John Linton
....and may the coming year be the happiest and most fulfilling of all of our lives so far.
Woke up very late this morning but when I commenced the day's work I saw the email telling me that the recurrent billing done every month in the early hours of the first day of the month recorded a new recurrent billing record which was really good to see as we reduced so many of our prices in November and again in December. A good start to the new year and, of course, of the new decade. It was a very positive start (I roughly calculated that we would bill less than in December and again in January due to the across the board reductions we had made) to what, personally, I think will be a very difficult year for the ADSL part of Exetel's business. I left the office around 2 pm yesterday just as we received our 7th corporate order for the day which achieved the very high target we had set for December. This was a great achievement bringing the total for December to an over 500% increase on what was achieved in December in 2008 and our newest graduate who only joined us in the first week of December making her 7th sale from prospects she obtained from her own efforts in averaging 60 cold telephone calls a day.....puts to shame the sales 'professionals' in other companies who say "nothing happens in December as everyone is on holidays or in wind down mode. I will be very, very happy if we achieve a 500% growth in December 2010 on the figures achieved in Corporate Sales for December 2009.
So back to the reality of running a small data communications business in 2010.
Much of our effort over the next few days will be spent on seeing just what we can do to increase wireless broadband sales to residential customers and particularly to business customers. We have made some 'moves' to put programs in place but we really need to improve the rapidity of our development which has been far below what we need it to be to achieve our 2010 targets. There seems to be a consensus among US and EU wireless suppliers that data over wireless will continue to grow exponentially in 2010 - far outstripping ADSL growth which, as in Australia, has plateaued and is likely to fall sharply over the coming twelve months as an increasing percentage of lower end ADSL users swap to wireless. One reason that might not happen is shown in this article:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/29/mobile-problems-force-apology-by-apples-uk-partner/?mod=
O2 is the 'old' British Telecom and it's networks have always been very good. It is clearly a sign that even the largest carriers are underestimating the take up or wireless data services even though, as in O2's case, they have invested a further billion dollars over the past two years in trying to match the exponentially growing demands. Spending 60 million dollars in London alone over the past three months is an indication of the magnitude of the problem. My friends in the UK with whom I had hoped to do business with tell me that their business has quadrupled in terms of monthly net new customers since we last spoke when I was in the UK back in August and that their growth experience is probably not as 'explosive' as the market leaders throughout the EU.
At Exetel we have begun to see the first signs of our own very low ADSL users swapping their services to wireless and, we believe, there will be an increase in the number of 'students' returning to studies and living in rental accommodation over the next month or so who will prefer an affordable wireless service rather than incurring the expense on installing/re-activating a telephone line - particularly female students. We are also seeing the first signs of companies 'standardising' on providing wireless offerings to the personnel rather than paying for ADSL services with three very large corporates approaching us in December asking for meetings in January to discuss 'migration paths'.
The issue, generally, is finding the price points that meet these new types of buyer's needs and then, much, much more difficult to find ways of meeting those price expectations and not losing money. While we won't be doing any work on that today we will have to finalise the offerings over the weekend so that we lose no time getting the sales programs underway on Monday. It will be a very difficult challenge....but we need to find a 'silver bullet' otherwise we will not meet our targets.