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Vision & Destiny

Discussion in 'Snippets of Life (Non-Fiction)' started by Viswamitra, Aug 7, 2012.

  1. Viswamitra

    Viswamitra IL Hall of Fame

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    [JUSTIFY]In 1999/2000, the stock market crashed significantly especially the companies listed in NASDAQ. The dot.com bubble busted resulting in all tech stocks hitting the rock bottom within a matter of weeks. When we were doing acquisitions, we were using stock as a currency in most of the deals. Besides, we also did a secondary offering in the market after the stock price performed in the market and hence raised $100 million. This money and stock, we were able to use for a period of 3 years. I had reviewed nearly 400 M & A opportunities from 1998 to 2000, visited approximately 60 companies and completed 14 M & A transactions in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. We had also built multiple offshore facilities in India and increased our employee strength to more than 2,000 in India during that period. The biggest challenge we faced as a management team is to understand the business model of each one of them, try to identify the synergies with our existing business, find cross-selling opportunities, consolidate administrative functions, assimilate the technology offered by the acquired companies, understanding their customer needs and so on. No one had experience in integrating the acquired companies into the mainstream business. We had to spend considerable amount of time drawing plans, pulling resources from various organizations and monitor the execution relentlessly to keep the momentum and to achieve the value perceived in acquired companies.

    At the end of year 2000, I was told by the CEO that there is no money left in the company to do any more acquisitions nor was the stock price high enough to use it as consideration. As I had completely moved out of operations 3 years back to execute acquisition strategy of company and I genuinely thought I lost my job and was getting ready to resign. At that time, our company’s CEO called me and told me that he was going to give me an important role in the operations but my immediate boss was not ready to release me for taking over that function. After several rounds of discussions, finally my boss agreed and the CEO was happy. Even though the CEO said it was an important function and he did not explain in detail the function for nearly two weeks. Later, I came to know that I was going to be appointed as Vice President of Project Office.

    When I probed further, I was told that this function would involve a) compiling and preparing the metrics of all the projects performed by the company either at clients’ location or offshore, b) technical resource planning and allocation including recruiting and HR function, c) total quality management of all the projects executed by the company, d) data warehousing of responses to request for proposals, detailed design documents, project management methods and other data that could be archived for reused in future and e) metrics collection on customer account management and improvement to account management methods for revenue enhancement.

    When I heard that I was shocked as I thought it would be very hard for someone to take so many functions and effectively meet the expectation of the CEO. Luckily, he appointed very capable individuals to each one of the functions and asked me to supervise them. Every one of them were very young and had lot of enthusiasm to introduce and change the existing system to make the organization much more effective. There was never a dull moment starting January 2001 as they were making enormous effort to improve each one of those areas effectively. I paid a lot of special attention to two areas a) metrics collection on customer account management and b) data warehousing as they were introduced for the first time.

    But on July 1, 2001, the CEO announced that the company was going to be sold to another company and I resigned on the same day. I was asked to serve 90 days notice as per my employment terms and I eventually left the company on September 30, 2001 and formed the consulting business I am involved in now. I was thinking that it would have taken at least 12-18 months to streamline those functions but I had to leave abruptly within 6 months. However, the acquiring company did offer me a job to either continue with my new role or join as Vice President of M & A. But since that position involved moving to Canada, I decided not to accept it.
    [/JUSTIFY]
     
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  2. rgsrinivasan

    rgsrinivasan IL Hall of Fame

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    Destiny decided to provide you more challenges / opportunities and we are the ones who got benefitted the most Viswa. Thanks for sharing. -rgs
     
  3. Viswamitra

    Viswamitra IL Hall of Fame

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    Dear RGS,

    Thank you for your kind words RGS. The pleasure is mine to share it with like-minded people. I enjoy everything I do and I am always very keen to learn new things. These two qualities I learned from my dad and the credit should go to him.

    Viswa
     

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