John Linton
.....with yet another inability to retire by failing to bring home the 10,000 - 1 quadrella and you realise, yet again, that it's 'almost Christmas'. Exetel's business has gone so well over the first four months that we 'declared' Melbourne Cup day to be an extra public holiday for Australian personnel who (with the exception of Steve) are all based in NSW or the ACT. Most of them took it and the dedicated finance team who decided they needed to work as it was the day after billing day were given an extra annual leave day to take at some later date. Annette and I took time off to have a quiet lunch in the CBD in one of the few restaurants that wasn't running a Melbourne Cup day event which we enjoyed....before returning to work
But it is almost Christmas and all of our plans for 'Christmas promotions' (such as they modestly were) have come to nothing with the sought after hardware still a month or so away and our two other "great ideas" and the other things we had expected to be able to do becoming non-starters due to supplier indifference. Never mind - we will have to come up with something else though on our fragile margins there is never much room for 'specials'. 'Christmas Celebratory Event Invitations' began arriving in the last half of October and we advised our people of the date of the Exetel end of year event a few days ago which adds some sort of impetus to the feeling that this year is nearly over and I haven't done anything like what I had hoped to do in this calendar twelve months and, yet again, I don't know where all the time has gone....except that it has.
Part of this lack of progress may be because my view of the current marketplaces in which we operate is that at least half of them are far tougher than they were during the recession/GFC/whatever and it is more difficult to read their future than at any time since I have been involved with them. Perhaps that is because of my failing abilities or perhaps I never actually could but only kidded myself I understood them - probably the more likely of the two options. I base this on two main things - the increased efforts it requires for us to achieve our monthly revenue targets and the amount of "lower price offers" by a range of other suppliers across a range of services - the "lower prices" are expressed in many different ways few of which actually seem to provide real lower prices - more for the same appears to be the majority of offers.
The more cautious of the economic 'experts' I bother to read or listen to all seem to be saying the same thing - that business conditions are probably tougher now (in the EU and the USA) than they have been seen to be because of the government hand outs which did nothing to improve conditions in any real sense but simply deferred, slightly, effects of widespread business downturns with the double whammy effect of loading even more debt on to banking systems that were not coping with their then levels of debt before the US and UK governments borrowed a trillion and a quarter ($US) more over the past twelve or so months. As a total economic ignoramus I have no way of actually understanding what is happening or will happen over the coming months in terms of how much individuals and commercial entities have to spend and whether or not they will spend more or less than they have done over the last 4 months - not a clue. I am presuming the various governments around Australia will be forced to spend less because they have no more capacity to borrow and will now have to start paying back the money they have p***ed away over the past year.
So all the 'signs' (competitors reducing prices, suppliers reducing prices, more efforts needed to make targets, extreme caution urged by the better respected economic commentators) are of tougher times now than twelve months ago. Our bank manager is coming to see us later this morning as we are thinking of doubling our floor space buying another floor somewhere in North Sydney or the CBD to cater for our planned growth in the business market places and it will be interesting to hear his views on what is happening generally and his views on how sensible it is for us to continue to try to double the size of our small business over the coming year. We could always rent but we have a view that Exetel shouldn't do that for its core business needs just as we pay cash for routers, switches and all other capital expenditure.
It will be interesting to see just how 'happy' this Christmas turns out to be.