Executive Spotlight with Altaf Sayed

After almost 25 years of building my career from the ground up at Epicenter – where I wore almost every hat from operations and training to HR and sales – I recently stepped out to launch my own company, Right Shores.

Currently, I act as the founder and CEO of Right Shores, but I like to think of myself as an operational partner to my clients, helping them scale by setting up highly reliable offshore teams. My work focuses on providing tailored solutions across Staffing, Outsourcing, and Consulting specifically for the ARM, fintech, and legal spaces.

I actually stumbled into the industry by accident in 2001 at the early stages of the massive Outsourcing wave to India. Core engineering roles paid very little at the time, so I joined Epicenter as a credit card collector, planning to stay for just six months to save money. Those six months turned into a 25-year journey.

What kept me here was the constant challenge and the incredible room for internal growth. My engineering background naturally drove me toward process optimization, allowing me to transition into training, manage large process transitions/migrations for massive banking portfolios, and step in as a “fixer” to ultimately lead the Training, Operations, Analytics, HR, Administration, and Business Development functions.

Around 2017, I started attending industry conferences and realized that the receivables and ARM space is incredibly tight-knit. You build genuine, long-term relationships with clients and peers because you see the same professionals year after year. The opportunity to solve complex operational problems while building genuine, long-term partnerships with peers is exactly what kept me here and what inspired me to launch my own firm to serve this space.

An early defining moment for me was fighting to transition from a collector on the phones into the training department.

I had an engineering background, which naturally made me look at things structurally. I loved breaking down complex processes and coaching others. But when I applied for the Trainer position, I was rejected twice while other colleagues were promoted. In fact, I was told I would never be promoted to a trainer because leadership saw me strictly as team leader material in operations. I was stubborn and refused to give up on what I actually wanted to do. My manager fought tooth and nail just to get me included a third time. The panel grilled me for two grueling hours, trying to find any reason to reject me.

Ultimately, I got the promotion. That experience taught me never to let others put me in a box, and it proved that my engineering background, which focused on breaking complex, undocumented workflows down into clear, structured steps, was a massive asset. It set the foundation for me becoming the go-to “fixer” for the rest of my career.

I wish more people understood that what we do isn’t just about putting “butts in seats”. When companies look offshore, they often conflate staffing and outsourcing, or they don’t grasp the distinct operational differences between voice services and complex back-office work.

In our day-to-day work, a massive amount of effort goes into alignment. For example, when a US client says “back-office,” they assume that an employee can just jump on the phone if needed. Offshore, true back-office teams are specialized, highly process-driven professionals handling intense, computer-based data tasks without ever touching a phone.

My company’s mission is to bring absolute transparency and reliability to this dynamic. I don’t believe in selling seats or selling solutions clients don’t actually need. Because I spent over two decades building operations, training, and HR from the ground up, our day-to-day focus is on building highly reliable, process-oriented extensions of our clients’ teams. We want to prove that offshore operations can be completely trusted to handle a business’s most complex, heavy-lifting tasks seamlessly.

What excites me the most right now is the massive shift toward agentic automation and AI-driven predictive behavior in receivables. We are seeing a major shift away from rigid, legacy workflows toward intelligent systems that can automate complex decision-making. As someone who approaches operations with an engineering mindset, I love this because it relies entirely on clean processes and structured data loops.

However, this innovation excites me for a highly practical reason: it highlights the critical need for elite back-office support. I know that technology is only as good as the system backing it up. The real magic happens when you pair that tech with a highly structured, process-oriented team, especially in a highly regulated industry. More importantly, no matter how advanced the AI becomes, there will always be an irreplaceable need for humans to build the genuine connection required to find a mutually beneficial solution.

By marrying automated workflows with specialized teams who live and breathe standard operating procedures, we can achieve near-perfect operational accuracy. That balance of smart tech, flawless back-office data management, and authentic human communication is the future of this industry.

My background as an engineer completely shaped my approach to leadership and operations. My mind naturally forces me to break down every complex problem into structured, repeatable steps; this helped me immensely when I had to build departments like Analytics, Operations, and HR from the ground up without a formal background in them. I lead with a collaborative, problem-solving mindset that focuses on building trust, robust structure, and reliability.

My path from an entry-level phone collector to the Executive team has made me a leader who values straight talk and radical transparency. I don’t believe in selling a client an idealized story or something they don’t actually need; I tell them exactly what is operationally possible and what isn’t.

Additionally, my experience navigating the relational nature of the ARM industry taught me the value of building genuine, long-term partnerships. People know that I will always try to do right by my clients and my team, because at the end of the day, reliability and trust are the only things that truly scale a business.

