The End Of The Last 'Full Week' Of January.......

John Linton

.....all monthly targets exceeded or far exceeded and still much to come over the last two 'working days' next week......if the current forecasts are to be believed. So a very successful month in terms of new sales and a really satisfying start to the new calendar year and the last sx months of the financial year.

We also moved in to our new floor space in Sri Lanka over the Australia Day holiday with all SL based sales personnel moving to the dizzying heights on Level 35 of the East Tower of the WTC (our 'old' floor space is on Level 25 of the West Tower). It is 'just in time' planning as we have five new engineers starting next week and when I was in Sri Lanka earlier this month we were down to one or two spare desks on Level 25 and that may have been because people were on leave. Despite starting five new sales trainees and three new engineers in Australia over the past few weeks we now have twice as many people in Colombo as we do in North Sydney. Exetel in Sri Lanka has come a long way since we hired two work from home support email ticket answerers almost five years ago to the day.

We have some quite frightening targets to achieve over the coming months of 2012 and it will be the biggest challenge of Exetel's 'short life' to complete the transition of the company from a supplier of telecommunications services to residential users to one with the majority of its revenue coming from business and corporate users. We have made significant progress in deploying ever more redundant and greater capacity infrastructure to deliver ever larger, and far more, business and corporate customer connections. We have an ever growing list of customers who now use Exetel for 100, 200 and now 300 mbps pure IP services and are getting closer to signing our first 1 gbps pure IP service. It wasn't that long ago when 1 gbps was more bandwidth than Exetel used to provide its then tens of thousands of residential customers with ADSL connections.

Our major challenge (among so many) is to get Exetel better known around Australia. We have never done any real advertising apart from 'playing' with the concepts every year or so and will probably never do any advertising in the future. We do need to get more people to know about Exetel than we have accomplished over the first eight years of our existence. As with every major 'challenge' in business life there are seldom, maybe never, "new ways of doing things". Perhaps all 'the new things' are done by people who have never done anything before so they actually think they are doing something new? So, either from having no 'new' ideas or because one idea (far from new) that I have used in the past on four occasions to rapidly build companies from the ground up to something relatively substantial (once with Exetel, once in the UK and twice in previous 'lives' in Australia) has worked very effectively we will use that as the basis for developing Exetel as a much better known presence around Australia.    

Perhaps there is nothing new in selling products or services to widely spread market places?

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