John Linton It was a very fractured week for me - arriving back in Australia on Monday and taking balance of that day to readjust backwards by five and a half hours, Wednesday being Australia Day and flying to Melbourne and then staying for a few hours to call on two Melbourne based companies we might do some sort of business with resulting in not getting back to Sydney until late Thursday afternoon which basically left Friday as the second 'working day' of the week. So although I worked the usual number of hours the week in Sri Lanka plus the heavily disrupted week that has just passed don't seem to have produced much in terms of progress for the Australian company.Perhaps that's actually a good thing in terms of a 'traditionally quiet' month - what an abysmally stupid phrase that is.
I won't know the actual progress, in numbers terms, until Tuesday morning when we get the recurrent revenue results from the monthly bill run but the 'feel' of the month is mostly positive. The day by day numbers are on track for every part of the business except corporate sales which, while always being down is currently further down than I would like to see with much promising but less result than was anticipated. However we did have an exceptional, record, December for corporate sales and that could be a contributing factor. However, in business as in much of personal life, there are no excuses for objectives not being met.
The only significant disappointment in January has been the inability to hire more sales trainees in Australia for corporate sales. In contrast we filled the additional sales positions in Sri Lanka within a few days of approving the increased head count. I don't know what it is about our inability to find suitable sales trainees in Australia lately - for the previous 18+ months we had no trouble in finding excellent trainees. It obviously needs a re-think of what we now fail to do that we used to do well - or at least productively in being able to find people who turn out to be successful in selling to corporate buyers.... and we need to do that with a greater sense of urgency.
The month was dominated by the major changes we made to our residential ADSL plans to come in to effect from February 1st 2011. The advisory emails sent out on January 1st resulted in a quadrupling of telephone calls to our sales and support lines and major activity in our forums. I received many emails from customers and business
associates telling me I was insane to do such things and that my actions would destroy Exetel by forcing "all" of Exetel's customers to move to "much better" ISPs. Maybe that will be the case. If it is then Exetel, and I personally, will be much better off financially because we will no longer lose money providing residential services at a loss. Looking at the daily figures it seems unlikely that will happen and far more likely the actual number of 'lost' customers, and more importantly the 'profiles' of the lost customers will end up as being slightly lower than my personal estimates and much lower than my colleagues more 'pessimistic' estimates - however we won't know for sure until the end of next week.
I have found little time to research the state of the markets in which we operate or any changes in our competitor's approaches to those markets so I can't get any sort of feel for what is happening in competitor land. From the little I have seen directly there is no change to the general 'desperation' that was evident in the last six months of 2010 (in that I have seen no changes to pricing or approaches in January for what that's worth) and I guess we'll have to wait for the half year reporting to see what the larger comms companies actually achieved in the last half of 2010 as they file their half year reports next month and the ABS publishes their half yearly statistics.
I am looking forward to a 'full' week next week with more confidence than I have had for quite a while - the 'magic' of a break no matter how brief?.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46