John Linton
May has come to an end which leaves just one month to complete this financial year. May was another record month in terms of revenues and increased customers for every one of our services (just like every month from February 2004 has been) - very nice to see. I have no 'benchmark against which to judge Exetel's growth other than the 'average growth for the communications industry reported by the ABS from time to time so I never know whether Exetel is doing as well, better or worse than the people we compete with. I make the assumption that if we grow each month then our customers are happy enough with us to both continue to use our services and to recommend them to other people which is a positive indication of how the company is performing.
I remain fascinated that ADSL1 sales remain so high but obviously there are many places where ADSL2 can't be obtained or perhaps can't be obtained at a reasonable price as it's only available from Telstra or a Telstra reseller. Our HSPA revenue continues to grow at a slightly faster rate which is encouraging given the preponderance of advertising and promotion being used by the carriers and their retail outlets. Our business connections are growing much faster because we have begun to put in place a business outbound sales force so that is to be expected. Our plans for FY2010 now contain a modest HSPA promotion budget and money to support our agents plus a big increase in money for the corporate sales force so hopefully we will see slightly stronger growth over the next few months than we have seen in the past. I always get a kick from looking at our monthly recurrent billing reports on the first of every month and get a lot of satisfaction from seeing the visible progress that is always made but, on top of the very full workload running a tiny communications company usually imposes, May has been a somewhat frantic month in many other, largely very positive, respects.
Courtesy of an apparently ethics-bereft land lord/estate agent - an insight into the landlord's interesting views and practices can be gauged from this article about another of their properties:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/residents-savage-basement-zoo-plan-as-hideous-20090530-br16.html
we will operate from our newly fitted out premises from today. That has meant that, a little earlier than we had expected, we have moved to using a telephone PABX and other telephone capabilities supporting 100,000 customers via connecting them to two offices in two different countries and individuals in six different geographic locations that we have fully developed and written ourselves based on the Asterisk code. I, personally, think this is a, possibly the, major achievement for our small company to have fully developed our own highly functional and complex telephone hardware and software that is tightly and seamlessly integrated in to our very comprehensive and quite complex data base services. A major step in our continual process of more and more fully automating all aspects of our company by writing our own code and developing systems that are better and more useful than any we could buy 'off the shelf'. It's a great compliment to the abilities of our very small software development team that they developed and tested the systems in record time and that they 'survived' the 'test' of being cut over on no notice and working almost faultlessly.
The other step forward that we will begin to make from this month is the planned move to save almost 50% of our NSW co-locaton costs (an eventual saving of over $A100,000 a year) by moving facilities from one of our two Sydney CBD rental facilities to our new 'in house' data centre facilities. We will do this over a 12 month period commencing in August and take our time but we will end up making considerable savings which will help keep the costs of providing our services at the lowest possible levels. While, in the overall costings associated with delivering communications services, $100,000 a year isn't a significant sum of money it can be looked at that it would be necessary to increase the costs of individual services if costs aren't continually reduced by every means possible.
Our decision to use advertising and other promotional activities in rural and regional Australia was a pretty radical change for us and will take up a fair amount of our very limited resources while also changing the way we take our services to non-metropolitan markets. As well as the expenditure on TV ads we will significantly change the ways we support our agents in rural areas and have 'earmarked' more money to be spent on those programs than we have on the actual advertising. These promotions will include free wifi for vrious places and an increasing amount of 'subsidised' hardware. These moves have also required us to enter the fields of hardware sourcing and importing to support the HSPA promotions which in turn require us to provide warehousing and fulfillment processes of which we have absolutely no experience or knowledge.
In late May we also finalised the Sri Lankan company plan for FY2010 and formally approved the increased short term head counts that will shortly mean we will employ more people in Sri Lanka than in Australia. It seems a very short time ago that Steve, Annette and I sat round a table at a board meeting in Sydney and agreed that we should try to employ one engineer in Colombo to work from home to see whether or not we could make a work from home support function in a foreign country we had never been to, and see if such a move would provide some value.....it was more than three and a half years ago now - time flys by. It will be interesting to see how the Sri Lankan operation develops over the coming year as we gradually pull back the 'controls' in Australia.
We also finalised the operating plan for the Australian company for the coming twelve months and began some of the preparations for making that happen over the past few days. In most conservatively run businesses, of which I think Exetel is one, things develop/evolve rather than 'leap ahead' but there appears to be a definite quickening in many aspects of our development as evidenced by the 'happenings' last month. A principal focus will be to continue to grow our 'corporate' business at a faster rate and provide a continually more integrated service 'suite'.
It was a very interesting month in which many things have changed for Exetel.....probably more things changed last month than in any other month we have been in business.