John Linton Annette raised this point over dinner last night. She has been doing the periodic personnel reviews which combine disussing with employees both their immediate and longer term future career direction preferences as well as their views on their current positions and jobs and various other aspects of the company, work environment, information dissemination etc and had collated the information she had gathered so far.
I had, and have, never really thought about it and when asked last night had no answer. I suppose I had always assumed that Exetel would increase in terms of number of customers for as long as we provided effective and cost advantageous services. Apart from how it relates to macro financial planning for future periods Exetel has never had any view or even estmates on how many customers we might provide service to from time to time. We certainly have never had any specific aims to be "big"/"Top N"/"$N million in annual revenue" or any other metric associated with dollars or customer numbers.
Annette's question was - did we actually need any more residential customers than we currently have and wouldn't it be far easier and far pleasanter for every one concerned to base any future growth on additional business customers while simply adding residential customers as current customers left us for whatever reason. Her more colourful way of putting it was to suggest that we closed the residential application pages with a message to the effect that:
"applications are closed at the moment - should you wish to be advised when we could accept your application in the future please fill in your contact details below and we will notify you when a vacancy occurs".
Pretty silly concept in any meaningful commercial sense but.....but......what is actually wrong with limiting the 'size' of any part of a commercial undertaking to some sort of discrete size? What actual advantage is there in growing a commercial business, or in this instance, part of a commercial business, simply because it's possible to do that? I actually couldn't think of one assuming that, as with Exetel, the objective wasn't to make any large amount of money in the first place.
I suppose some of your suppliers won't 'love' you as much as you won't continue to regularly increase the amount of business you do with them beyond the current levels but then Exetel is only a tiny customer of virtually all of our suppliers so, in our case, such a situation is almost irrelevant. It's probably more problematic that 'no growth' in certain areas means that it will be more difficult to maintain the lowest possible component 'buying prices' but that would, presumably, be offset against lower operating costs as each aspect of current processes and procedures becomes ever more precisely (and therefore better) executed and each person employed becomes increasingly more knowledgeable and skilled in what they know and do.
Career growth is still maintainable as the business customer base grows and more complex products and services are delivered. Personnel loss is addressed by hiring in either Australia or Sri Lanka as the circumstances dictate.....so nothing really changes other than the difficulty of maintaining residential customers at some pre-determined level. So an interesting few minutes over a pleasant dinner but of no real consequence and certainly no intention of considering it further. We moved on to talk about more interesting and personally relevant things as people who have known each other for a very long time tend to do as the level in the wine bottle continues it's inevitable plunge.
So we drove home and thought no more about it. But then, in the cold light of an early Sydney Autumn morning (even earlier than I at first thought as I had forgotten to put the clocks back) I again thought about what we had discussed. There is little doubt that dealing with new 'business' customers is far, far easier than dealing with new residential customers of communicataions services. There is also no doubt, at least in my mind, that it is far easier for a small company to compete in business market places than it is in residential market places. In fact, when I think back about it I can see how really hard it has been for Exetel to offer communications services to residential users and how so much easier it has been to offer services to business users.
So I thought about it a bit more and all the things that came in to my head were how there are so many problems providing services to residential users and virtually all of our resources (and certainly all of my time) is spent on dealing with issues and scenarios that generate very little satisfaction and absolutely no either personal or professional pleasure - simply because 0.25% of many, many tens of thousands of users are able to ruin (probably too harsh a description - maybe "introduce negativity completely disproportionate to their importance in the scheme of things") most days. On the other hand new business users require very little tiime and almost no effort and make life, for the most part, very pleasant and they are a pleasure to associate with.
It would be interesting, and I thought, mutually rewarding to work with a 'fixed' number of customers to get every last detail of a wide range of services absolutley perfect rather than wasting so many people's time dealing with the same utterly mundane and pointless 'issues' such as "how do I set my email", "why is my ticket closed" and "I'm getting loads of drop outs"and endlessly on and on, from people who just won't lift a finger to read the copious documentation. It simply isn't a way that either customers or support personel should spend their days.
So by the time I had finished the first cup of coffee of the day I actually couldn't think of a single real reason not to more thoroughly investigate Annette's light hearted suggestion but I coud think of a whole lot of reasons why it would be a really good thing to do.
Then the caffeine kicked in and I realised I am getting far too old for this sh**. I need a new direction at least and more probably a new life - and I need to aim at achieving more realistic objectives like .......