John Linton ....and may this traditional celebratory period bring you happiness and relaxation shared with those closest to you. For those of us in Sydney it is a perfect summer's day - not a cloud in the sky and still a fresh off shore breeze in this part of the city....and Christmas carols on the sound system with the first aroma's of lunch emanating from the kitchen.
We finished up the Exetel year in the Australian office with nibblies and champagne in the office around lunchtime yesterday - also celebrating the 'arrival' of a further 8 business data link orders well and truly breaking the record for a record business sales month.....an amazing result. Most Australian personnel (and many Sri Lankan personnel are now on holidays with only a skeleton staff returning to work next week in Australia but an 'almost business as usual' number in Colombo - just recognising that the 'demand' for support and other services is much lower over this period recognising that almost all Australians take time off during the days between Christmas Eve and the start of the New Year.
We didn't manage to complete the re-pricing of the residential ADSL plans yesterday morning as we had hoped with only the first 'draft' of the AAPT based plans in any sort of 'final form'. This was disappointing but the problem simply is that the market generally and Telstra Retail and TPG in particular have made it quite difficult to offer plans that appear to be competitive but that aren't offered at below our current and likely near future costs.Looking at other company's pricing for residential services indicates that they don't seem to have any sort of coherent pricing policies at the moment though that may just be that my tired mind is not able to comprehend the nuances and subtleties of their strategies.
In TPG's case it appears they are only 'sustaining' their low 'head line' prices by severely under provisioning much of their network - which is something that will prove very costly to every aspect of their business in the future - if that assessment is correct. Telstra Retail is offering the pricing it currently does via a deliberate, and publicly stated, policy of losing something like a billion dollars in give aways and massive marketing budgets. I'm not, for one moment "complaining" about the tactics of either company - simply making the point that in such circumstances it becomes very difficult to find a way, let alone 'ways', of offering services that break even let alone return a small profit to ensure that the company remains in business. We will finish the Optus based ADSL2 plans next week and also the Telstra based ADSL1 plans - with a bit of inspiration that we need to generate between now and then - hopefully the 4 day 'rest' will revive the flagging 'little grey cells'.
We did almost make one major decision yesterday - unless something changes significantly over the next five days we will execute the heads of agreement to almost double our North Sydney floor space to allow for the more ambitious of our planned growth programs for business services in 2011. Personally, I have hesitated about doing this because we have found it more difficult to find suitable sales trainees to hire over the past few months which has slowed that intake significantly - to the point that the last person we hired made her tenth sale yesterday (which came in while she was on holiday) and therefore successfully completed her probation. As probation usually takes around three months to complete this means that, for the first time since we commenced this program (22 months) we have no 'probationers'. One more issue to be considered over the 'Christmas Break'.
Have a great day.
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