In the receivables space, inclusive leadership means moving past the traditional “command-and-control” mindset and actively bridging the gap between front-line operations and leadership. It involves three core principles:

1. Creating Transparent Growth Paths: It is about defining clear, objective milestones for career progression so employees know exactly what goals they must hit to move up the chain. Everyone should have an equal opportunity for internal growth if they put in the work.
2. Empowering Non-Traditional Backgrounds: Inclusive leadership means taking a chance on people and giving them the tools to succeed, even if their background doesn’t perfectly align with a role. Just like my mentors did for me when I transitioned across diverse functions like operations, HR, and sales without prior experience, true inclusion is recognizing raw potential and problem-solving ability.
3. Respecting Every Function: It requires understanding the distinct value of every team member, from the voice agents navigating the psychology of a collections call to the highly process-oriented back-office staff executing critical, non-voice data tasks. True inclusion recognizes that the person actually doing the work day in and day out knows the process best. As a leader, it’s my job to listen to their feedback, give them a voice, and empower rather than just dictating rules from the top down.

A piece of advice that truly empowered me came from my boss in 2010 when he asked me to take over Sales and Business Development. I was incredibly hesitant because I had never done sales in my life and thought it was just a high-pressure role about spinning stories.

He looked at me and said, “You understand operations, you’ve lived it, and you’re a straight talker. Americans appreciate someone who tells them what’s actually possible and what’s not, rather than someone just selling them a story.”

That completely changed my perspective. It made me realize that my operational background and my instinct for radical honesty weren’t detours; they were my greatest strengths. It empowered me to stop trying to fit into a traditional “salesperson” mold and instead show up as a trusted problem-solver for my clients.

What motivates me to keep showing up is the responsibility I feel toward my clients, employees, my partners, and the teams we build.

Throughout my career, whenever there was a major operational fire, a sudden client transition, or a department left without a leader, I was the one who stepped into the gap to fix it. I learned early on that people rely heavily on the structures and reliability we put in place.

On the hard days, I remember that my company was founded on the principle of doing right by our clients and providing them with genuine flexibility and trust. Knowing that our process-oriented approach directly impacts their operational peace of mind is what keeps me entirely focused on solving the problem at hand, no matter how grueling the day gets.

A mantra I always return to when I need inspiration is: “Complaining doesn’t solve problems, and excuses don’t fix mistakes.”

Throughout my career, I’ve constantly been pushed into the deep end on many occasions, whether it was taking over an analytics team when I barely knew Excel, leading HR without a formal background, or handling major client crises. I learned very quickly that when things go sideways, sitting around wishing things were different, making excuses, or trying to create distractions gets you absolutely nowhere.

Instead, you own up to the reality of the situation immediately, look at the broken process, and put all your energy into fixing it. I’ve always been a straight talker, and I believe clients and teams respect someone who takes accountability rather than someone spinning a story. It’s a constant reminder to stop the noise, roll up my sleeves, and focus entirely on finding an honest, practical way forward.

If the industry gave out superlatives, mine would undoubtedly be “Most Likely to Fix It (With Straight Talk and a Spreadsheet).”

Throughout my career, I became the ultimate accidental leader for almost every department. I didn’t have formal training in most of those fields, but when there was an operational crisis, a department head quit, or a process broke down, I stepped into the fire to fix it.

Clients and peers in the ARM space know they will always get radical honesty from me, which is exactly how I’ve built trust in this tightly knit industry.

Ultimately, I hope to be remembered as a trusted operational partner who always did right by his clients and his people.

I want my legacy to be that of a straight talker, someone who brought absolute transparency, robust processes, and reliability to every operation I touched. Whether I was stepping in to fix a broken department from scratch or building long-term relationships at industry conferences, I always believed that accountability and radical honesty were the only ways to do business. I hope people remember me as the partner who rolled up his sleeves, owned the results, and could always be counted on to deliver exactly what was promised.

Outside of work, a lot of my energy and sense of community comes from the deep relationships I’ve built over the years. I love winding down by connecting authentically with people, whether that’s catching up with long-time industry peers or hanging out in casual, unfiltered settings where you can just be a straight talker and share a laugh.

I also naturally recharge by stepping away from screens and engaging in spaces that allow for genuine, unstructured conversations. For me, snooker is the ultimate way to recharge and find focus. Because of my engineering background, I naturally love the game’s demand for absolute precision, angles, and strategic calculation. Every shot is a mini-problem to solve, requiring complete mental presence and patience.

Since I’ve always worked US hours, which is usually nighttime in India, spending hours at the table when the world quiets down is how I truly recharge. But beyond the strategy of the game, it’s about the community. I’m not a fan of massive, overwhelming crowds; instead, I find energy in smaller, tightly knit circles. The quiet, focused atmosphere of a snooker room is where I wind down, talk straight, and connect authentically with friends and longtime peers over friendly competition and plenty of shared laughs.

What people often overlook is just how much empathy and human connection drive my decisions, beneath my very process-driven, analytical exterior.

Because of my background and obsession with the precision of things like spreadsheets, it’s easy for people to assume I view everything strictly through a cold, operational lens. But the reality is quite the opposite.

The structures and transparent processes I build aren’t just about efficiency; they are designed to give my team members stability, clear career paths, and the confidence to succeed. Similarly, in Business Development, my approach isn’t built on cold sales tactics; it’s built on a deep respect for the relationships I’ve nurtured over the years. I don’t look at operations as just managing metrics; I look at it as protecting and supporting the people who rely on those workflows every day.