From The Star Online.
FIFTEEN years ago, a young business consultant named Aminuddin Baki Esa dreaded missing his wife and baby daughter so much that whenever he had to travel out of town, he would spend as much time as he could with his family until the last possible moment.
“If I go to Seberang Prai from Kuala Lumpur, I would start the drive at three in the morning, take a short break at a rest-stop in Sungai Perak and continue the journey to Penang for a meeting at eight o’clock,” he told StarBiz in an interview.
Today, Johor native Aminuddin, 39, is group chief executive officer of Mesdaq-listed Scan Associates Bhd. It is a job he clearly enjoys, though his duties also take him away from his family at least seven days in a month. So he tries to fit in family and working time as best as he can.
It is nearing the end of the year, and Aminuddin has plans to take his wife and two kids on a short vacation to Indonesia. If you go to Bandung, you can either opt for a direct flight or take a plane to Jakarta, and if you are daring, hop on a train to Bandung. It’s scenic all right, but a real experience. There are mountains and there are ravines,” he said with a laugh.
On the same day, he returns to Malaysia. Aminuddin will catch a flight in the evening to the Middle East as the company is due to conclude a contract with a client and finalise a partnership agreement with a managed services company.
Scan Associates has gone overseas for a big reason. “When we started in 2000, 95% of our income came from the Malaysian government. But over the years, we decided that it was quite risky to have just one main source of income, coming from only one sector,” Aminuddin said. “We tried to diversify. And because the financial sector then was lacking in IT security measures, we went into it with managed security services. After that, we decided to expand overseas, and we’re now in the Middle East and Indonesia.”
He added: “When we decided to go public, it was determined that we could not be overly dependent on the Malaysian government and local market only. And we had to improve our capacity to increase the number of knowledge workers and improve our delivery in terms of project implementation.”
Today, about 53% of the company’s revenue comes from overseas. In Malaysia, business is evenly split between government and private clients. Other than financial institutions, it also plans to corner the market for telcos and oil & gas companies.
Scan Associates’ list of clients includes the Employees Provident Fund, Affin Bank, MNI Insurance, PT Bank Danamod, PT Bank Niaga, and Kuwait Finance House (for its Malaysian operations).