Meet Alia.
She is the head of operations for the CEO Office for Evermos, a social commerce company focusing on enabling resellers to sell everyday products which are Halal/Sharia-compliant across Indonesia. Her role includes maintaining relations with investors, overseeing and improving the internal operations, and bridging information between the business units and the management so that the management could give a good helicopter view of the whole business process.
Alia graduated from Swiss German University, majoring in industrial engineering, on a scholarship, and now, at the young age of 27, she has taken various roles in 3 different companies; Citibank, SpaceStock, and Evermos. To top it off, she was also the co-founder of CV Touch Up, a CV creation service that also actively gives seminars and classes, and is also involved in the marketing part of a small-scale food business.
She is very driven in her career, and naturally, it intrigues me to find the reason behind such burning ambitions.
“I was very afraid of not having money.” Alia had said it bluntly to me. Well, that was very honest, I thought.
She then proceeded to tell me that it apparently is rooted in her childhood experience, in which her family comes from an unstable financial background. She had experienced what a lot of us have only seen in movies: from helping her mother selling ice sticks and snacks during her elementary school days to her mother baking her birthday cake and sewing her prom dress on her own because the family just simply can’t afford it. These events were somehow ingrained in her mind which translates into a strong drive for her to secure a financial safety net for herself and her family.
“I cannot imagine if things had gone otherwise, though. Maybe I would just become another spoiled brat, and I wouldn’t be where I am and I wouldn’t work this hard.” She reflected as she told me about her past.
One of the things that I learned from Alia is the importance of the productive and positive networking that she builds with her friends and mentors. Despite being inactive in organizations throughout her college years, Alia had the opportunity to meet three of her seniors, successful SGU alumni, at an event she attended during the penultimate year of her college. There, they share stories about their career journey and eventually become mentor figures in the early stage of Alia’s career. It was one of them who encouraged Alia to sign up for an internship at Citibank, where she was apparently offered the management associate position.
Alia is also active in the SGU Alumni Association, where she actively gives seminars and workshops for her juniors. From these seminars and workshops, she saw a market opportunity for a Curriculum Vitae (CV) creation service, as one of the most frequent questions that were asked to her from her junior was on how to make a good CV. She then started the business with a close friend, often by giving how-to seminars to numerous local universities like Universitas Indonesia and Institut Teknologi Bandung.
Alia’s career journey and learnings along the way
After resigning from Citi, her close friend introduced her to Spacestock’s founder and later, Evermos’ founders, where she works now. While there was completely no doubt in her work ethic and capability, it was these networks and relations that exposed her to new opportunities.
When I asked her about the cultural difference in the companies that she has worked for throughout her journey, Alia told me that each company gave her different lessons and unique meaning to her career journey. During her internship days in Sikora, for example, she got to experience firsthand the working world. In Citi, she got to learn the basics of operations and how to implement it.
“Trying to improve a process is a little bit different in theory and in practice. You can’t just come in and try to champion a change without considering the environment, especially when you’re new. There are several factors to consider so it has to be a little more customized. There are relationships that need to be built and also office politics that need to be considered.”
Another enlightenment that she found during her days in Citi is the fact that money is not always equal to happiness.
“It was fun in Citi in terms of learning opportunities and privilege. However, I also learned that while money is important, it’s also important to find something that you’re passionate about,” she said.
In Alia’s case, she finds satisfaction in empowering the people around her. She told me about the English class she created, the training she gives on the basics of Microsoft Excel, analytics, and many other basic skills for her team members at Citi and SpaceStock as she observed that most of her team are only doing administrative work without any real opportunity for skill development.
“What I want for them is to give them tools so that they can strive better in their job and also in the worst-case scenario when something bad happens to the company, they could have additional skill sets and values that they could use to keep on surviving.”
In smaller companies, like the startups Alia joined in the past few years, Alia felt more satisfied as she could give value to the people around her and create more impact on society. She also noted that one of the distinctive differences in working for a big company like Citi from working for startups is that in these big companies, most people are only looking for money and their own personal goals. However, in startups, there is a strong sense of collaboration where people are working together to strive for a common goal.
“In startups, most people are not working for the money, but rather to realize the vision, the purpose,” she said.
Now at Evermos, Alia feels more grateful than ever because she is now given a bigger platform to reach out and empower even more people through Evermos’ SME partners and resellers.”
“My short-term goal is to improve the business processes and help introduce more and better solutions to empower our SME partners and resellers,” Alia said.
She got pretty excited when she listens to the stories of Evermos resellers who learn numerous new skills such as business strategy or even designing ads for their reseller business.
“It’s exciting because the way we empower them is not only through providing them a job but also by improving them as a human being.”
