide now he's grandstanding without a safety net and his ego has zero restraints. Where are all these jobs that "have been saved" and who did the arithmetic to come up with figure? Nobody of course - he just plucked the figure out of..............
Nothing to see here.....
I have mentioned several times this year that while I read about the various estimates of decline in the Australian marketplaces I see nothing in Exetel's day to day results that indicate anything but strong growth and my subsequent puzzlement as to what may be happening in the marketplaces that we operate in. Nothing has changed - new orders over the weekend continued to be strong despite the last days of every month being 'slower' than those of the rest of each month. In fact, for the first three months of this year every product/service we offer has continued to grow more strongly than at any time in our company's short 'history'.
Having considered the non-action of making no changes to the current plans (based on there being no need for change as everything is going so well) - I rejected it. My reason for not 'doing nothing' is based on the long history of commerce and military campaigns that it is almost always too late to make changes when it eventually becomes obvious that you should do so - nothing more - and that improving your position might cost you some money in the short term (if it eventually turns out that in fact no subsequent changes need to be made) but making improvements can hardly damage your current situation if it turns out that changes don't become necessary.
So....it's a tough decision to 'give away' money on plans that already delivering very thin profit margins but we will shortly have around $A2.00 a customer in known cost reductions and an unknown, but not inconsiderable amount of further cost reductions across a number of the services we offer. While an amount of "$A2.00 per customer" doesn't sound much it actually turns out to be more impressive than it initially sounds because, depending on the 'plan element' only somewhere between 10% and 40% of total users of a service actually use the full amount of all 'plan elements' in any given month.
So, for instance, we could include the 100 free VoIP National calls on all ADSL1, Non Naked ADSL2 and HSPA plans (currently they are restricted to "naked" ADSL2 plans) without having to cost in a $400,000 increase in our supplier bills.Similarly we could increase the 12 midnight to 12 noon allowance from 54 gb based on our monthly increase in actual usage of the 12 noon to 12 midnight period - and as we expect to significantly add to that bandwidth at a much lower cost than is available today (in the near future) that would not impact our costs at all. We will also make the various 'bundled' options more attractive and also try and find a financially sensible way to add HSPA as a back up/travel option to our higher end ADSL1 and ADSL2 plans.
Depending on some more 'investigation' today (and probably tomorrow) we will consider doing all of those things together with a number of other 'riskier' plan changes. Our expectation is that we will therefore ensure that the current strong growth in almost all services continues to be maintained and that, if we have 'guessed correctly' that growth may strengthen.
Then again.....there's the Krudd factor that is far, far beyond a small company's risk minimisation planning to deal with......maybe there won't be an Australia worth living in beyond the current year?