John Linton .....which is probably why women have so much more of it.
It has been a miserable weekend in Sydney and while it isn't continuing to pour down with rain for an hour or so it shows no sign of really improving with the forecast for the rest of the week for even more rain. We long ago abandoned the concept of driving somewhere to take advantage of the 'extra day's holiday a long weekend provides - mainly because of the traffic but also because when you run your business you actually don't differentiate days in to 'work days' and 'weekends'. Week ends for small business owners are days when you take more time to do non-work related things with your family (at least those members of your family that consider you worth spending time with) and a few other activities.
As the years pass ever more rapidly I have been trying to do less in terms of business activities and more in terms of personal activities before I lose the capabilities of doing either. I have been partially successful in some aspects of this but far from successful in most attempts. I ascribe the failure of those initiatives that have failed to my inabilities rather than than any other circumstances or people but, whichever way the problem lies, it has to be addressed. I am sufficiently experienced and have a realistic understanding of human dynamics not to need any more 'knowledge' on how to avoid the more obvious problems in delegation and, to use a totally stupid current term - "empowerment" - FGS did those idiots/frauds who call themselves "management consultants" ever have access to the OED during their education?
Our latest, longest and most important attempt at delegation of serious management responsibilities ended this month after 27 months - though in fact it should have ended a year ago when it was obvious it would never work, which was very sad for everyone concerned. Despite what was we considered to be a careful selection process, a set of indelibly clear guidelines and a totally unsupervised 'free hand' it was a complete failure. It was almost certainly worse than a complete failure but that determination will only be made over time. What went wrong in that instance? I really don't know although for the past year I have been trying to find out and, during that time, addressing the issues - without a skerrick of success.
So, just how do you grow a company of Exetel's size to a larger sized entity without burning up more money than company's of Exetel's size have available to them? Sell Exetel to another more competently managed entity? Hire much more experienced and different management people? Send key potential serious business managers on some sort of business education program? I have given this issue an increasing amount of thought as our boldest attempt to 'delegate' and grow our business showed increasing signs of falling apart...but have come up with nothing useful.....other than the query - is there any need for Exetel to grow beyond its current size in terms of people numbers but generate what growth is possible by the people themselves developing more competence and greater skills? Because Exetel has doubled the number of people it employs in a little over a year there is an enormous upside in developing the company that way.
The current business plan is premised on much more growth than we will have achieved in the year just about to end - that is almost a self defining result because we aimed at very little growth for FY2011 given the conditions we anticipated resulting from Telstra Retail's activities. However the work and hiring put into developing a much bigger corporate sales and support capability over the past two years may deliver a rapidly escalating volume of growth in the coming year. Having established the capabilities to sell 100 corporate customers a month over that period it will be a little easier to continue that growth, maybe accelerate it, month on month throughout FY2012 - fingers crossed.
If the planned growth in corporate and small business goes as the more 'optimistic' of our projections indict is possible, as well as the more modest growth in other services that is predicted, it is possible that Exetel will grow in revenue terms more in the coming year than it has done in the past three years combined - a very sobering thought - although those years have been extremely difficult years and we have planned very conservatively. How such a growth 'spurt' could be handled is currently beyond my abilities to understand and put in place in terms of increasing the management, as opposed to supervision, that would be required.
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