James Molloy has been at the center of the most transformative era in Irvine-based Alorica Inc.’s brief history, overseeing two financial transactions in little more than a year that quadrupled the size of the call center operator.
Molloy, within a few months of taking on the chief financial officer role, completed the $275 million buy of Omaha-based West Corp. in March 2015. The deal not only doubled revenue to about $1.2 billion and companywide employment to 48,000, but expanded operations into several new geographic markets, including Mexico and Jamaica.
Then came the takeover of Expert Global Solutions in Plano, Texas last June. The transaction on undisclosed terms again doubled revenue.
“It’s really been accelerated growth at warp speed we’ve been working at,” said Molloy, the recipient of the Business Journal’s CFO of the Year award in the privately held companies category (see profiles of the other winners, pages 1, 7 and 8).
Alorica was Orange County’s 15th largest private company last year and will likely move into the top 10 this year with sales of about $2.4 billion.
It employs more than 80 at its 20,000-square-foot headquarters at 5 Park Plaza and 102,000 worldwide, up from 16,000 when Molloy joined the company.
Alorica has grown into one of the largest call center operators in the world, with operations in 16 countries and expansion plans in the works in Japan and South Korea. Its industry generates about $65 billion in annual revenue, roughly half of that in the U.S., so it has some room to run, according to Molloy.
“We’re nowhere near capped on all the opportunity in this marketplace,” he said.
Alorica likely wouldn’t be in a leadership position or an aggressive acquirer without the behind-the-scenes structural changes Molloy initiated before he became CFO.
The South African native joined the company in 2013 as the successor to finance chief Jack Pollock, who had been with the company since it was established in 1999.
Molloy said he immediately set out to organize and structure the company for a growth spurt.
“We were a company that barely had infrastructure to support the business when I came in, never mind at the rate I wanted to grow it,” he said. “We had a very basic accounting and planning analysis team. We needed to upgrade the people and the bricks of the company.”
He set out to overhaul the tax, treasury, procurement and auditing operation, which he said all lacked teeth.
“The functions that were there were really somewhat unsophisticated,” Molloy said.
The company grew organically at a 25% clip in his first full year as it focused on profitability and expanding margins. Alorica was scouting potential deals at the same time.
Founder and Chief Executive Andy Lee, who started Alorica with about $10,000 after a bad customer service experience when he bought a computer, gave Molloy a directive to build up infrastructure to double growth by the end of 2017.
“We had to build the infrastructure faster than what I anticipated,” said Molloy, who oversees about 600 employees in financial management and planning, accounting, reporting, analysis, treasury, auditing, taxes, procurement and pricing, among other departments.
“When deals come up and they’re the right ones, you have to jump on them when you can,” he said. “If you wait, those deals aren’t there.”
