When I look back at life, I can see pattern of challenges, sharp turns and blind alleys which I always chose to take.
- Mohammed All Khan
- CEO of a Dubai Atermet
- City-based software development firm
When I look back at life, I can see a pattern of challenges, sharp turns and blind alleys which I always chose to take. Not because there was no choice, but a comfortable, predictable career was not my cup of tea.
I like to take risks, raise the bar of my personal-achievement capacity and push myself into extremes where I can deliver despite all odds.
Being the chairman-founder of a U.S. financial group, building an asset management firm from virtually nothing to $240,000,000 in equity transactions alone, being the youngest member to be included in the New Jersey State Governor’s Council, pioneering the Islamic benchmark index, taking up the challenge to be a senior advisor to Pakistan president General Pervez Musharrat’s National Reconstruction Board in Pakistan… there are many more firsts here and I auess this has all happened because my childhood experiences were that of over-reaching and extracting better-than-best from myself.
I came from a humble middle-class family of Karachi and went through school in an accelerated programme owing to double promotions twice.
Thus, when other children my age were grasping knowledge at a relaxed pace, I was grappling with concepts far more complex for my age. It can be terribly taxing on a child’s mind, but that was the training in life that later let me take on any challenge.
I completed my high school at 15 and completed an undergraduate course in Physics from Karachi.
By then, my family had moved on to the U.S. I had a very high SAT score and got accepted to Princeton in northeast America on a scholarship for Physics. But that was not my destiny, nor my preference.
I never graduated in Physics as I wasn’t interested in research. What fascinated me were numbers, finance and economics. I took a course in macroeconomics while at Princeton and fell head over heels in love with the subject. So I had myself transferred to Rutgers State University, nearby.
I have no regrets of having left a scholarship-paid course at an Ivy League college for a university where there was scholarship to support me. I just threw myself into hard work to make ends meet.
I mopped floors at Burger King, putting in 16 hours of work and study every day day, including weekends, to support myself. I used to earn $8 an hour. Later, I managed to get a part-time job as a bank teller at the People’s National Bank.
“In 1988, / wrote a thesis that got picked up by quite a few publications. The Prudential
Financial Services, a reputed organisation, invited me for an interview after having read it / was still in college and was offered the job of a trainee taxation and state-pienning officer. / accepted it and within 18 months was promoted to the top league in the organisation. But then, this challenge was over and what attracted me was investment Banking.
I was barely 23 then and was keen to join the investment Banking arm of the organisation. I recall having met one of the top investment bankers of the organisation who raked in profits of $5 million a year single-handedly.”
He thought I wasn’t cut out to be an investment banker and that spurred me on to become one.
Within two years, I was promoted to the rank of vice-president and became the No 1 producer in my field. I was 24, had made a few million dollars, but then this challenge too was over and I had to move on.
I decided to join a smaller investment bank as Prudential was too large with close to 500 vice-presidents. I had offers from reputed organisations such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Saks, but once again, those seemed too easy to take up. I had to choose a more tedious path and so I chose to join Barret Day Investment Bank, which was the smallest among these.
Since I had the reputation of being a decent producer, the bigger organisations normally offer a sign-up bonus of $4million. I chose to forgo that to join this organisation because my contract here gave me the full freedom of trading and international expansion, which seemed a bigger challenge. And I stuck to my guns.
The organisation had 22 branches and | had become a partner in it. I gave that up to buy a
10-year-old organisation, the KMS Investment Bank.
This was the first licence ever given to a Muslim in New Jersey and there was a lot of resistance.
But I had to break out of the box and reach out to people. The first thing I did at the bank, which had 40 employees, was to fire 37 of them as I decided I could not teach all old horses new tricks.
I built the place and its reputation brick by brick and, later, had close to 450 employees. In the first year, which was the toughest, we did business worth only $900,000.
The next year it was $32 million, the year after that $54 million, and the following year $96 million… The figures kept jumping. When I left the bank, it had customer assets worth $3.4 billion.
I never looked back after that. But it was not money which I hankered after. Once you begin earning in those denominations, money loses its value and is reduced to just numbers.
My focus was to look for a comfortable niche in the market. My organisation was too small to be a large investment bank and too big for individual investments.
So l began extending finance to projects undertaken by smaller countries such as Grenada, Azerbaijan where there was a spurt of development projects. Our work was swift, efficient and we delivered, and gradually our reputation spread by word-of-mouth.
Gradually, we turned into a middle tier investment bank with advisory services, but the biggest chunk of our revenue came from these difficult projects, which no other bank would touch in Third world countries. We undertook jobs like financing the dredging of the harbour in Grenada. Besides making profits, we also built a sound reputation.
For instance, I took the restructuring of Dae Han Bank in the middle of the South East Asian financial crisis for peanuts, earning crucial points in our credibility record.
However, when the bank began registering losses in some divisions, I had to sell it off in parts and that is when I thought of Dubai.
In my project finance days, I had travelled a lot to Asia and gave some thought to the best place where my family could live and which was also a great market hub.
Dubai was the only answer. So, I sold off my interests in the U.S. company and moved here, bought over Focus SoftNet, which is a 10-year-old Hyderabad-based firm with branches in various countries.
We sell packaged software for restructuring companies. We have undertaken various restructuring projects for the Ministry of Finance, the Government of Yemen and some companies as well.
“Project finance is the niche I have found, and I think one needs a vision and not management to run these. Dubai has a lot of untapped potential to offer. There’s plenty to do. One of the main issues with me is that I get bored quickly when things are going right. If you give me a perfectly running company, it would be very difficult for me to show up at office on time. But, if you give me a company, which is a fledgling struggling to soar in the sly, a great product with not so great a market share, I will be there at daybreak to work things out, because the best creation comes out of chaos.”
I love to salvage and turn around companies as I do not believe in breaking up organisations. It has to make money as an exit strategy.
I am a voracious reader and what fascinates me most is the development of the human mind. Human behavior never ceases to amaze me and issues of mind control and mind power appeal to me.
I have a sizable library of my own and like to spend time reading. I am also busy with my autobiography, which will be published soon. Right now, my priority is my family.
I am trying to make up for all the lost quality time with my family and discovering the domestic pleasures of taking my wife and children out for desert drives, eating out, watching movies and so on. Life always finds a way to catch up and compel you to play an even-handed game.
Personal notes…
Motto: No challenge is big enough if you have your eyes set on your goal.
Favorite invention: The wheel.
What touches me most: My family.
Favorite food: Chinese
Favorite hobby: Reading
Favorite car: Racing cars.
Greatest fear: That I’ll develop a fear on day.
Idea of relaxation: Spending time with family.
Favorite place in the UAE: Home
Friendship means… Understanding each other
