John Linton Some progress was made yesterday towards putting in place arrangements to work with two other companies in quasi joint ventures. We also made some progress in completing next year's business plan but also realised that, small though it is, Exetel has grown beyond the, what I have always thought were, sensible bases of previous management practices that we have used for the first seven years of its existence. I feel like I am being nickel and dimed to death with minor issues when what is really happening is something quite different and it concerns me that I don't see issues in the same ways that so many, different, other people see them. As I have fleetingly noticed and commented on over the past two years - Exetel is inexorably changing and can't be managed in the ways I have become used to and happy with.
In terms of the 'joint ventures' there isn't much 'joint about them'. At these early stages it will be Exetel that provides a very large dollop of its intellectual property and quite a bit of its software systems and in return we will get not very much. However the value of these possible agreements is in the future and that is always a quite dangerous view to take - at least from my past experiences and from what I have observed....although I do understand that there could very well be significant advantages if either of them do work out. Perhaps it's end of calendar year tiredness that is making me view things more cynically than usual but I am not feeling that anything I am involved in at the moment is worth the time it is taking to reach any sensible conclusion - and I do realise that's a state of mind rather than reality.
What really continues to concern me each day is the ongoing 'marketing activities' of Telstra Retail. I don't know what else they may have in mind in terms of improving their current win back market share offers but there has to come a time when they make providing ADSL residential services so uneconomical for any other service provider that you have to, very seriously, consider what should be done. Over the last week or so there has been an apparent lessening in the churn aways to Telstra and a noticeable increase in the churns to Exetel from Telstra (and a more noticeable drop in churns to TPG and a corresponding increase in churns from TPG) - both have gone back to being positive in Exetel's favour. I am not stupid enough to think that a few days of more positive results mean anything very much and I have little doubt that this is only a very temporary respite. In the ongoing development of the 2011 calendar year business plan it is becoming clearer that we need to find a way of wasting so much resource involved in supporting Telstra ADSL services if we can't make a sensible financial return from them in the coming year - which looks highly unlikely.
We made the decision on hiring a sales director yesterday and hopefully that will be completed by the end of this week - assuming the offer of employment is accepted after the paperwork is 'examined'. This position is now very important for Exetel as we continue to add more sales resources and personnel in to the company. If every thing goes to plan we will have more than 50% of our total personnel in sales positions by around the middle of 2011 and more than half of those resources will be devoted to business/corporate sales - mostly based in Australia but a growing number in Sri Lanka - depending on how things work out. There are an awful lot of things to get right before that can happen. If we do actually accomplish that then by the end of 2011 we will have over 60 people involved in selling to end customers and the company should be on the way to the planned goal of revenue from business users exceeding revenue from residential users.
So one more day goes by and I have the distinct impression we didn't accomplish as much as we should have......as someone more insightful once said (attributed to John Lennon but I don't think that's correct) - "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans".
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