John Linton .....which served to accentuate how exhausting business life can be on occasions.
We had a low key celebratory cocktail party for all Sydney based personnel last night at a local hotel to acknowledge the ending of the current financial year and to look forward to the coming 12 months. I was so bone weary tired that I left after I had made a brief 'speech' acknowledging the achievements for FY2010 (including meeting all the financial targets except profit which, at least to date, we have placed little emphasis on) and spelling out the major changes for FY2011 and the areas we need to concentrate on to meet our next year's objectives. I think the hit of the hour I spent there was the belly dancer with the two meter python though the rapid consumption of alcohol had raised the noise level to deafening proportions by the time Annette and I left.
As always when I see all of our people together in a smallish space I am 'terrified' at how young they are to be responsible for the tasks they perform and continue to be amazed at the results they achieve. I am also very grateful that we still have so many of the people who joined us in the first year of our existence and that more people each six months pass the magic 'five years with Exetel' mark - it gives such a very young group of people a stability that can only come from employment longevity.
Before the cocktail party, Steve and I had a very nice and very enjoyable lunch with one of our major providers and exchanged some versions of our different experiences over the past year. They, like most people I have talked with (suppliers, customers, acquaintances, bank managers) over the past few months have not viewed FY2010 with anything but being glad it's over and hoping for better times in the new financial year. No-one seems to have done particularly, if at all, well over the last six months so it will be interesting to see what the final results are when the reporting season rolls round.
I had my final input in to the fibre plans and how we will now proceed to market them in the Opticomm 'estates' and the NBNCo 'trial' locations in Tasmania. We will 'activate' both the Tasmanian and Opticomm order forms next week and will start the "marketing" program a few days later. I am sorry that I will miss sharing this kick off of a new type of service as I would be really interested in seeing how the customers in those locations react to the various different 'selling efforts' of iPrimus, Internode and iiNet and the three other ISPs 'rumoured' to be signing up for the NBNCo trial.....and what happens when they find out the results of their initial price offerings. It would have been fun to have been here for that really interesting time.
There were a myriad of other tasks that filled in all the available hours in the last week but they are not worthy of comment other than it seems more difficult than at any time in my working life to actually get through a day's work - clearly a sign of many things I need to address in the immediate future but the immediate future will now be put on hold for a week or so. We still have given no thought as to where we might go when we get off the plane in four day's time and we must put some thought in to that over the next two days - but there remains an awful lot of 'tidying up' to do so I am not sure whether we will actually get around to it.
Two more sleeps.
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