John Linton We completed the Sri Lankan personnel and operational reviews today and in a few hours time will fly back to Bangkok for one day's r and r before returning to Australia at first light on Monday to ensure the month ends as well as we can make happen given the combination of Easter, Anzac Day and the school holidays and the disruptions they cause. I always enjoy my time in Colombo and I hope I contribute to the development of Exetel here. The growth of the company is evident in the simplefact that we have almost used up all the space that when we first moved in we barely took up a third. Similarly the complexity of the tasks now being undertaken is around double that of a year go. We have enormous challenges to achieve the targets we are aiming at for the balance of this financial year let alone the huge tasks in front of us up to December 2011.
Assuming we manage to keep going at the current rates in our corporate and mobile broadband endeavours the current personnel in Colombo will reach around treble that in Australia - it is currently almost double despite the growth in corporate sales people in Sydney over the last few months and we will need the planned additional space in Sri Lanka almost right on schedule. Our major problem remains the development of supervisors and now managers which I made some progress towards formulating over the past few days and will 'flesh out' over the next few weeks.
One of the highlights of the week back in Australia was one of our new 'batch of corporate sales trainees broke the record for completing her probation in less than 60 days (to complete probation at corporate sales at Exetel you need to make ten corporate sales) which broke the year old record set by one our super stars who herself is as good a corporate sales rep as any I've seen in a long career. The work also started in fitting out the new floor in North Sydney which is planned as a dedicated corporate sales/pre sales support floor for 48 personnel - assuming we continue to meet our targets.
Exetel continues to be a very small company in any comparison with the companies we compete with day to day and even our recent 'growth spurt' means we only have 115 personnel in both countries. However we take business of all of the companies who are much bigger than we are (by any measurement) and it does demonstrate that personnel quality and total honesty in dealing with customers in all aspects of selling and provisioning is a very powerful set of attributes even in today's markets. The challenges that we face in continuing to grow our business all revolve around increasing the 'quality' of everything we do.
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