John Linton ....which, if it actually turns out that way, will be a pleasant 'relief'.
We made a little more progress towards completing next year's business plan yesterday and have some chance of meeting the deadline of COB next Friday for having a workable scenario for next year. The question in this stage of planning is always just how conservative or aggressive you should be in setting the targets for the various services and how many additional personnel and capital expenditure would be needed for any serious growth.....and in our situation how well the investments in new sales people over the past two years will deliver in terms of their 'maturity', and therefore additional performance, within their given roles.
So far we have adopted a very conservative approach to developing the planned targets and new hires and have restricted our capital expenditure to a minimum. Over the next three days we will re-look at all base assumptions before reaching a plan that will be put to the directors next week. Our usual practice has been to check the most conservative version of any annual plan and then make some decisions on what 'up sides' we can see that haven't been included in the presented scenarios before agreeing a 'starting' plan that will be in operation from July 1st. As in all previous years we have continued to modify the 'starting plan' as the year progresses.
Over the past two years the major influences on the residential ADSL markets generally have been Telstra Retails 'win back expenditures' and TPG's "unlimited usage" offers at very low prices. It's unclear what Telstra Retail will do over the balance of this calendar year but we are beginning to "win back from Telstra" as many customers as they are "winning back" from us - and we expect that trend to continue. The other big change is that we are losing very few customers to TPG now and the number of customers "returning from TPG" to Exetel has risen appreciably over the last few months to the point that the monthly net minus has become a growing net plus. So we have included a small month on month growth for residential ADSL in the new plan versus a month on month loss for the previous two years. if things do in fact go as currently planed then the trend reversal in residential ADSL sales will be a surprise 'bonus' after the last two plus years.
The other 'surprise' growth in the FY2012 plan is in both residential and business VoIP which as I noted the other day is 'booming' in both areas. Together with the more sedately growing sales of small business ADSL the plans we put in place late in 2010 are making really pleasing progress towards our theoretical goal of acquiring 100,000 small business customers by the end of 2012. This is one of the key issues in terms of conservative versus more aggressive decisions for FY2012. How many additional sales people do we add in both Sri Lanka and Australia to progress this key 'strategy'? I am tempted to double the size of both sales operations in the short term as the current levels of success these operations are achieving indicate some sort of overall weakness within the companies we are competing with for this business. My only hesitation is caused by the 'shell shock' of the actions in the residential markets over the past two years that caution me to re-think what could happen in the coming year.
So it will be a busy three days to meet the first dead line and then a very intense last week of June to determine just 'how lucky we feel'.
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35 - apart from being the actual percentage of beef in a Taco Bell beef taco.