Hills reclaims glory with aggressive acquisitions strategy, page-5

"Ted Pretty deserves credit for actually carrying out this strategy and getting what was a pretty conservative board to go with him."

Agree here, good strategy to sell off under performing business's and to re-structure to trim the fat.


"however at an operational level, he has yet to prove himself, and genuine question marks remain over whether he has the ability to integrate and effectively operate the collection of new businesses"

question marks remain about operations of existing business's,
This isnt Telstra, this is a group of companies that offer solution based systems that need specialized people to support these systems.

My word off the street is they have an operations manager that doesnt understand their business, are losing specialist people with management, engineering, sales and technical backgounds with the ability to support the sale of their systems and have set up a 'telstra' style call centre which has had a huge negative impact on their customers.

When presenting solutions systems and offering support for clientelle, you cannot have a transient workforce, which is what a call centre offers you, you need relationship building long term knowledgeable people to support these types of businesses otherwise Suppliers of product groups to Hills will look for organisations that can support their wares and service their systems and so will customers look for new suppliers that can support them.

Customers of telstra can swap and change providers at a whim if they are unhappy, this is a more complex business group than telstra so dont try and put telstras business model into a solution / systems business cause it wont work.

Time will tell whether they can transform existing business's and integrate new ones.

Cheers