Central Beat magazine May-July 2017 Central Beat May-July 2017 | Page 9

CentralBeat/BizBeat Page 9
May 2017
Grow your business outside of TT
From Page 8
And all our major offices do that
as well. We started that in Guyana
and not only do we have lunch with
our staff, a lot of the time customers
drop by, vendors drop by, people
come by and it is a nice way to inter-
act with people and say hello.”
The company also started a
Christmas treat for the community of
Cunupia and has been working with
the community police and some of
the different homes and orphanages.
Arising out of that they recently
‘adopted’ some young children in the
area who were suffering and needing
educational support. The company
decided to use their own boardroom
for training and employees volunteer
two hours of their time per month to
work with the children. Given the
growing success of the undertaking
they are hoping to expand it further.
“I don’t think people in this
country realise that you have a lot of
kids who don’t go to school for
months. Because when I first learnt
about this I was like no, that’s against
the law, it can’t be that we don’t have
a social support system within the
country, we have all this money as a
country, how can we not have kids
going to school? But that is, sadly,
the norm in some communities ver-
sus the exception.
“So what we want to do is that
we started off small, with a few kids,
Members of staff at Ramps
Logistics talk business
around the boardroom table.
but we want to ensure that those kids
go to school on a consistent basis and
we have people who adopted them.
When I say adopted them, within our
organisation we have persons who
are responsible for each one and they
would be responsible for making sure
that they have simple things, shoes.
We had one child who didn’t go to
school for a week and we couldn’t
understand why but he was too
ashamed to tell us that he didn’t have
any shoes. I think a lot of our staff
have really felt a sense of accom-
plishment a sense of well-being when
they know they have an impact on
people.”
The company also ensures that
all its employees are kept up to date
on everything going on in the com-
pany through quarterly meetings.
“We want people to feel secure in
the business, you want people to un-
derstand that they are growing, you
want people to take pride in your
business, you want them to feel
proud that they work with this com-
pany because our employees are re-
ally and truly are our biggest brand
ambassadors,” Rampersad notes.
“Our success is built upon the
success of the businesses that we sup-
port,” the young entrepreneur states.
“Our customers’ success it our suc-
cess and on the other side of that our
customers’ hardship is our hardship.
We have seen serious drop in the
amount of business our Trinidadian
customers do, especially smaller
business and medium size busi-
nesses. Their access to foreign ex-
change is a big, big challenge, a huge
challenge. But the way to get around
that, I also think, is by encouraging
those businesses to go outside of
Trinidad. If you do something and
you do it well in Trinidad, with the
right support and the right people you
would be able to do it outside of
Trinidad as well. There are a number
of markets that we need to look at
and I would encourage everybody to
look outside of Trinidad.”
Rampersad believes that this
country has some of the strongest en-
trepreneurs and some of the best
business people but that we need to
do that to a much larger extent.
“We have enjoyed a quality of
life in this country that, to some ex-
tent, is artificially supported by our
natural resources but we have not
been able to completely expand and
use those natural resources to build
strong companies and brands that can
go across the region. And we have a
few, we do have a few. But what I
would like to see is more young peo-
ple building companies that can oper-
ate not just in Trinidad but firstly
across the region. So what we want
to do is we want to build a brand that
can operate across the region and
then be able to compete globally. Be-
cause our market cannot be 1.3 mil-
lion people. It has to the 1.3 million
in Trinidad and the 750,000 in
Guyana and the 500,000 in Suriname
and then the 10 million in Haiti and
then the 18 million in Venezuela
which we have not been able to pene-
trate to a large extent for a long time.
And why shouldn’t we?”
It is clear that that question un-
derlies much of the work of the peo-
ple at Ramps Logistics – they dare to
ask ‘why not?’ and with that philoso-
phy and a commitment to quality
there is much more to be hea