Checkers Inc.: Employee-owned business pulls through COVID with new FinTex solution

AMMAN — A worker cooperative is a business or social enterprise that, instead of being controlled by shareholders and managed by bosses, is run democratically by the employees themselves. Each cooperative employee is a member; the profit of the company is distributed among them, and each has an equal vote in decision making.اضافة اعلان

“My vision is to build the cooperative ecosystem, where the workers own the tools they needed to produce,” Abdul Rahman Bazian, founder and CEO of Checkers Inc. said in an interview with Jordan News.

Highlighting the importance of cooperatives in the private sector, he added that he wants to create a collaborative ecosystem in Jordan, engaging citizens, employees, workers, and businesses in a more socially and economically sustainable form of doing business.

However, the path to success in Jordan is filled with obstacles, he underlined.


(Photos: Handouts from Checkers Inc.)

“To this day, I insist, if you can make it in Jordan, you can make it anywhere. Our journey through thick and thin has been challenging, to say the least,” the founder told Jordan News.



Failure and recuperation

In 2017, Bazian, along with Checkers Inc. cofounders, CTO Hatem Sweileh and CFO Muhannad Awamleh, developed the cloud-based application called SmarTax, which was intended to engage citizens in the government’s efforts to combat tax evasion at the time.

“Back then, it was a brilliant political and tax monitoring solution, we thought. We were even featured by a number of media outlets and had already gotten the implicit and explicit approval of multiple private and public-sector entities. I invested everything I had in this project, and so did Hatem and Muhannad, but the project was not implemented due to nepotism and favoritism, mostly. So, we ended up losing everything,” he said.

“To recover from the loss, late in 2018, we decided to mainstream our services while experimenting with a new business model, which I believe to be the future of sustainable business,” Bazian contended.

Checkers Inc. is a living example of democracy in business. It is an employee-owned tech and business solutions company dedicated to the empowerment of cooperatives, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), start-ups, and entrepreneurs in Jordan. Checkers Inc. hopes to enable a more equitable and sustainable model of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector, thereby increasing productivity, lowering costs, boosting income per capita, and directly reinvesting profits into the local community and economy.

“It's an adaptation from the beginning of employee-owned companies,” Bazian said, which “is the equivalent of cooperatives in the private sector.”

“Our vision is to recreate a Jordanian version of the John Lewis Partnership, but in the tech sector instead of the garment industry, and establish a cooperative business ecosystem here as well, in 10–15 years, similar to the world-renowned co-op towns in Italy, but centered on tech and innovation,” the founder explained, “before expanding to create an actual co-op town, which is — let’s face it — a very difficult goal to achieve.”

The company is built upon the fundamental concepts of workplace democracy, and it comes in various forms, such as voting systems, discussion, and democratic structures, the founder explained.

“We are currently working towards establishing an employee fund — that is, each partner will own an equal share in the company, driven by the philosophy of corporative business,” Bazian underlined.

To monetize the skills and services on hand, after losing significant investments in the SmarTax project, the partners — CTO Hatem Sweileh, CMO Islam Sbaih, CBDO Shafea Al-Kayed, CFO Muhannad Awamleh, and CEO Abdul Rahman Bazian — founded Checkers Inc., the employee-owned cooperative business.


Success in the long run 

To succeed as a cooperative business, “we realized that we need to retain talents and develop mutually prosperous relationships with our clients,” Bazian said.

Internally, we founded the partnership stream, which allows Checkers Inc. employees of more than two to three years to enroll associates and become partners, such as Associate Cooperator and Digital Artist Youssef Hreish and our newly boarded web developer Mohammad Freihat.

Externally, on the market front, our partnership approach is to retain clients in the long run by “building trust in our brand, employees and services,” Bazian said.

“Startups and SMEs in Jordan are our strategic partners,” he added, “We decided to partner with SMEs and provide them with our services at affordable prices,” which Bazian hopes will make both his clients’ business and the relationship with them sustainable. “We were able to strike long-term, mutually prosperous relationships with a number of major clients, including Middle East Payment Services (MEPS), the Military Consumer Corporation, Al-Wehdat SC, Al-Faisaly SC, Aviocom, and others.”

According to the founder, Checkers Inc. provides several integrated and interdependent services and solutions, ranging from planning and consulting, to creative marketing and branding, web solutions, mobile applications, hosting, network solutions, and cyber security solutions, among other services.

“We are a cloud business solutions company that provides supporting services that have proven to be irreplaceable to most of our clients, and at competitively affordable prices,” the founder told Jordan News.

According to Bazian, Checkers Inc. is the first company in Jordan to develop an antivirus software, Tirs Tech AV, augmented with an optional standalone remote maintenance support component, Tirs Tech MS.

