John Linton ......it isn't a simple transition from three weeks of enjoyable holidays.....at least it isn't for me.
I coped marginally better with the effects of jet lag over night but still feel as though my mind is comprised of cotton wool with a dull head ache and a slight tinnitus - none of which are conducive to meeting my colleagues after a three week absence let alone contributing sensibly to the conversations about how the business is faring and what changes we need to make over the next few days to make achieving next quarter's targets more probable. So it was with some reluctance that I got out of bed an hour or so earlier than is my normal practice earlier this morning.
A key item to be addressed is moving the Sri Lankan operation from the end times of 'Phase III' to the beginnings of 'Phase IV'. In general terms this means removing the remainder, and there is relatively little, of the "do as the Australian imposed 'blue print' tells you to do in every circumstance" and now do what your experience, skill and knowledge tells you are the best things to do in the ever changing circumstances in which you find yourself. Steve will be in Colombo this week to make a 'formal' start to these processes in the event that there ever can be a "formal" start. Brendon will return from Colombo today having spent the past two weeks preparing the various people for this set of procedural and process changes in operations in Colombo that must now change to explaining why so much of the day to day activities now need to reach a new level of customer satisfaction - and how that might be accomplished and over what sort of time frame - not an easy assignment.
The second key item is to review the plans for making some very significant changes to the ways we address the small/medium business marketplaces and how to develop an 'alliance' to now build on the progress we have made in those areas over the past almost three years. We have roughly met the quarter by quarter targets we set at this time in 2008 - and in some ways have exceeded most of them. We could just continue the way we are going which has been quite successful to date and as I mentioned the business sales force we are building made a little over 150 sales in August - a very notable achievement. The issue that confronts us now is how to accelerate the growth in this area of our business and just how fast that growth can be accelerated from its current rate. Our original objective was to build this operation to achieve 400 new sales per month by the end of calendar 2012 and then see how possible it might be to more than double that number by the end of calendar 2014. Such aims are very, very ambitious but the initial objective of growing our small/medium corporate business to 150 sales in a month was achieved roughly within the original time frame and, in many ways, building all the things required to do that was far more difficult than the issues we now face.
So it is going to be a busy week with the review of the current quarter's results and how we might need to change the next quarter's targets also being of a very high priority. I can feel the beneficial effects of the holiday already receding and it's not yet 7 am.
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