Mohammed A Ghani, President and CEO, CheckMark, Inc. (USA) and Managing Director, CheckMark India Private Limited (India), like any Business Leader, has different responsibilities towards different stakeholders.
Ghani is responsible for providing customer-centric products with high quality at competitive prices along with good service; providing his employees with good pay, challenging work with career growth, good working conditions, and a balance between their work and personal lives. Ghani is responsible for providing his shareholders and investors with a good rate or return on their investments, providing his vendors prompt payments and ensuring that they are profitable; simultaneously providing support to his community by being involved and being a role model.
Journey towards the Mission
For most of his career, Ghani worked at large or medium size organizations where he has implemented enterprise systems that cost a lot of money. Prior to CheckMark, Ghani held multiple Technology Executive positions which include, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Nurse-Family Partnership a national non-profit organization in the US, CIO at Employers Unity, a privately held US company acquired by Equifax, Director of Information Technology at City and County of Denver, Colorado and Manager of Information Deployment at an international manufacturing company with 28 locations in multiple countries. Ghani also founded several small businesses.
While gaining a vast eminent experience, Ghani understood how these systems help organizations to be more efficient, productive, and profitable. He knew that the small business owner does not have the financial and the technology resources to have these types of systems. And hence, his mission became to provide the small businesses the systems that their large competitors have at an affordable price and without requiring the technical know-how. Because of this, he stepped into this business.
A Bachelor in Electronics Engineering and Master in Business Administration (MBA) (from University of Denver), Ghani found that CheckMark, Inc., does not only provide business solutions, but they deliver the best services available. And therefore, he chose CheckMark to further move towards his mission.
CheckMark: Providing The Easiest Way to handle Payroll in-house
CheckMark, Inc. is a company providing fast, easy-to-use, affordable accounting and payroll solutions to small and medium-sized businesses since 1984.
CheckMark, Inc. became one of the first companies to roll out accounting software for the Mac when it launched General Ledger in 1985, CheckMark Payroll in 1986 and MultiLedger™ in 1987. A Windows version of CheckMark Payroll debuted in 1994, and MultiLedger™ for Windows was released in 1998. In 2010, CheckMark added CheckMark 1099 Software for Windows and Macintosh.
To better suit the varied needs of customers, CheckMark launched its services division in the summer of 2011. It includes customizable Payroll Services, Time Clock Solutions, and an Online HR Access Center. Payroll Services has grown rapidly and offers a more personal touch to payroll services.
For the Customers
Ghani along with his team know that their customers are not accountants or technologists and thus, the whole team of CheckMark tries to train and educate them while helping them with their work. The team caters to customers who want to do everything themselves by providing them with robust tools. CheckMark also provides a variety of services where their customers can turn over their payroll, accounting, and tax services to the company and the work gets performed by knowledgeable and certified professionals.
Strategy to Stay Competent
Most people believe that the management and leadership in an organization are always against them and their well-being. On the contrary, Ghani found that the majority of the time, what is good for the organization can also be good for the employee. He says that the key is to articulate situations and turn them into a win-win.
With Ghani’s exceptional business tactics, the company was able to double its staff—more than double explicitly—in the past three years and currently has over 75 employees. The strategy of Ghani to make CheckMark stay competent is to leverage the 33 plus years of experience and goodwill of their customers along with the proven state-of-the-art technologies and exemplary support to deliver solutions and services to their customers. “We want to eventually provide a full-fledged ERP System to Small Businesses that is designed specifically for them containing all the functionality they need to run their business productively and efficiently,” asserts Ghani to provide more comprehension to their strategy.
To support his statement of “developing more technically advanced solutions,” Ghani reveals that CheckMark is partnering with Microsoft on the development of the ERP System and the next generation of all its software.
Attributing Success to the People
Always looking for “The Best Value” in everything he does, and believes “Do it right the first time,” Ghani perpetrates to do everything best at the first time. He is passionate, persistent, and believes in hiring the right people. He has learned to hire the best, train them, empower them, trust them, delegate the work to them, and hold them responsible. “I cannot do everything myself – each and every staff member has to be a success for me to be a success,” he added.
When asked about the qualities he possesses that made him a successful business leader, Ghani asserted, “My personality of being a workaholic and working in Senior Executive positions have prepared me well for what I currently do.” Furthermore, he advises aspiring businessmen to have a detailed business plan with realistic, best-case and worst-case financial projections. “Be prepared for the worst and know what you will do if things do not turn out well. Be flexible to make changes to your plan if necessary. Make sure you have a good accountant, banker and a lawyer providing you advise. You want your business to be one out of ten that succeed,” Ghani concludes.
Source :- The 30 Most Innovative Business Leaders
