Consider these facts from the June Monthly Operating Report: MI-Connection lost 232 cable customers in the 12 months ending Jun 30, but 67 in the month of June itself. They’ve gained 812 Data customers (an average of 68 per month) but only 24 in the month of June. They’ve gained 1,387 Voice customers (an average of 116 per month) but only 55 in the month of June.

What does this imply? June was a horrible month in terms of aggressively growing the company’s business. I guess the Marketing Plan is waiting for the new Fiscal Year to kick off (lol!) What this really shows is MI-Connection’s inability to grow their business, except by offering additional service (Data and Voice) to a slowly decreasing number of existing cable customers. More ominously, it shows that they’ve already passed the point where existing customers WANT the additional services, as evidenced by the declining trends in these categories.

Most discouraging of all, however, is the fact that revenues in the 4th Quarter of this Year are only $125,000 better than the 4th Quarter of last year, showing hardly any growth at all (heavy discounting of services and promotional offers may be actually reducing average sales per revenue generating units). No way will this trend correct the cash flow problems of MI-Connection.

Of course, something must explain the “increase in operating profits” headlined in this story. On a positive note, Operating Expenses are less than last year….$821,000 less in theQquarter to Quarter comparison. Will MI-Connection be able to cut expenses yet another $800K next year? I Doubt It! These cost reductions may be impacting the company’s vaunted Customer Service…..the June numbers indicate nearly 20 % of Tech Support and 17% of Customer Service calls went unanswered (ie, customer tired of waiting), and average times to answer the remaining callers went up significantly, taking almost 2 minutes to answer Tech support and 1 minute to answer Customer service calls in June! Dont forget, just within the last few weeks MI-Connection had a major Data outage that affected nearly all Internet and phone customers for almost a whole day! Even worse, MI-Connection claimed their incoming phones linesto Customer Service were out. Is this a sign of things to come as they operate on a shoe-string budget?

Mr. Cobles of the Mooresville MI-Connection Advisory Board (Cheerleading Club?) recently stated that the time for griping is over. He’s right, and next week’s combined meeting of the Town Councils of Mooreville and Davidson would be an excellent opportunity for Town Officials to let their citizens know that continued ownership of MI-Connection will result in tax increases necessary to sustain $5 to 6 million dollars or more of recurring losses for many years to come. Its time to stop the promising substantial and exponential growth when 3 years now of actual results show its just not going to happen.