John Linton
I'm not sure whether its' old age or the demands of managing the future of a small but continuingly growing company that passed the $A50 million annual revenue mark some time ago and now has over 90 professional career oriented employees in 2 countries but I have hired a 'research assistant' to take over the market analysis parts of my job that I have carried out since we 'converted' Exetel into a service provider (from a consulting company) some six years ago. I have been trying, with some success, to devolve a number of my responsibilities to other people within Exetel for almost two years and I think that would have reduced my personal workload except for the fact that Exetel has continued to grow and the markets in which we operate have continued to become more difficult. We have also slowly increased the range of services we provide which has continued to increase the amount of reading required.
My many hours per day, 7 days a week,work routines includes around 30 hours of 'market/product/service analysis' and I simply can't fit it in recently (I don't know how long "recently" is but I notice I don't have precise enough information these days). As we depend on that market place knowledge it is past time to correct that situation. From the first year we were in business we have always been lucky to have extremely bright 'interns' apply to us each November whom we have given internships to with alacrity. We have hired three of these interns over that time and have been 'blessed' with the intellectual power they have brought to the company. We would have liked to have hired all of them over the past six years but we had no positions that would have begun to utilise their intellectual needs and desires.
We have offered the job to another very bright intern who has worked with us over the past four months who apart from her unbroken excellent school academic record and sporting success ending with a distinction 'ridden' transcript is from Sri Lanka although she came to Australia as a young girl before returning to complete high school in Colombo and then again returning to Australia to complete her under graduate degree. She is currently completing her internship in the Sri Lanka office preparing some legal documentation for Exetel's law suit against the TIO.
I haven't been in a position to use help in the daily tasks I have performed up to now, partly because of our attitude to keeping personnel costs to a minimum and partly my convoluted way of working that makes it difficult to separate some tasks from the overall workload. However it has become essential and when something has to be done the previous barriers preventing it, magically immediately disappear. I have done this twice before in my 'career' with mixed, but overall positive, success and I am hoping I have learned enough from the previous experiences and glaring mistakes to make this iteration completely successful. Time will tell.
As I mentioned it in passing - our solicitors served the TIO with our 'demands' last Thursday relating to over 300 instances of incorrect charging and vexatious behaviour. It has taken much longer to produce the documentation because, effectively, Larry and co have had to 'educate' both our solicitors and Senior Counsel on the detail of how the TIO processes work (or in the cases cited - don't work) and then re-produce all the case notes, email exchanges with the TIO, recorded calls to and from the TIO in the format required to take before a court. I am grateful to have played no part in the long, tedious and time consuming processes. Perhaps it is a litigation dominant period in Exetel's life as we also submitted the first of two legal actions against Telstra last week to the court to request a hearing date and the second case will be submitted before the end of March.
Life always seems to me to be a bit like that - no sooner do you get around to addressing one problem another two appear.