My first 100 days with BIT
Schwalbach, Germany – On 1st of September Mark Rahman joined BIT as Group Chief Financial Officer. Mark is an experienced global finance and strategy executive who has worked extensively across the world in both the production and service sectors in the healthcare, mining, chemical and retail industries. His previous position was at Henry Schein, the world’s largest dental and medical distribution company where he was VP & CFO for their European business. Prior to Henry Schein, he was the EVP Finance & CAO for Walmart and worked in Japan, Germany, China, Brazil, Korea and the USA. Mark is a US citizen who has been living and working in Germany for the past 14 years.
As I reflect on my first 100 days, I can clearly say that joining BIT, a company with four decades of history and a rich tradition of the Messer Group, was the right decision for me. Compared to the large publicly held global corporations where I worked for most of my career, BIT is a smaller family-owned global company but with an outstanding potential for growth and success. What drew me to BIT and continues to inspire me today is BIT’s dedication to serving mankind. We research, develop and manufacture life-saving diagnostics devices that extend and improve the quality of people’s lives. What could be more inspiring?
I was fortunate to have joined BIT at a time when we worked on taking our corporate culture to the next level, as well as redefined our vision, mission and business strategy. It was refreshing to see that we were working on these fundamentals that are key to organizational success. This gave me the chance to learn the business and understand our strategic priorities and organizational challenges quickly.
In my first 100 days, I spent most of my time listening, learning the business, and getting to know our team as well as some of our key clients. To be able to contribute and to be effective quicker, it was important for me to understand our business model and the competitive environment in which we compete. I took the time to focus on the details of our business to understand the levers that allow us to win. I visited our markets and had the opportunity to interact with our local teams to get their insights into our business. This was very helpful to my learning.
There were some real challenges on the way also. We had vacant positions in Finance in our US business right from the start. This was exacerbated by the fact that it was at a time when the team was dealing with budgets, year-end closing and external audit. But I am pleased to report that our finance team pulled together and met this challenge successfully. My sincere “thank you” to Linda Leal and Phuong Duong (Kitty) in the US as well as Marcus Heinemann in Germany for their tireless work in making this happen.
During my visits, I had the chance to interact with many BIT team members. Almost without exception, each person I spoke with made a point of stressing how proud they were of the work they do and of the contribution they make to improve people’s lives. Their level of commitment and dedication is impressive.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my management team colleagues as well the rest of the BIT team for welcoming me to the organization and helping me to learn the ropes.
My takeaway from the first 100 days is that we have a talented team and a great market opportunity. We have made excellent progress on our culture development, we have finalized our vision and mission statements, and we have developed our strategy. By implementing our strategy and working together as one global company, we have the potential to grow our business and achieve our strategic and financial goals. I am excited to be part of Team BIT and look forward to working together as we proceed on this journey. If we stay focused and continue to take care of our clients, I am confident that the best days of BIT are yet to come!
Specializing in “Instrumentation for Life,” BIT provides contract product development, manufacturing and after-sales services, as well as hematology instruments, for life science, medical and IVD instrumentation OEMs. Quality and regulatory standards include GMP, FDA registered, ISO13485, QSR and CE IVD Directive. BIT’s global operations in USA, Germany, France & China deliver precision engineered, cost effective systems solutions. Pre-engineered platform technologies reduce development cost and time-to-market; lean manufacturing centers and global supply chain enable competitive product cost.
Contact:
Valentin Kaiser
Global Marketing Manager
Phone: +1 (858) 886 8350
V.Kaiser@BIT-Group.com
www.BIT-Group.com