John Linton ...We Must Put In Place A Comprehensive Five Year Plan.
Not being Stalin, Fidel or Mao (let alone Pol Pot) and having no knolwedge of, or liking for, the structures of 'command' economies I find it strange to be contemplating such a concept - albeit for a tiny commercial enterprise such as Exetel. However, time passes so quickly when you're having the endless day by fun that is your lot if you're involved in being part of a start up commercial operation in Australia (or any other country I imagine) that, here it is, almost 5 years since Exetel 'opened its doors'.
Hindsight is interesting in a pretty meaningless way but it can be vaguely useful in looking at where you are, in this instance in business rather than personal life, and how you got here and why you would prefer to be somewhere else with different infrastructures. I'm not criticising anyone within Exetel, not even myself, for the company not being ideally set up and positioned after almost five years - each decision that was made over the past 57 months was sensible at the time - on more than a few occasions it was the only decision available to be made.
As with all hindsight exercises you don't have to be too hard on yourself to admit that if the objective was to get where you are today you would have done it a lot better, a lot more easily and with much better results than you have actually done. Most sensible people would accept that and move on - which is what Exetel and the people who are involved with it are going to have to do.
Without 'going over the top' it is quite an achievement to start a business and have it survive for five years yet alone grow it to a monthly recurrent revenue of over $A3.5 million. However it is a magnitude more demanding and more difficult to repeat the process over the coming five years - in the event that is what is to be done.
One main difficulty, spelled out in all the 'how to' texts I have come across over the years is that the first five years of building a commercial entity are based on long hours every day of total 'involvement' by the founders of the enterprise which are difficult to maintain over a second five year period.
The other major difficulty is that the founders run out of both time and ability/knowledge to continue to understand and therefore control/direct the increasing areas of operation of a commercial business much beyond whatever point they have reached after five years. Of course the exact timeframe may not be five years (it may be more or less) but it is more often than not around that period.
Exetel's 'life' to date has been based on one year's relatively detailed planning for each of the next 12 months with a second year in broad concept with no firm detail. As with many start up enterprises (as far as I've observed) much of the planning is heavily modified each month/week/day of the time the operation stays in business. So Exetel has always started each successive financial year with a pretty detailed plan but has almost always had to change many aspects of those plans as each year progresses.
So, less than three months in to the current financial year, we need to put in place a long term plan for Exetel partly because we are now faced with making some very serious investment decisions which means that we have to commit large sums of our personal money to Exetels future well being and partly because we are going to have to manage the company very, very differently if we look forward 5 years to what sort of company and what sort of size company Exetel might be if it's still a discrete commercial business (or set of businesses) in July 2013.
I have no real idea of where to start in putting such an overall plan in place. If Exetel still exists in July 2013 I am having trouble visualising in any meaningful way what the Australian communications industry will actually be - either in what services will be delivered or what sorts of companies will be delivering them. To put that wimpish statement in some sort of perspective, try going back to 2003, 1998 and 1993 and write down your estimates of:
1. Total revenues of the Australian commuications industry at June 30th in each of those years
2. Major services by percentage delivering those revenues
3. Names of the top twenty companies involved in earning those revenues
4. Names of companies that have existed over that 15 year period that are no longer are involved together with the reasons they are no longer involved.
5. List the top 20 companies involved in providing communications services today and predict what they will be doing over each of the next 5 years.
Any information that anyone cares to share with me on all or any part of that research wil be greatly appreciated.
Lucky its a pretty cold and miserable weekend in Sydney.