John Linton ......and despite the punishing nature of spending a week in Sri Lanka (especially the journey to and from Colombo) it usually 'revives' my abilities to think slightly differently or, more simply put, it almost always allows slightly new perspectives on issues that were posing more problems than they should before spending time on completely different issues in a completely different environment.....and it has proven to be the case this time.
We will now attempt to put three new initiatives in place by the end of this week or at least make the decisions that will begin to change several aspects of our business. The most 'immediate' change will be to begin promoting the Optus mobile retail plans to our current ADSL customers and shortly after that to new ADSL customers. This is, in some ways, a very big change for us because we seldom 'leave' a supplier and we have used the same mobile service provider since mid 2004 when we first began to offer mobile services. We have also 'stubbornly' maintained since that time our 'need' to create our own plans rather than reselling a carrier's retail plans which is a real major change for us. However the circumstances in the current ADSL residential marketplaces are now so different we could no longer continue with those previous policies. Sad - but necessary.
The second thing is to put more emphasis on the smaller business services via a revamp of that section of the web site, new pricing, new services and building a new small business outbound sales force very much along the lines of the corporate sales force we have been building since late February 2009. This will obviously take longer than just changing mobile suppliers (though that is by no means as easy as I have made it sound) but with a bit of concentration that should 'get under way' before too much more time elapses. It will be interesting to enter a brand new marketplace for Exetel for the first time almost since we began business.
The third thing that we need to make an almost immediate start on is to expand the business network beyond Australia to New Zealand, the USA and to the UK/EU. We have been turning away an increasing amount of business each month from Australian based companies that want links to these countries and, more lately, overseas companies operating in Australia that want their Australian operations, often in multiple locations, linked back to their head offices. In my ignorance I had always dismissed these opportunities as being too expensive to invest in with little prospect of reaching break even in any realistic time. Now that Steve has looked in to it (following our buying our own bandwidth between Australia and Sri Lanka last year) it turns out to be much more manageable than I ever considered it could be.
Then there is the fourth growth path of quadrupling our efforts in providing VoIP services to small and large businesses which we will now put in place by hiring more VoIP personnel specialising in VoIP sales and support with the objective of duplicating the current level of revenue from ADSL services by June 2012. Of all the projects - this looks the easiest to accomplish - but that is possibly because we have spent more than four years refining just what we can offer in VoIP services and have 'pioneered' more VoIP related applications than any other communications provider within our own operations.
So, three/four 'projects' to initiate and then manage towards success simultaneously as well as the daily demands of the current businesses brings new perspectives to daily working life. After all the dreariness of the last 18 months of residential gigabyte give aways, business life looks more and more attractive and exciting again.
PS: I smiled when I read this - feeling 'smug' that we had the forethought to actually build a company based on web functionality from 'day one' and it has resulted in the best possible customer facilities of any company I have ever looked at:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/online-banking-expert-to-help-telstra-win-back-customers-20101011-16fz9.html
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