John Linton ....in Australian communications land in which we ended one month/quarter and started the next month/quarter which just re-emphasises just how 'one day at a time' the Australian communications business has become over the past two years.
Annette and I will be leaving for the airport in a few hours time to do the quarterly personnel and overall company reviews in Colombo next week. So many people say how wonderful it must be to be able to spend so much time each year in such a tropical paradise which would be true if we ever managed to go to the tropical paradise type places - which we don't. It's a tiring trip taking some 17 hours (including the hour or so stop over ) from 'door to door' and involves landing in Colombo at around midnight - facing the 45 minute 'nightmare' drive to the hotel, working constantly for a few days (which involves a 30 second walk from the front door of the hotel to the office building via a covered walk way) and then leaving the hotel at around midnight and having another 'nightmare' drive back to the airport. On one trip in the past getting on for three years we took a Sunday off to visit the elephant orphanage and, even with a careful hotel driver spent most of the trip with our eyes firmly averted from the road or the surrounding countryside due to the perpetual mayhem that is driving on Sri Lankan roads (we saw at least one fatal accident and several more multiple vehicle collisions that must have resulted in injuries of various severity).
It's certainly true that everyone we meet is exceptionally friendly and helpful in every way and the views from our room over the presidential palace and the port and Indian Ocean are exceptional - as are the views from our 'new' offices on the 25th floor of the Columbo version of the WTC. However Colombo is no-one's idea of a 'tropical paradise' and the working day is the same and as long in Sri Lanka as it is here. Having said all that; it is still still highly enjoyable to visit the Colombo operation and talk through the issues first hand and plan for the future growth of the various operations there. The main purpose of the trip this time is to review the completion of 'Phase Two' of our presence in Sri Lanka and the start of 'Phase Three'.
'Phase One' comprised the actual establishment of the physical presence (with all the multitude of events and tasks that involves) and the even harder tasks of recruiting and training the personnel. It took the best part of a year to do that. The next 18 months, 'Phase Two', comprised the ever more detailed knowledge transfer, the ongoing recruiting to a level of 50 people, and the transfer of almost all management of the day to day operations to Sri Lankan personnel - that phase is now, subject to the reviews over the next few days, largely complete. If I ever took the time to review what we have achieved in the now almost five years since we took the decision in a North Sydney restaurant over probably too much red wine to "see what could be done in Sri Lanka" I would be very happy with just how much has been accomplished over that time - I must do that one day - in the mean time I remain too involved in the day to day issues involved in such a difficult set of tasks.
'Phase Three' of the development of the Sri Lankan company is to make it 'financially self sufficient' in terms of generating revenue other than what Exetel Australia pays it to provide 'back end services'. This has already started in a very small way with the recruitment of programmers who do some of the work on the contract programming services we offer in Australia as well as the development of key software for our Australian VoIP, FoIP and SMoIP services. That will continue to grow as we provide contract programming services to more Australian and New Zealand companies - if we become more successful in that endeavour. That is an ongoing, very long term aspect of the SL company and one we can't "rush" in any way.
The two key areas for the SL company to acquire its own revenue are to provide out bound calling service to Exetel and to provide back end support services to other Australian and New Zealand, and perhaps UK, companies. How and in what time frames this is to be accomplished will be the most important topics for discussion over the coming week. Surprisingly, we have had more than a dozen enquiries over the past two years from ISPs smaller than Exetel to provide provisioning and technical support services to them on a contract basis. (Even more surprisingly, we had one casual enquiry from an ISP much larger than we were/are). We have never pursued those enquiries because we weren't, remotely, ready to provide such services at the times we received them but now we could seriously consider doing that. Sure the 'confidentiality issues' need to be addressed but they, in all reality, are totally trivial - as are the logistics.
However 'exciting' the possibilities of providing back end services to other companies may be the development of an outbound sales operation in Sri Lanka for Exetel's residential business, and for one key function of our corporate business remains our highest priority. Not being a TFI I do understand the various issues relating to this difficult scenario (I have personally built sales forces selling highly technical products from the ground up several times). We have spent the last eighteen months building a corporate out bound sales force in Australia which is, by several third parties of different 'persuasions', regarded as being more than highly successful.....although we did it totally differently to any other company in our industry. Our plans are to do something quite similar, but in some ways quite differently, in Colombo.
It will be a very interesting few days.
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