Pitch perfect: UTC Cohort 4 wows trade minister

BUSINESS owners who make up the fourth cohort of UTC’s Scale Up programme have been given a chance to pitch their businesses to one of the biggest investors in the country – the government.

This opportunity arose at the welcoming ceremony of the Scale Up programme, at the UTC’s head office on Independence Square.

Trade Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon and UTC chief operations officer Natasha Davis listened as entrepreneurs described their businesses and how they plan to scale up.

Making the pitch

The businesses in the fourth cohort come from several different areas, including entertainment, security, agro-processing, tech and even the funeral industry.

Each of the businesses sought to expand through the scalerator programme.

Reshma Advani-Rojas managing director of Advance Commercial Equipment, a supplier of commercial equipment for hotels, restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets and janitorial companies, said while the business started from humble beginnings, it is now the leader in the southern Caribbean for commercial food service.

She said, with the help of the Advance Commercial team and stakeholders such as UTC and the Trade Ministry, she plans to take the business further, promoting TT cuisine and culture through initiatives such as the Forge – a culinary film studio – where food brands can film and photograph content for promotions.

“I think while the country has looked at outside expertise in order to do these things, what Advance is trying to do is not just build up the hospitality sector, through programmes like Scale Up and with the support of the UTC and the Ministry of Trade, but by making a network of individuals who actually look forward to growing with us, whether it be in hospitality the ministry or outside,” she said.

Maj (retired) Dirk Barnes, CEO of Air Support Tactical Security, said his company specialises in telematics, geomatics and asset retrieval.

“In other words, we recover stolen vehicles,” he said.

The company started in 2016. Barnes said the company uses the expertise of highly trained retirees from the security services along with innovative systems to track and recover assets.

In his pitch, he described to the minister how crime has affected several people and how through coming together, citizens can stop criminals in their tracks.

“In 2018 I had a police officer whose vehicle was stolen around 2 am and we recovered it at around six.

“Back in the pandemic, we had an employee of Air Support Tactical whose vehicle was also stolen, and we recovered that at just around six as well.

“Last month, there was a young lady, a mother of two, whose car was stolen, and we recovered that one around 7am. What was interesting, though, is that lady had to interact with the police officers and our sergeants at the station and when she came back to us and we were talking, we realised that the officer who noticed that the car was moving on the map and the officer at the station were the two people whose cars we recovered before. That just showed to me that we were on the right track."

CEO of Civon Multi Services Ltd Jonathan Lee said his company specialises in the maintenance of elevator and escalator services.

He said Civon is the first and only company to offer elevator maintenance on cruise ships, having signed contracts with Otis Marines, a company that services cruise ships, ferries, commercial ships, offshore platforms and others.

“What we looked at is developing the business more,” he said. "This year, in the 2024 Trade and Investment Conference, we introduced the lift preventative diagnostic monitoring system, which gives us the ability to monitor any one of our lifts throughout TT and the Caribbean.”

He added the company sold its first lift in Puerto Rico, which technicians were able to monitor from TT.

"We also signed a contract with a monitoring company in Italy to provide this service in the Caribbean and in South America, which means we could be in Trinidad, set up our lift monitoring company and actually provide services for projects in Suriname, Guyana, Brazil – any place.”

Gopee-Scoon to businesses: Buy local, sell foreign

Gopee-Scoon said the manufacturing sector is leading the charge in diversifying the economy, with the TT Manufacturing Association and other associations leading trade missions to several countries, such as Ghana, and coming back with business deals and new trade relationships. She advised entrepreneurs, once their businesses were established, they should seek to begin exporting as soon as possible.

“It's all about extra-regional now,” she said. “Yes, there's room, and there are gaps in the traditional markets that we're working with, but it's still a small number. If you are to grow, it means the number of people you serve or supply has to grow as well, and the only place you're going to find that is outside of the region.”

She said TT’s businesses have gone as far as Africa, with major companies such as NFM already sending containers of pet food to African countries.

“I know there's New Wave, who is a success story and graduate coming out of Scale Up as well. New Wave is also looking at assembly (and) is close to us doing battery assembly in Ghana, because it's a huge market. If the company were only able to get one per cent of the market, it would have done extremely well and earned his foreign exchange.”

She also called for businesses to use more local inputs in creating products for export.

"Yes, we export, yes, we produce, but a lot of it depends on foreign inputs into the actual product."

“What we want to see is that value shifts so more inputs are, in fact, local.”

She said there are the beginnings of linkages through various sectors such as the agricultural and manufacturing sectors but innovation and creativity are required to take the next steps.

“You’ve got to think outside the box. You’ve got to be creative and think of new products, new processes, new markets around and more local inputs into what you do as well.”

Instructor: What you do makes a difference

Scalerator instructor Daniel Isenberg, a professor of entrepreneurship practice at Babson College Executive Education in Massachusets, in a video message, congratulated the entrepreneurs on entering the course. He said, as the Scale Up programme makes its way to helping 100 companies, it is having a cumulative impact on the culture of growth in TT.

He encouraged the entrepreneurs to continue telling their stories.

“It is very inspiring to see the little, medium and big-size growth stories that you're telling. This has an impact that you may not see right away.

“Your growth, in and of itself, is beneficial and gives back to your community and to your country.

"But there will also be opportunities to give back more explicitly – using yourselves as examples, the learnings that you've had, conveying those to younger entrepreneurs, to smaller entrepreneurs, to bigger companies, and, of course, to your own teams.”

Eisenberg lauded Gopee-Scoon and UTC executive director Nigel Edwards for developing the project, saying it is already seeing returns with companies graduating from the Scalerator programme generating well over half a billion dollars in revenue.

“I've seen scale-up projects in many countries, in many areas around the world. And I'm very impressed and also grateful for the decisiveness at with which you're exercising your leadership,” he said. “We can already see that it's starting to pay off.

“What's particularly gratifying about that is a lot of the growth we're seeing is in export markets. As you use the training and the learnings and the networks that you're forming, you're able to compete in a much bigger and also much more difficult and challenging marketplace, and you're doing it successfully, and that's a good sign.”