Clarification part 1: Let's talk about corporate finance

Whilst I was in Spain, I received quite a few messages from a few people who hated what I wrote enough to send me hate mail. It was not the kind of comment which politely disagreed with the point of view I presented - no, it was the kind of "shut the fuck up already, eat shit and die" kind of hate mail. I really don't mind getting hate mail - actually, if I am that provocative that someone is willing to take the time to write me such an angry message, I am actually quite flattered. I would hate to be so bland and boring that what I post on my blog is actually just ignored and not read by anyone, so even to get this kind of reaction - well, it doesn't bother me that much. It is just a shame that some people don't realize that they are hardly going to influence me or make me take them seriously if that is the way they communicate and present their opinions - it just makes it too easy for me to be dismissive of them. Please feel free to hate me, go ahead - certainly, you do have my permission to do so but allow me please to clarify a few of the following points that cropped up.

I don't work in HR, but I am a gatekeeper. 

Now I have been accused of working in HR because I had posted a few pieces about looking for a job and I had presented those pieces from the POV of a gatekeeper. It really isn't that hard to understand: if you work for a huge company, like I'm talking about a company that employs thousands of people, then sure they will have a HR department where they will have various members of staff who are employed to handle HR issues. But if you work for a relatively small company, then no the small company isn't going to be able to hire even a HR manager to handle HR issues - that responsibility usually then falls to the managing director or one of the directors who has to do it because there is no one else to handle HR matters. The MD can sometimes delegate some HR matters/tasks to another member of staff if s/he is too busy and this is often the case in small companies like mine. The boss sometimes delegates a number of matters to me and yes, in the past that has included HR matters amongst other things, but let me be clear: I am a salesman, I work in sales, that covers about 90% of the work I do on a daily basis, I sell the company's products. However, if I am asked to handle a HR issue, my job title doesn't change. Besides, it is not like we are so busy hiring people all the time - we're growing but not that aggressively. We hire a few people a year at best, so my skills as a gatekeeper isn't required on a daily basis (in contrast, my skills as a salesman are used everyday), it is simply a hat I may wear when required.

What is it like to work for a small-ish company

So for example, before I went on holiday to Spain, my colleague received a document in Italian and rather than wait for the client to send an English version of the document, he asked me if I could read it for him. I took the document from him and realized that I could translate it for him, so I did that and he thanked me for it. Does that suddenly mean that I am no longer a salesman for my company, but an Italian translator? No, I was simply the salesman who happened to have helped my colleague out with an Italian document that afternoon. Such is the nature of working for a small company - you never know what may come your way and if you can pitch in and help a colleague do something (such as translating a document or handling a recruitment issue), you don't say, "oh that's not in my job description" or "that's not what I do in my department". You simply say, "okay, let me see if I can help", you try your best and you help your team. Believe you me, if I started listing all the different areas where I helped out at work on a daily basis, I wouldn't even know how to condense all of that into a job title - the Hokkien phrase "pao ka liao" (includes everything) does capture the spirit of what I do because I just have to handle every darn thing they throw at me. So whilst I am a salesman, I am also a PKL manager, a pao ka liao kinda guy who happens to handle some HR issues sometimes. So, I hope I have cleared that up.

I don't get paid what a HR manager typically makes. 

Quite simply because I am not a HR manager! Perhaps one day, my company will grow big enough to require a full time HR manager and when that day arrives, then they will gladly hire someone who will do HR full time and that someone will be very experienced in all matters of HR. I would be not qualified to do that job because I work in sales and only have very limited experience in handling some HR matters now and then over the years. And if you want to know how much I get paid, well allow me to explain how people who work in sales get paid. We get a basic - it is like a retainer, that is usually based on a number of factors such as how many hours we put in a week, how experienced we are and how much we manage to negotiate. For younger sales people, that basic can be anything from £14,000 to £20,000 but for more senior people like me who work in financial services, that number is usually several times that. Then there is commission: that's where sales people make the most of their money. So in the case of my company, we do corporate finance, we are matchmakers between the investment and the investors: each deal is minimum six figures, but I handle anything from six to nine figures. Hence when I broker a deal, I get my commission and when it is a multi-million pound deal, well the commissions can be in 5 or 6 figures and typically, all I need is just a few big deals a year and I could be potentially earning well over a million pounds a year. Ouch, think of just how much tax I have to pay on that. Damn.

