After spending 10 years in information technology, I decided to switch to a business unit of a financial division when an opportunity arose. I have always been curious about how it would be on ‘the other side’ of work. Turn out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought as many skills that I learned in computing days are transferable to solving business problems. Instead of aiming to get the system up and running as it should be, now is the business and financial outcomes that I need to focus on. The difficult part is actually the people relationship and office politics.
My turning point came when I was tasked to take over a profit center unit. It has a revenue of approx. $30 million with a profit margin of about 50%. Not too bad, except it was a hot potato. The service was running on an obsolete technology platform, so old that the hardware is no longer supported and we frequently have to source worldwide for replacement. Both customers and our company doesn’t want the high cost of technology replacement yet the mission given to me was “don’t lose the profit”.
We changed the business model from a technology provider to a provider of access to the marketplace. We bring in technology partners for technical services and we focus on expanding our connectivity as well as customer base and allow foreign firms direct access to our marketplace. We also change our pricing model to a small percentage of traded value instead of fixed terminal price. The result, we grew our revenue to more than 5 times with a profit margin exceeding 80%.