John Linton ........although they are inefficient which is why I stopped using the 'meet till its accomplished' process.
We spent around six plus hours in one continuous (only break for lunch) meeting yesterday to review and upgrade the ADSL residential plans yesterday. Even that length meeting involving 5, sometimes six, people wasn't enough to complete the residential plan review but most of the work was done and the web site and order forms had been updated on the web by around 6 pm yesterday. So, probably the longest meeting ever held in Exetel's existence. Hopefully the changes made will be seen as being beneficial to prospective and current residential ADSL customers. In general terms they are greater value for money and are the lowest prices we have ever offered. Given that Exetel runs an uncontended network and has excellent support there really is not anything more that we can do to improve the residential services we offer.
We will attempt to complete the work today, and correct any errors made, as well as consider how to make the presentation of the information better than it has been in the past. There is very little 'individuality' left in today's residential ADSL markets which, due to the major carrier's influences, have devolved to similar levels of obfuscation to the 'selling' of mobile services. If you don't think that's true then all you have to do is look at any of the top ten residential ISP providers web sites and try and work out exactly what is being offered at what price. I can tell you that four or five people in the meeting yesterday misinterpreted what was being offered each time we visited a competitor's site yesterday and those are people very well versed in 'ISP speak' and what to look for. Perhaps real customers look at those web sites differently?
Once we finish the residential ADSL plan review - hopefully by midday today - we will need to apply the same process to both mobile and wireless broadband services. With the Easter/Anzac Day 'break' removing so many 'working days' from April it's unlikely that we will be able to complete those reviews until early May which coincides with the time allocated to producing the FY2012 financial and operating plans. It seems that time frames in our business are becoming more and more compressed with less and less time available to carry out the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi annual and annual tasks. So one thing we have to do is to simplify our business and business processes to allow enough time to do a day's work in a day.
It is never easy 'transforming' any business, even a business of Exetel's modest size, to primarily address a different set of markets with a different set of products/services using completely different people and methodologies but I am finding the current 'transformation' more difficult to accomplish smoothly than I expected. We have made a great deal of progress, perhaps as much as we planned to do some two years ago, but the efforts required to bring this about have exceeded my most pessimistic expectations. Hopefully we will continue to gain momentum from now on as we reap the rewards of more productivity from the enormous (for a company of our size) financial and time investments we have made to make our 2012 objectives at least possible.
Then again - that's business for you - always much harder than it looks when you plan and often much less rewarding than you hope it will be.
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