John Linton
.....but of course we did and, yet again, we didn't allow enough time for dealing with all the issues that are "out of our control". It has exceeded even my pessimistic view that allowing nine months to plan and execute the promotion of HSPA in country areas of Australia would be more than enough.
There's a lot going on as we approach the end of another financial year and it is becoming a little clearer on what Exetel is going to become involved with moving into the new financial year in terms of HSPA activities - just as well really as that's only two weeks away now. It really does still surprise me just how fast the years slip by these days and why we make so little progress - I think it's getting more and more obvious that we need a change in management as I clearly can't make things happen as quickly as I once did - or perhaps more accurately, kidded myself I did.
Early yesterday morning I 'shook metaphorical hands' (the other party was the other side of the world) on a deal to buy HSPA modems from early in 2010 at pricing we can only dream about in Australia and will execute the formal paperwork when we go to the UK in a couple of month's time. In the meantime we will need to either get the source we have been pursuing for some time now to actually agree a ship date or change our strategy on that aspect of our HSPA promotion. I will be disappointed not to bring that to fruition as it would be an important 'edge' to have in the early days of the country rural/regional promotion. However we have put a quite considerable amount of effort in to this activity but have still not achieved an actual usable result.
I also was given the perfect 'magic box' pricing late yesterday together with the specifications that exactly matched our requirements. Their ship date, unfortunately, is not till October which is disappointing but at least I know its possible now and I will pursue some other options and also encourage the other people we have asked for help to make more effort to get an earlier ship date and a better price than they have offered previously. Again I have been unprepared for dealing with the issues required to achieve a successful result in a realistic time frame from what I thought was a pretty simple process - wrong again.
It looks like the antennae will finally ship next Saturday (we made the final payment today) and we will decide on a 'fulfilment house' tomorrow so they have a home to go to when they eventually clear customs. That will be a relief, assuming it happens, because it has taken "for ever" to reach this point. Again I think it will help our rural/regional agents to have a significant price advantage over their local competitors - the antennae should be around $A50.00 including shipping to them which is a big price break from what I can see. We have never used our own fulfilment house before so this is yet more new territory for us but it is going to be something we are going to become increasingly involved with if things turn out the way we are planning.
The new pricing for the HSPA services was released yesterday and was, largely, well received - the expected percentage of "but why isn't it all free with massive downloads and millions of dollars of inclusions" smaller than expected. I made one error in the construction of the order form (why do I always forget that there are thieves and a***holes who will always exploit nice suppliers like Exetel) and I will have to fix that later today. I am happy with the sensible people's general approval of the plans. We still need to price the 'add ons' and put in place the processes that make them easy to order (and cancel) and that has to be done in the near future.
Our latest 'push' to increase the number of regional/rural agents we have in more locations is bringing in a slowly increasing number of new agents in new areas and we have most of the project milestones locked down and capable of being achieved. It is good to see that our 'second effort' is much more successful than our first attempt and I am really pleased to see that the new 'towns' are names I have always liked but never had the chance to visit. We are still a long way from finding agents capable of servicing the 1,132 townships we ideally we would like to have in place (actually a very, very long way short) but we will persist with that objective.
I was reminded today during a discussion with someone with long experience with Telstra's "activities" to be extremely careful of the design of the TV ad to ensure that Telstra don't have an opportunity of derailing the campaign by filing one of their numerous complaints about "deceptive behaviour" a la their last ludicrous complaint about the three words on an obscure web page (that at the time had actually been 'de-linked' so goodness knows how they got access to it).
I like the ad concept as set out on the 'story board' when the agency presented their pitch because, to me, it was unambiguous in how it described the HSPA offering and, as far as I could see, there was nothing at all that could be construed as "deceptive" or contravening the numerous sections of the act as set out by Telstra's legal person when objecting to the heavily qualified words "pretty much anywhere". However if I put my mind to it I could almost certainly object to EVERY ad I've ever seen in finding something misleading or deceptive in it so doubtless some legal pettifogger among the scads of 'legal experts' could find something wrong and proceed to attempt to ruin our investment and advertising schedule and processes. I will have to seek further reassurances from the agency that they do understand the 'legal requirements' of producing an ad that will be 'invigilated' by Telstra's lawyers - have I ever made it clear what I think about Telstra and their ways of running their monopoly?
So it was a day almost full of dealing with details about HSPA and its promotion in a month's time which left precious little time to deal with the work needed to be done on the other nine products/services on which we will rely to produce FY2010's revenue and profit targets....but, I suppose, there are 9 days left before the new year commences.