The Financial Turnaround – Interview with Chief Financial Officer Rajendra Rajcoomar
Q
: You were appointed SEIFSA Chief Financial Officer in May 2014. What was the state of the Federation’ s finances when you occupied the CFO’ s office?
A
: I think the most important fact to state as far the finances are concerned is that
SEIFSA was is a serious deficit, which had started in 2012 when the Collective Bargaining Levy( CBL), which the Federation was accustomed to receiving every year, expired and was not renewed. In addition to the expiry of the CBL levy, the Federation’ s losses were also generally increasing.
Q
: What strategies were then put in place to mitigate the Federation’ s financial losses and to narrow the gap created by the expiry of the CBL?
A
: In 2014 after Mr Nyatsumba took over as the Federation’ s new CEO, we embarked on a journey to turn the SEIFSA ship around and to make sure that the Federation starts to generate revenue and, subsequently, to make a profit from the products and services it offers, among other measures. Key to the turnaround strategy was the review and repricing of all the products and services offered by the Federation, most of which were grossly under-priced. In this regard, we also added more products and services to our basket of offerings. Some of the items we added onto our basket include BEE services, legal services and the Small Business Hub, among others. The establishment of the Southern African Metals and Engineering Indaba as well as the SEIFSA Awards for Excellence Events also subsequently contributed towards improving the Federation’ s finances.
In addition to repricing and adding to the basket of our product and service offerings, we also had to find ways to contain the Federations expenditure. In this regard, we had to start making changes even with little things such as changing and sharing printers and doing as much as possible internally, instead of using consultants. This meant bringing on board experts into the SEIFSA fold. Furthermore, the unfortunate cost-containment measure of retrenching 11 SEIFSA staff members in 2015, along with the resignation of others, also contributed towards boosting the Federation’ s bottom line because we have not filled those positions. Instead, we have reassigned the work among the remaining employees, brought on board Alliance Partners and outsourced some of the roles, where it made sense for us to do so.
Rajendra Rajcoomar Chief Financial Officer
Another important measure that the CEO insisted upon to improve SEIFSA’ s bottom line was to rebrand our training centre from Fundi Training Centre to SEIFSA Training Centre during the 2013 / 2014 financial year. The rebranding helped us raise awareness of the centre among our existing members, which in turn resulted in our members using
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