John Linton .....all is right with the world.
Well the good, personal, news this morning is that my youngest daughter was offered a new position with IBM as a rep in one of IBM's UK business units - so her trip to England was not a waste of time and money. It occurred to me that my children are the third generation of our family to work in the IT industry as my father worked for NCR in Japan, the Philippines, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong from before my birth eventually selling the first NCR computers throughout the Asian region. It will be sad for her mother and me but a great opportunity for Catherine - so a great, personal, start to the day.
We continue to adjust, upwards, the inclusions in the current ADSL plans and are making some beginnings of progress in getting these more correct than in in the past. It has been a very long job and there is still no real 'end' in sight to this analysis - not that there ever has been I suppose. As I stressed yesterday - I blame my totally appalling 'negotiation' skills for this situation (there was a time when I was pretty certain I could tell when people lied to me - clearly that ability is no longer available to me). However I am assuming that if we work hard enough for long enough - using brighter and more experienced people than me - we will get back to a situation that becomes more viable for us over the coming months.Maybe we will 'finish' this current round of adjustments by the end of this week if some things finally go right.
We will need to do the same thing for the mobile broadband and mobile telephone plans before the end of June on the basis that I must have contributed to getting those buy prices as wrong as I got the ADSL prices. While we make some progress in developing those services the progress is not anything like fast enough in today's terms. This is due to any number of factors but mostly its our lack of 'bright ideas' and we need to fix that major issue before we can expect an increase in progress. Again, our buy pricing is not going to make things any easier and some hard decisions will need to be taken on just how best to improve our rates of progress in the coming new financial year.....nothing new in coming to that realisation.
One aspect of our current business that has benefited from 'bright ideas' (and enthusiastic management) is the ongoing development of corporate sales being made out of Sri Lanka. These are, at the moment, mainly in the small business business markets but we are not far away from signing our tenth large business customer from the efforts of the SL outbound sales personnel. This has been a highlight of the 'daily struggle' and is encouraging enough for us to escalate this program more quickly than originally planned. The new 'batch' of trainees are also developing more quickly than in the past which is also pleasing to see. Perhaps this is an indication that the people mentoring and training them are doing a better job based on having more experience than in the past?
Perhaps the sun replacing the seemingly continuous rain of April is having an overall cheering effect?
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