John Linton We seemed to have more 'meetings' than usual over the past five 'working days'. Most of them were 'internal' involving making changes to various aspects of the way we do things in terms of selling our services and managing our businesses but a few key meetings with 'outsiders' as well as our monthly board meeting yesterday afternoon. Our key pre-occupations were with with the continuing issues brought about by the continuing 'turmoil' in the various residential market places brought about by Telstra's ever more aggressive 'marketing' and the 'actions' being taken by the companies affected by Telstra's marketing that in turn affect Exetel.
I have 'been around' a fair while in the Australian communications industry but I have never observed so much change taking place so frequently over such a sustained length of time. Virtually all of the change is 'negative' as far as our company is concerned and it is becoming more and more evident that it is just as painful, perhaps more so in some cases, for many of the suppliers we are in regular contact with. Personally, I think it will all end in tears for everyone with the possible exception of Telstra. Again, personally, I think that may (emphasis on MAY) end up being the best long term result for the Australian residential user but will almost certainly do immense short term/medium term damage to the Australian industry and any beneficial longer term result in return for that possibility seems, to me, to be a ridiculously high price to pay. But then I am obviously biased in my view.
Despite the current shenanigans in the residential marketplaces it's not all gloom and doom though. We continue to develop more and, hopefully, better plans to allow our company to continue to exist and continue to contribute to making Australia a better place. At yesterday's board meeting we discussed the need for an Auckland PoP in the immediate future - next 4 to 6 months and a similar need for PoPs in the UK and the USA in the longer term - perhaps before the end of 2011. We have discussed these issues more than once in the past but have not gone beyond brief discussions as we had many more 'pressing demands' on the limited financial and personnel resources we can deploy at any given time. There seems little doubt that we will go ahead with an Auckland, and perhaps, a Wellington PoP either on our own or in some sort of 'collaboration' with a New Zealand company that has presences in those two locations - all we need is a thoroughly costed implementation plan (not being a cargo cultist or Labor politician) and an associated business plan.
We also discussed the timing of the development of an outbound calling capability in our Colombo office. Since we began our business back in January 2004 we have totally relied on our web site and 'word of mouth' supplemented by an initially very small number of 'agents' to bring customers to our residential services. That has worked very, very well for the whole of that time but, as I have been remarking, times are now very different. Annette and I will go to Sri Lanka in early October to conduct the quarterly reviews and part of those reviews will be to determine just how we can 'build out' an outbound sales capability for residential and small business services using the experience we have now developed over the past 18 months building an outbound corporate sales presence in Sydney. Hopefully we will have hired the first three people that will allow three of our current inbound residential sales personnel to move to outbound sales by our target date of November 1st 2010. This will be a whole new venture for us but, admittedly knowing nothing about how to do this, we can see huge advantages for Exetel and a new 'dimension' to our overall activities.
We also are seeing the early signs that our contract programming and technical consulting business may become more successful than our original modest plans indicated that it might. We have a great deal of expertise (because of our own ongoing ever more sophisticated developments) in data base and voip integration and more expertise than we can find externally in voip and Asterisk development. Our sales of voip to small, medium and medium large businesses are beginning to grow exponentially and that has exposed us to the yawning and ever widening gap in general expertise in Asterisk and other aspects of VoIP implementation across all sectors of the business marketplaces. How we can identify suitable prospects for this part of our business remains to be seen but it may prove to be much easier than I thought when we decided to explore this possibility.
So, the last few days have been very challenging (as always) but they also provided more positive signs than usual - perhaps I am so 'punch drunk' from the constant "issues" I deal with every day I am mistaking 'daylight at the end of the tunnel' for the onrushing freight train.
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