7y
It's disappointing when the company parts ways with someone on bad terms. I'll try to add some facts to this review that can be viewed in light of the comments.
Gower is the founder and now the CEO of the parent company. If people only knew up close how much he had had to sacrifice to make ZoomSystems succeed, they would be left inspired but of course only a few people do, including myself as his close friend and current CEO of ZoomSystems.
When ZoomSystems took ownership of NAK's 500+ mall network due to their bankruptcy in early 2017, it put a lot of pressure on our business, so when Swyft acquired us in late 2017, it gave the capital support we needed but it was still not enough. I was hired to turn the business around at that time and we've had to walk a tight rope (what really helped though was a financing that happened in July 2018) and which has also meant a payment plan for vendors, all of which are all caught up on now. It will take another 1-2 years before ZoomSystems gets to where I think it needs to get to, but we’re on track and it’s an exciting time. We wouldn't be hiring so many people if that was not true.
* Terminations
Since the October 2017 Swyft acquisition (where there was a big restructure), we’ve also had three contractors get terminated involuntary due to poor performance in their roles, and a redundancy of a recent role. Of the latter, this employee had documented performance issues within one month of starting from their former manager and these last 4 months where I've directly kept track of their work along with their new manager, this person would rarely turn up to work for a full day to the point where the rest of the department had to pick up their responsibilities to run the company, so by the time they were terminated, what was a key role turned out to make no difference in our operations. People from other departments would complain -- for example, we had a critical piece of infrastructure (a new firewall) on hold for three weeks because this person didn't look at their emails despite followup, which crippled the company.
* Pay rates
If we were not competitive, then how have we hired 17 people this year? In terms of pay, here is a screenshot directly from our Payroll provider of how we pay against other companies: http://bit.ly/2G4g423. I'm also happy to say, we've got parity between the sexes for compensation.
* 401k
It’s true, we don’t do employer matching for the 401k plan we offer (but it will be something we do once our profits increase in this turnaround). Benefits is an area that we are constantly reviewing. Our flexible working policy is something people appreciate more: examples include supporting the mothers in the organization to work remotely either on a permanent basis during the week or whenever an issue occurs (ie, sick child) with no questions.
* Raises
On a weekly basis, I get requests from my managers to give a pay rise and there are other people I've flagged that I preempt with a manager— so I can assure you, quite a few occur, but it’s based on consistent performance not when you last received a raise.
* “Offshore”
I hate this term because offshore belittles our overseas team members, something I repeat often internally. The only person who could claim their “role” was affected by someone overseas, is the recent redundancy we made. They are a team of four in the Philippines that has been with the company for years (and brought in by the previous CFO). This team reported to the employee that was terminated and who had to shoulder that persons work because they didn’t do it.
* Interns
I got my first job as an intern and I’ve been a big believer in it ever since, with some of my best employees over the years starting that way. Although we don’t hire every intern, this year, we’ve had three interns hired fulltime after their internship and they are the best of the best — one is overseeing our migration from the data center to the cloud with the CTO; another is rebuilding our core platform through prototypes as an independent R&D team with me; a third runs our entire tax practice which cover 200+ tax jurisdictions. We’re building a A-Class team, and interns are a way for us to discover that talent, so I make no apologies about that.
* “Work them to the death”.
As an Australian, I like the work hard play hard approach — which to me means work efficiently and get out to enjoy life. It’s just so happens that the people that think like this, can end up working longer hours because they take pride in their work (as CEO, I personally work 50-70 hours.) But I want to be clear, that’s their choice as it is mine — and burnout is something I worry about all the time, because we have a team that cares about the company but in the process, that need help regulating their work load. I have a personal rule: you become unproductive after 50 hours, so if you’re doing that, there is either a problem with your manager or yourself, and it’s something I want to be made aware of.
