Raphael John-Lall

In­tel­li­gent Busi­ness Ad­van­tage Ltd, CEO Bernard Camp­bell, ex­pressed sat­is­fac­tion that the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries’ (TTC­SI) Do­ing Busi­ness With the World Se­ries is a suc­cess as it opened doors for lo­cal com­pa­nies to ex­pand busi­ness ties with in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners.

His com­pa­ny pro­vides busi­ness sup­port to com­pa­nies wish­ing to break in­to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets. The com­pa­ny al­so does IT sup­port.

From 2014 to 2016, he served as chair­man of the Trade and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­mit­tee of the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce in West­moor­ings.

Camp­bell de­scribed the TTC­SI’s in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness se­ries as a “board meet­ing specif­i­cal­ly set up” for the busi­ness per­son seek­ing in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

“This was ex­treme­ly ben­e­fi­cial. The more in­for­ma­tion that we have avail­able, we can bet­ter be able to as­sist clients. Right now, we are look­ing for prod­ucts for a spe­cif­ic com­pa­ny. They are look­ing to re­place one of their prod­uct lines that comes from the Far East. They im­port food prod­ucts in­to T&T. They are a dis­trib­u­tor. That long dis­tri­b­u­tion chain gets dis­rupt­ed very eas­i­ly. They are look­ing for a clos­er mar­ket, so in­stead of go­ing to get the prod­ucts far away, they get them close by. T&T has over 1,000,000 peo­ple, but there are clos­er mar­kets in this re­gion and they are much big­ger than T&T; for ex­am­ple the coun­tries which TTC­SI high­light­ed.”

He spoke of ad­van­tages that his client can gain by ac­cess­ing re­gion­al coun­tries from which to source its food prod­ucts.

“You get scale so that the man­u­fac­tur­er that do things over there, they have ad­van­tages of scale and po­ten­tial­ly bet­ter prices and prod­uct lines. One of the ben­e­fits of this se­ries is that, let’s look at the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, they brought the Am­bas­sador, their busi­ness pro­mo­tion agency and they brought to­geth­er the lo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive for busi­ness pro­mo­tion. They brought all these peo­ple in one place who shared their in­sights in­to how to do busi­ness with them. You had peo­ple from ship­ping lines. You can’t sign a busi­ness agree­ment and then you can’t ship the prod­uct. There is need to find out the es­ti­mat­ed cost and du­ra­tion to get prod­ucts in­to T&T.”

He said in 2024, he and his food dis­trib­u­tor client will be vis­it­ing sev­er­al coun­tries in the re­gion to source canned food prod­ucts.

“They are look­ing at non-per­ish­able canned goods. Co­in­ci­dent­ly, two of the meet­ings that we had were coun­tries we were on the way to vis­it. One of them was Cu­ba and the oth­er one was an­oth­er Latin Amer­i­can coun­try which I don’t want to give the name of as yet. In terms of qual­i­ty and their stan­dards, in terms of pack­ag­ing and la­belling and avail­able vol­umes, things look quite promis­ing once the num­bers make sense.”

Camp­bell, who al­so speaks Span­ish, not­ed that the TTC­SI’s in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness se­ries al­so as­sist­ed lo­cal com­pa­nies in fa­mil­iaris­ing them­selves with Span­ish-speak­ing Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries as do­ing busi­ness with a coun­try that speaks a for­eign lan­guage can make the process more dif­fi­cult.

“More peo­ple from these coun­tries may have peo­ple at their com­pa­nies who speak Eng­lish. So, if you can’t speak Span­ish at all, it may lim­it the size and type of busi­ness­es you can in­ter­act well. If you at­tend­ed one of the TTC­SI’s busi­ness ses­sion be­fore you vis­it the coun­try you want to do busi­ness in, it puts your busi­ness five steps ahead of the game.”

Nu­tur­ing new busi­ness­es

The TTC­SI’s CEO Vashti Guyadeen told Sun­day Busi­ness that lo­cal busi­ness peo­ple are al­ready work­ing on leads de­vel­oped out of the se­ries.

She re­ferred to fi­nan­cial an­a­lyst Stephanie Pem­ber­ton who vis­it­ed the Ba­hamas for a trade mis­sion and on so­cial me­dia, Pem­ber­ton said her trip was aimed at on­board­ing Ba­hami­an SMEs & buy­ers, and rais­ing and de­ploy­ing pri­vate eq­ui­ty in­vest­ments in the re­gion.

Guyadeen not­ed that Pem­ber­ton’s trip to the Ba­hamas fol­lowed the Ba­hamas’ Prime Min­is­ter Phillip E. Davis’ vis­it to T&T in Au­gust.

Guyadeen al­so said from May through No­vem­ber 2023, the TTC­SI’s com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age spanned twelve coun­tries and the Eu­ro­pean Union, en­com­pass­ing a di­verse range of lo­cales such as Cu­ba, Türkiye, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Bar­ba­dos, Be­lize, Cu­ra­cao, Colom­bia, the Ba­hamas fea­tur­ing its Prime Min­is­ter, Cana­da, Chile, Pe­ru, and Mex­i­co.

She spoke about the in­volve­ment of at least 100 busi­ness peo­ple per ses­sion dur­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness se­ries not on­ly from T&T but in the Caribbean and even through­out Latin Amer­i­ca.

She al­so said in 2024, they will con­tin­ue the se­ries with more coun­tries.

“In 2024, our agen­da in­cludes ex­pand­ing our reach to 32 coun­tries, in­clud­ing T&T. These coun­tries have been strate­gi­cal­ly cho­sen based on their sig­nif­i­cance as key mar­kets for our mem­bers and busi­ness­es that have en­gaged in the Gate­way to Trade Pro­gramme 1.0, as well as those list­ed on our Na­tion­al Ser­vices Ex­porters Por­tal.”

She said the TTC­SI’s aim is am­bi­tious and is to nur­ture a group of 100 glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive ser­vice providers and firms by 2027.

“The ‘Do­ing Busi­ness with the World’ se­ries is a piv­otal com­po­nent of this vi­sion. Lever­ag­ing cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy, we are build­ing a sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ty through our na­tion­al ser­vices ex­porters’ por­tal. By Jan­u­ary 2024, this por­tal is set to trans­form in­to an in­ter­na­tion­al plat­form, en­abling B2B in­ter­ac­tions be­tween lo­cal firms and glob­al part­ners. This se­ries does more than dis­sem­i­nate in­for­ma­tion; it ac­tive­ly fa­cil­i­tates con­nec­tions be­tween buy­ers and sell­ers in re­al-time, tran­scend­ing ge­o­graph­i­cal and time zone bar­ri­ers.”