What do you do when the company that employs you decides to withdraw from the overseas territory where you work so that it can concentrate on its home market?
Well, in the case of Lenia Iacovides, she set up a new company that kept together her former employer's sales team and set up a Cyprus company, InterFrontiers Services Ltd, based in Nicosia. She then offered the services of her company to the top-selling home PC seller in Europe in 2001, Packard Bell and its corporate counterpart NEC, and provided a ready-made sales network for its products in a geographical area where it was largely unrepresented.
I caught up with the dynamic Mrs Iacovides, founder and managing director of InterFrontiers, at the Corinthia Palace Hotel, Attard, when she was in Malta some weeks back with business de-velopment manager Stelios Symeonides and marketing director Christina Stylianou.
Mrs Iacovides was responsible for driving the growth in market share for US PC company Gateway in countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
That sounds a bit simplistic, for her territory, including Malta, where Gateway was represented by Forestals (Appliances) Ltd, covered such a huge geographical area that it extended from Russia to South Africa.
She also controlled a network of sales managers with local responsibility for Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the entire Middle East, Egypt, the lower Gulf, the Near East, and Portuguese-, English- and French-speaking Africa.
The momentum was such that Mrs Iacovides, a mother-of-two, developed Gateway's EMEA business from a one-person start-up to a US$60 million sales turnover by 2000.
She is a woman of vision, who has built up a company that is strong in human resources to enable it to deliver astronomic growth rates - 400 per cent in the case of Gateway - within very short time frames.
Her goal, she told me, is for Packard Bell and NEC to be "one of the top players in all the markets we are in". More specifically, she wants to be a "top ten player" in every market she represents - including Malta.
Whether that means being number three or number eight; and whether that will be achieved in six months or two years, she says, is still being evaluated but the object-ive is to be at the top.
The internal organisation that is to deliver that sales growth for a brand that is already represented in Malta is impressive, with departments offering services in business development; channel development; sales management; bids and tenders sales and support; project management; major accounts handling; and marketing management.
Mrs Iacovides holds a BA in Economics and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Cyprus.
She has worked as a chartered accountant for Moore Stephens and Co in the UK and run the Middle Eastern PC sales and financial organisations of AT&T and NCR, respectively.
InterFrontiers is now the Regional Business Development Unit for NEC Computers International and is responsible for the market share growth and the development of NEC CI's business in the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa (excluding South Africa).
Both Packard Bell and NEC are set to gain greater exposure locally and with the support of InterFrontiers working in the background, the numbers are bound to fall into place.