Business

Marks to hand over day-to-day running, readies firm for JSE listing

Huntley Medley, Contributing Editor - Business

Businesswoman Audrey Marks is getting ready to give up the reins of Paymaster Jamaica Limited, the pioneering bill-payment company she launched in 1997, and has run since then as its chief executive officer (CEO).

But in an interview with Wednesday Business , she said the move to bring in fresh talent did not mean the company was up for sale.

Instead, Marks is strengthening the management structures and personnel of her business as a precursor to taking the firm public.

She did not give a timetable for demitting the top job and would not say who, if anyone, had at this point been identified to head the entity.

She said, however, that new management talent was being recruited and existing staff trained to beef up top-level administration.

Informed sources say Marks could walk away from the Paymaster top job later this year, speculation she would neither confirm nor deny.

"I believe Paymaster is at a stage where we are going to transition from being a more entrepreneurial type company to a more stable, growing one, and that naturally demands new management," Marks said of the planned leadership transition.

"It is an unusual entrepreneur who can start a business and be able to take it from its early stages to maturity, as your skills set is more focused on creating and building, and that is kind of disruptive to the natural growth path of a company."

Most smart entrepreneurs, she maintained, try to get out of the enterprises they build - at a certain stage in the growth cycle of the company.

Looking to transition

"I think we are at that stage and so we are looking to transition."

The career businesswoman, who described herself as "a natural entrepreneur" said she did not envisage giving up total ownership of Paymaster, even when the ultimate objective of public listing is achieved.

Plans for Paymaster to be listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange are not immediate, the CEO noted.

"This year the company is more focused on putting in an internal structure to allow myself, as the CEO for the past 13 years, to have less of a role, than preparing to go to the market," Marks said.

"We are building the internal processes to allow for that transition. Before you go to the market, private or public, you try and build up your business."

Paymaster, with 156 locations, 130 direct staff and 300 other indirectly employed workers, is also looking to expand its business lines, as it diversifies its current heavy reliance on the core business of bill collection for 52 client companies.

"Over the past three years, in particular, Paymaster has changed its model to become more broad-based than just bill payment," said the CEO, who is now locked in a legal battle with conglomerate GraceKennedy Limited over alleged intellectual property rights breaches in the setting up of its rival outfit, Bill Express.

There are now about 10 business lines in which Paymaster is engaged, including a range of application services, especially those that are Internet-based, tax payment and fee collection on behalf of educational institutions.

Capitalised, Marks said, with $25 million from her personal assets in the 1990s, Paymaster had difficulty attracting loan and equity capital for the initial start-up, a fact that is said to have hobbled the business' rate of expansion in the early years.

While current growth is being described as "steady", Marks pointed out that a planned aggressive build out of branches in Jamaica, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere in the Caribbean, had been shelved because of the global economic downturn.

One or two closed

Paymaster said it has kept its five UK outlets and largely left its Jamaican network intact, although "one or two" operations had been closed out because they were said to be operating inefficiently.

"Our budget for this year will not get aggressive again until the last quarter," Marks noted, aligning the planned expansion with forecasts for an end to the recession in the larger global economies.

While acknowledging that Paymaster was a multimillion-dollar firm, Marks was reluctant to disclose the value of the private company.

Since start-up, the firm has attracted some private-equity participation with former US Ambassador to Jamaica, J. Gary Cooper, being a shareholder and chairman of the company's board of directors.

Other equity partners were not named.

The company's website lists a five-member board - chairman Cooper, CEO Marks, Theodore Winston Golding, Marina Sakhno, and Alton Fletcher.

huntley.medley@gleanerjm.com