After working for a decade in finance and consulting, Adel Haddadin launched Midas Advisory, a boutique financial advisory firm that serves small and medium sized companies and post-seed-stage tech firms.
“At the time, it was out of necessity given the prevailing market conditions with the euro debt crisis,” says Haddadin, who had previously worked internationally at Manulife Investment Management, Standard Chartered Bank, Union Bank and EY.
Midas Advisory has gone on to advise clients in a variety of situations, and raised $317 million in private placements.
An investor open to new opportunities, Haddadin is also the founder of Medallion Holdings, which specializes in supplying paper, adhesive-labels and packaging-grade plastics to manufacturers in the printing and packaging industries.
Greatest challenge
“Attracting talent from the big banks. The key was offering the kind of benefits that are absent in big banks such as working from home more often than not, and a politics-free flexible environment for almost the same fixed pay. Building the team and moving on from having a big brand name on my business card (such as a bulge-bracket bank or consulting firm) to having no name recognition was the greatest challenge and accomplishment.”
On maintaining a stellar track record
“It’s crucial to keep learning and keep an open mind for betterment opportunities.”
The Concordia factor
“Aside from the academics, which gave me a good foundation, the greatest learning experience was on the soft-skills side — making connections with a diverse pool of people and personalities. Over the long run, people skills are more useful in managerial careers than technical skills. You can only get so far if you are unable to connect with and influence people, whether they’re your peers, supervisors or associates.”
Fostering diverse interests
“I am passionate about learning. It’s fun and makes me relax. It’s a lifelong quest with no destination other than feeding my curiosity in a broad range of interests such as behavioural sciences, philosophy, physics, technology, astrology, the future of humanity and economics. Besides extensive reading, I’m currently conducting research around machine learning to try and come up with more efficient forecasting models in certain industries.”