Imagine if you had more than doubled your company’s revenue and employee count over the last five years. Imagine if you had increased your customer base by 80 percent and increased your annual profitability by 800 percent in that same period. And if you’re a public company, imagine if your stock had appreciated 300 percent, as well.
These numbers are Sohaib Abbasi’s reality.
When he took over Informatica Corp. (NASDAQ: INFA) as chairman and CEO in July 2004, the data integration company was on its way to finishing the year with $219.7 million in total revenue and a net loss of $104.4 million.
“At the time, Informatica was pursuing two distinctly different market options — data warehousing and, the second one, analytic applications and business intelligence,” Abbasi says.
Abbasi had plenty of experience growing an organization, as he had previously worked at Oracle for 20 years, which he joined when it was a 30-person startup and where he was instrumental in growing the business from $4 million to more than $9 billion in annual revenue.
Using his previous experience, Abbasi created a clear vision for Informatica, and from there, he created a focused growth strategy that has resulted in revenue growth and profitability. Employee count increased from 800 in 2004 to more than 2,000 today.
All of this during a period when most businesses have struggled to stay above water and laid off employees. Here are the keys to how Abbasi did it.