The company was doing fine until COVID-19 hit, he added.



Weathering crises

During the pandemic, Checkers Inc. faced a multitude of significant challenges.

“This pandemic came out of nowhere, and we were surprised,” the CEO reaffirmed, adding that “there were signs, yes, but the World Health Organization (WHO) persistently reassured that it is an epidemic. Until it wasn’t anymore, in March 2020.”

Checkers Inc.’s main client base was comprised primarily of SMEs and start-ups, which is the business sector most affected by the pandemic in Jordan.

“We lost more than 90 percent of our client base to the pandemic; they shut down, most of them permanently,” he recalled.

The pandemic also disrupted internal business operations, aside from finances and clientele, for an extended period of time, the CEO underlined.

“Internally, we had the tech and fluid structure to navigate the crises. But externally, in terms of markets and clients, had it not been for the loyalty of our clients and partners who survived the pandemic, thanks to the many sacrifices and compromises we made pre-pandemic to win them over, coupled with the high-quality services we provided, we most likely would not have survived,” he added.

“This proves the importance of building long term, collaborative relationships within the business sector, and more so the importance of creating a cooperative ecosystem,” Bazian underlined.

“Our clients and strategic partners, including MEPS, the Military Consumer Corporation, Kemlat, Kaasak, Nile IFS, The Bridge SC, and Plan International, among others, played a vital role in our survival through what is surely one of the most difficult moments in Jordan’s economic history, and perhaps the world’s,” the CEO contended.

Nonetheless, despite having survived the pandemic and all, the challenging situation brought to the surface a number of internal issues that the partners were not entirely aware of, in relation to financial planning, pricing, and sustainability.

“The crisis uncovered a number of aspects of Checkers Inc.’s operations that we had not exactly considered before. Yet again, the pandemic and its repercussions were like nothing we had experienced before,” Bazian explained.

They discovered that — like most SMEs, entrepreneurs, and start-ups — their financial planning and pricing strategy did not sufficiently balance out competitiveness and sustainability. “We pulled through the pandemic in one piece, which in and of itself is an outstanding achievement, given that we’re a small business with extremely limited resources,” in light of the blow Checkers Inc. took in a failed project, the founder said, adding “But we could have done better.”

So, Checkers Inc. revisited their financial planning and pricing model in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic, and decided they would develop a tool designed to help SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs like themselves.


Looking forward 

Most entrepreneurs and SMEs are not financially well informed, nor do they have the financial resources to enlist the services of high-end financial consultants and experts, the CEO pointed out.

“We had Awamleh at our side, a seasoned tax and financial advisor with an innovative outlook on finance, which helped us build a resilient financial structure to withstand the pandemic. Most SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs do not,” he added.

The challenges the company, as well as almost everybody else, faced inspired Checkers Inc. to develop what they call the FinTex model, a reverse financial planning and pricing instrument revolving around financial sustainability.

FinTex serves two main segments, across all sectors, whose limited resources do not allow for the employment of high-end financial consultants and services. This includes entrepreneurs who want to test the feasibility and sustainability of their businesses before diving in, as most entrepreneurs have very limited financial resources, and start-ups and SMEs who want to test their financial models to monitor, rectify, and plan for financial sustainability in the long run, according to the CEO.

Eventually, Bazian explained, FinTex provides three main benefits: First, it helps SMEs, entrepreneurs, and start-ups study and plan their finances for sustainability at affordable prices; second, it helps spread financial literacy as the application provides an interactive and illustrative wizard that takes users through the financial planning and pricing process; and third, it lays the foundation for significant leaps in the fintech sector, such as AI.

“We are currently benefiting from the primitive FinTex model, which is currently under development to become an augmented multiplatform application. So, why keep such groundbreaking technologies to ourselves?” the CEO asked.

Most entrepreneurs in the early stages of their businesses lack financial information and have no idea how to secure funding, Bazian said, adding that this is an issue Checkers Inc. faced and is still facing to this day.

While FinTex and Checkers Inc. may be able to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses into fruition and sustainability, according to Bazian, innovation requires an entrepreneurial ecosystem in which venture capital, financial services, funding, and other enablers of creative innovation and entrepreneurship are easily accessible, he added.

This is why, he added, Checkers Inc., along with a number of its partners, including The Grid and others, are working to develop FinTex and launch a series of financial literacy programs to help entrepreneurs realize their potential and do so with as little financial strain as possible.

“This time it was the COVID-19 pandemic. Next time, you don’t know. Financial sustainability and literacy are crucial, and so is the development of a collaborative business environment and the building of a cooperative business ecosystem,” Bazian concluded.

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