John Linton .......the magnitude of the decision I have just been part of making has begun to sink in.
We stopped off in Singapore for a day on the way back to Australia to do a couple of minor things and as a 'reward' for giving up two 'weekend' days flying to and from Sri Lanka (only kidding - we almost always fly on weekends to maximise the time in Colombo). So time to, once again, acknowledge that Singapore Airlines and Changi airport set standards of cleanliness, timeliness and efficiency that other airlines and airports can only dream about.
While Annette was busy doing other things during our 'daylight hours' in Singapore I completed the actions from the SL review and assessed just where we are at in 'Phase Four' of our objectives for the Sri Lankan operation so that the updates I am doing to the overall Exetel business plan for calendar 2012 can be completed on schedule. This will be far ore difficult and time consuming than in the past because we now have to seriously consider working with a partner, in a very real sense, to more rapidly develop the business/corporate areas of our business - possibly as far as shared equity in the Sri Lankan operations. So, pretty serious stuff and very difficult to actually put in to words and numbers that have to be clearly understood by people who have not been party to the actions and decisions that have allowed the current plans to be seriously contemplated.
So my final 'act' before leaving Colombo was to confirm that we would take the remaining 4,000 square feet of floor space in the WTC and also to give the go ahead for the fit out that will allow us to add an additional 50 people in Colombo to be dedicated to business corporate sales and support. This will double the number of people currently involved in these activities once we are able to hire and train the new personnel and will mean that we will be able to deploy one of the larger business communications sales forces in Australia and therefore make our ambitious aims of adding 400 new business data customers a month (compared to the current 100+) a very real chance of becoming a reality.
As I re-developed the task list/schedule for making that decision a reality in the hotel room yesterday it still seemed to be not really real. For almost exactly three years we have been developing a corporate sales and support operation and it is certainly very real that we now have closing on 2,000 business/corporate customers and it is also certainly true that we sell over 100 new business/corporate customers each month for it to have become almost 'common place'. So I shouldn't be surprised that the time has now come to make a serious attempt to much more rapidly expand our operations in this set of markets where we can compete much more effectively than we have ever been able to do in the residential markets we have put so much effort into over the past eight years.
So, having crossed our personal Rubicon by approving the new lease expense and all the other much greater expenses that go with that decision we now face an almost immediate exhilarating future!
Is it some sort of omen that as I have tried to write this particular entry in the airport lounge the internet has now crashed for the fourth time and despite using the 'save' function frequently I have lost most of what I have written on each occasion?
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