‘The year we almost lost everything’: Melita CFO recalls company’s brush with disaster  

Melita’s Chief Financial Officer Randolph Said has reflected on a crucial moment in the telecoms company’s history, recalling how it came close to running out of cash back in 2001 and was forced to plan sweeping job cuts. 

Mr Said, who was 22 at the time and had only recently joined the company, said on LinkedIn that Melita was losing millions every year. At the same time, management had placed a multi-million order for fibre equipment and hired hundreds of people to roll it out. 

"The company I had joined was supposed to be a cash cow. Instead it was losing millions every year," he said.

He said that Melita’s management eventually discussed a restructuring plan that would have slashed its workforce from around 350 people to just 120. 

He himself was one of the several people earmarked for redundancy but said he got to keep his job due to his knowledge of the company’s actual cash position. 

“I was saved by bank reconciliations,” he recalled. 

"Something so basic, so fundamental, that it had never been done properly before I arrived. The previous CFO had lost his role partly because of it. So when the cuts came, I was the one person who understood where the cash actually was. They could not afford to let me go.”

However, several of his colleagues were let go, a moment Mr Said said “felt like grief”.

“Because we were a family. Small, close, loyal to each other in the way that only tight teams can be. And watching colleagues, people I worked alongside every day, those people who gave me the opportunity to work there being told their jobs no longer existed was something I would not wish on anyone,” he said.

Mr Said that Melita then introduced widespread changes, renegotiated its supplier rates, payment terms and contracts and built a long-term plan that was credible enough to convince local banks to continue backing the company.

Cost-cutting measures meant the company “didn’t waste a single sheet of A4 paper if there was still a blank side left”.

He said that by the end of that year, Melita recorded the first profit in its history – amounting to just LM 600 (around €1,400).

“Not millions. Not a number anyone would put in a press release. But to the team that had fought for every cost saving, every renegotiated contract, every efficiency measure, it was everything,” he said. 

Mr Said said these early experiences shaped his understanding of finance, business and leadership,

“Numbers are important. But the people behind them are everything,” he said. “When it gets hard, and it will get hard, do not waste the A4 paper.”

Cover photo: Randolph Said/ LinkedIn