John Linton We held our final board meeting of the year yesterday mainly to celebrate the fact that we were just about to complete seven years in business including two of the most difficult years the industry has ever seen - at least in our collective experiences. We held the meeting in a nice restaurant and had some outstanding food. We discussed two very serious topics and made the appropriate decisions and dealt with the other items in between reminiscing about the various events of the past seven years. It was a pleasant two hours or so. We decided that the key events of the past seven years were:
- Surviving the Lorraine Rose Infamous attack in the week before Anzac Day in April 2005
- Surviving the Optus four months of under provisioning their ADSL1 back hauls in March through July in 2005
- Surviving Optus over billing throughout 2006
- Having the foresight and 'courage' and patience to hire the first work from home Sri Lankan support engineers in January 2007
- Having the courage and skills to decide to move all back end functions to Colombo in January 2008
- Having the foresight and skills to set up a corporate sales force in December 2008
- Surviving, at least so far, the Telstra succession of 'win back market share' promotions of 2009 and 2010
Certainly, the last seven years have not been without their challenges. Perhaps 2011 will be the toughest year of them all - so far.
With the exception of residential ADSL pricing for 2011 we have completed the planning for next year and hopefully the forecasts are more accurate than they were throughout 2010 - a year none of us will be sorry to see the end of. In terms of residential ADSL pricing - it is a very difficult thing to do and while we are making some progress in terms of revised plans for 'new' customers we continue to struggle to find ways of putting in place plans for 'old customers'. Each of the carriers we buy from are only interested in 'net adds' and don't recognise, or simply can't recognise, that it's fine to give big bonuses for new sign ups but that it is ultimately pointless if current customers are attracted to the bonus driven plans of other suppliers.
It remains difficult to explain to current customers that the plans they are currently on were only made possible by previous 'new customer' sign on bonuses provided by the carriers and that those have now been exhausted many years ago in the cases of customers who are on four or five year old plans. It's obviously Exetel's fault that this situation occurs because we have always passed on all the benefits provided by the people we buy from to the customers whenever we obtained them. One of the major down sides of attempting to provide the lowest possible prices for the past seven years.
On the brighter side we had another very good corporate sales day yesterday with six new sales bringing the total for the last four days to 30 - something we have never got close to before - let alone in the 'dead days' just before Christmas when business business is very quiet with someone actually answering a phone or email is unusual (except with a message that "Bill Jones will be on annual leave until January the 99th.....", so we have done something quite well in these difficult times. Let's hope we can continue to build on that in the coming year.
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