Sales vs HR

So why would I want to earn the relatively modest salary of a HR manager when a successful salesman could potentially make in just one month what a HR manager makes in a year? Look, I don't mean any disrespect to people who work in HR, they have a role to play and I respect their contributions - but that's simply not what I do for a living. There are four main departments in the world of corporate finance: firstly, there's origination. Those are the people who go out there and hunt for the investment opportunities, convince those companies to work with us to raise finance through the debt market. Then there's structuring: those are the guys who put together the complex investment vehicles for people to invest in, once we have signed the agreement to work with a client. Then there is my department: sales. I am the one who goes around finding the investors for the investment opportunities that the structuring team has prepared. Then the fourth department is the rest: administration, back office, accounting and HR. I happen to work in the sales department and not any of the other departments but as I have explained, once in a while, I am asked to help my colleagues in the other departments because I may have a skill (like my languages) that they require and I just so happen to be there.

Some people prefer to work in sales, others in HR. 

How does one make money in corporate finance? 

If you are curious as to who gets paid the most, well the directors do because they are the bosses who take the lion's share of the profits the company makes. They deserve to get paid the most of course because they are taking all the risks, unlike the employees. Those who work in the structuring department and the admin/accounting/back office/HR departments usually get a set package which varies depending on their experience, but they do not have the chance to double their earnings for the next month by making a huge sale. No, they know exactly how much they are going to earn - unlike the sales department, where the guys can have huge fluctuations in their income from month to month, depending on their sales figures. And of course, there are also the guys in origination who can make some commission as well if they are able to bring new clients for the company, but that is a much longer process to get a company to agree to use us to raise capital for them through debt and they are also limited by the capacity of the structuring team. So there's no point in the origination team bringing 30 new clients to the company if the structuring team can only serve say 15 of them in the next few months. Their job is a lot harder than the sales team: once we have established a network of good clients who use our products, all we do is funnel each new product along to our investors, sit back and collect the commissions which can run into 6 or 7 figures easily. That is why people hate bankers, because they earn so much for doing so little compared to say someone like a nurse or doctor working in an A&E department. So for what it is worth, I am in the right place at the right time and am happy doing what I do because of the potential to make a lot of money with this company - not bad for an autistic, working class kid from Ang Mo Kio who has made so many mistakes in his life!

So how is it working out for me as the salesman?

You know, working in sales is lucrative but the title salesman is not a nice sounding title at all. Some people dress it up as business development but I prefer to call a spade a spade. I sell, that's what I do, hence the term is appropriate. You can have salesmen in shopping malls trying to sell you mobile phone accessories for a few dollars or you can have salesmen in corporate finance brokering deals worth several million dollars - the salesman in corporate finance could probably make in one deal what the mobile phone accessories salesman makes in a year. I like those odds, because I don't like to work more than 30 hours a week. If you follow me on Instagram (if you haven't done so already, what are you waiting for), you will see that I travel a lot and take loads of holidays. It is a pretty good balance I have struck between working 30 hours a week, having loads of holidays and still being able to earn a pretty tidy sum as a salesman. Look, let me compare this to an old friend from Singapore: she was a government scholar who went to Oxford and now has a very senior job in a government agency, on paper she looks brilliant. She certainly is very well paid and very capable, but when I chatted with her recently, she is not happy at all because of the long hours she has to work. She often works 12 hours a day and even when she is at home on the weekend, she is constantly at her laptop trying to play catch up - putting in about 80 hours a week, leaving her little time for her family because even when she does spend time with her kids, well she is just too freaking exhausted to do much with them. She worries she is not being a good enough mother.

When I told her that I was going to Northern Finland in February to see the northern lights, she said that she was extremely jealous and wished that she could go. I smirked and reminded her that she earned more money than me - if she wanted, she could easily fly to Finland in first class and stay in a five star hotel. She replied, "if only - my boss would go crazy if I tried to take more than three days leave, the workload here is insane and I have no idea when my next holiday is. I am lucky if I can get a day off to spend some time with my kids, something as simple as attending a sports day or school play and even then my phone won't stop ringing and the people from the office are still trying to get hold of me all the time." So yeah, this lady did do everything right - she didn't put a foot wrong: she had the perfect A level grades to get a prestigious government scholarship to Oxford and now has a brilliant career in the civil service. Is she successful? Oh most definitely. But is she happy? No she certainly doesn't sound happy at all to me when I spoke to her. Isn't it ironic? I know this lady well - I know she did everything she did to please her parents: they are certainly delighted that their daughter is doing so well in all aspects of her life, but I don't even know if they realize how unhappy she is at the moment. So even those who do somehow do everything right according to the Singaporean formula till do not end up fulfilled or happy - that's why I am very happy to do what I am doing at the moment and surely that should matter.

So that's it from me for now in part 1 of this clarification exercise, in part two, I will deal with some of the more disturbing, darker things that have been said to me by what I suspect are actually quite young readers who are probably teenagers. Yeah, I did warn you that it gets pretty disturbing but hey, if they wanna bring their emotional baggage to me, it will get turned into fodder for my blog. Look I can deal with all kind of crap but when it is coming from teenagers, that's when it becomes decidedly disturbing. What are young people like these days? Stay tuned, akan datang. Thanks for reading.