John Linton
.......despite the grey skies and the rain on the windows.....and is the start of truly major changes in Exetel's business and technical 'activities'.
Perhaps that should be slightly modified to April ends with a rip roaring sales day and May's billing is getting closer to $A5 million a month. We had a truly remarkable business sales day yesterday that saw 18 new orders come in over a 9 hour period from new corporate customers signing up for EOC services of between 4 mbps and 20 mbps allowing every member of our young sales teams to exceed their quotas and give us the largest corporate sales month ever - by a long way - and to raise the happiness and excitement level in the office as each new sale came in to the loudest it's ever been - a very happy end to a pretty tough month.
May's recurrent billing held on to the huge gain we made in April, which was almost a 'miracle' in itself but allows us a chance of May's total billings exceeding $A5 million in a month for the first time - if not in May then almost certainly in June. This financial aspect of running a business of Exetel's size is very keenly felt, more than it would be in a larger business as such a large percentage of Exetel's people are heavily involved in the various performance, sales, delivery and financial targets and, like every other aspect of Exetel's business we operate on a completely open, 'no secrets', basis.
In the last week progress was made in increasing network capacity with the planned upgrades for the Sydney and Brisbane PoPs completed by Friday. The Melbourne upgrades are due to be completed next Tuesday with Adelaide, Perth and the ACT all due for completion by 12th May. When those planned upgrades have been completed the network will have had around 50% additional capacity deployed around Australia in three weeks....by far and away the largest network upgrade we have ever done and in such a short time frame; it represents the equivalent of around six months of the upgrades done in 2009. However those upgrades will be 'dwarfed' before the end of this calendar year as we begin the process of upgrading the current network from being based on 1 gbps circuits to being based on 10 gbps circuits in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and implementing new capabilities across the network to cope with the planned future growth of the business service network we are offering to larger corporate customers. By this time next year, assuming we meet our month on month objectives, the Exetel network will consist of two networks of more than triple the capacity we deploy today. A truly scary concept in terms of the money that is planned to be invested and the scope of the work that needs to be done.
Of course, there are many, many dependencies as we begin the planning for the current financial year and, as I tend to allude to so often, the as yet unknown difficulties in so many of the market places in which we operate make any sort of detailed planning extremely difficult because of the uncertainties that appear to be everywhere. The principal objectives we need to plan for are based around these sorts of numbers:
1) In ADSL, to retain as many of our 'good' customers as we can by increasing the value we provide to them and to attract enough 'good' customers to maintain our current total customer numbers.
2) To quadruple our number of VoIP users in residential and to grow our business VoIP users by a magnitude.
3) To increase our SMS traffic to 5,000,000 a month
4) To increase our MoIP traffic by a magnitude
5) To increase our business/corporate sales to 240 new customers per month by June 2011
These are simply overall objectives that have absolutely no detailed day by day planning yet and they may be very different when we complete the planning process but in my crude year by year plan written a very long time ago now this is the year of 'transformation' for Exetel (mind you I didn't expect to be here actually participating in these tasks when I casually wrote the objectives for Exetel's seventh year of existence so long ago). However, pretty much everything else has happened year by year so far so maybe these 'crazy' objectives will be achieved in some measure.
May will be an exciting month.
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