Raphael John-Lall

De­spite be­ing in busi­ness for less than two years and op­er­at­ing in a re­ces­sion, So­lu­tionOne Tech­nolo­gies Ltd (SOTL), a small en­er­gy ser­vices com­pa­ny, has man­aged to per­form well. Last year, SOTL suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed one of its first big projects for Pro­man AG Trinidad Ltd: the elec­tri­cal works for plant light­ing, in­stal­la­tions and the test­ing of four ma­jor ar­eas at the down­stream plant of the AUM Com­plex, Point Lisas. An­oth­er note­wor­thy project un­der­tak­en for Pro­man AG was the elec­tri­cal and in­stru­men­ta­tion in­stal­la­tion and test­ing works for their melamine bag­ging plant at the AUM Com­plex.

Old-fash­ioned busi­ness virtues

The com­pa­ny is head­ed by the fa­ther and son team, Roy and Lenin Ram­per­sad, and busi­ness as­so­ciate Faraz Pi­rali, all of whom have ex­pe­ri­ence in their re­spec­tive fields: me­chan­i­cal, elec­tri­cal and civ­il en­gi­neer­ing. SOTL was in­cor­po­rat­ed in March 2008 and com­menced op­er­a­tions in May 2008. The core of its busi­ness is the sup­ply of and ser­vice of in­dus­tri­al and oil and gas equip­ment, ar­ti­fi­cial lift sys­tems, oil tools, en­gi­neer­ing/ma­chine work­shop and in­dus­tri­al civ­il works. Roy Ram­per­sad, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, SOTL, in an e-mail pro­vid­ing the Busi­ness Guardian with in­for­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny, spoke about its per­for­mance in a chal­leng­ing eco­nom­ic pe­ri­od.

"Sur­viv­ing a re­ces­sion as a busi­ness is not that dif­fer­ent from sur­viv­ing as an in­di­vid­ual. Man­age­ment is now pay­ing se­ri­ous at­ten­tion to costs and gain­ing added re­spect for the old-fash­ioned virtue of thrift. "Com­pa­nies from the largest to the small­est are now slow­er to pay their bills and hard­ly any clients set­tle their ac­count in 30 days. "The rev­enue earn­ers in the com­pa­ny are al­so now un­der pres­sure with every­one try­ing to cap­ture a sale. The tele­phone is no longer a sub­sti­tute for a per­son­al vis­it. There is a much longer de­lay be­tween a cus­tomer's first in­quires and the ac­tu­al place­ment or­ders. "Clients now wait un­til the last minute to pro­cure goods and ser­vices that would have been snapped up ear­li­er when the eco­nom­ic cli­mate was bet­ter," Roy said. De­spite this, So­lu­tionOne is al­ready boast­ing about its suc­cess, hav­ing achieved mil­lions in sales.

Func­tions

Roy stat­ed SOTL prides it­self as be­ing a sin­gle point of project re­spon­si­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny. "This means that we pos­sess the abil­i­ty to han­dle your project from start to fin­ish, all un­der one busi­ness um­brel­la. This has def­i­nite­ly pro­vid­ed us with an edge since com­pa­nies that need to pro­cure goods and ser­vices from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers in or­der to get a job done can now ac­quire every­thing from one com­pa­ny, which is So­lu­tionOne," he said.

SOTL said it does a sig­nif­i­cant amount of busi­ness with some of T&T's ma­jor oil and gas com­pa­nies. "One of its ma­jor achieve­ment since we be­gan op­er­a­tions has been the ac­qui­si­tion of nu­mer­ous lu­cra­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion agree­ments from in­ter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers for items, such as pro­gres­sive cav­i­ty pumps, cen­trifu­gal pumps, fil­tra­tion equip­ment and cor­ro­sion equip­ment," Roy said.

Chal­lenges

Lenin Ram­per­sad, di­rec­tor, SOTL, said one of the hur­dles So­lu­tionOne faced was the high start-up costs. "Every fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion we ap­proached for ad­di­tion­al fund­ing re­quired full col­lat­er­al since they were un­will­ing to loan mon­ey to young com­pa­nies with­out am­ple se­cu­ri­ty. "Thank­ful­ly, in some in­stances, we were able to meet the lend­ing cri­te­ria and the re­quest­ed fi­nanc­ing was grant­ed," Lenin said. "Here we are at­tempt­ing to get po­ten­tial clients to change their ways of do­ing busi­ness with oth­er com­pa­nies and start do­ing busi­ness with So­lu­tionOne. For­tu­nate­ly, we have pen­e­trat­ed the mar­ket and we are now here to stay," he said.

De­spite these chal­lenges, Roy en­cour­ages peo­ple to start their own busi­ness­es.

"It is def­i­nite­ly not easy be­ing a small and up­com­ing com­pa­ny and hav­ing to com­pete against the top names in the in­dus­try to get a piece of the busi­ness. To some­one want­i­ng to start their own busi­ness, we would say that you would prac­ti­cal­ly have to sac­ri­fice your en­tire life to make your com­pa­ny a suc­cess." Roy ad­vis­es small busi­ness own­ers to work with a plan. "En­sure that you work with a busi­ness plan and be cer­tain that all your statu­to­ry re­quire­ments are in or­der. "It is uni­ver­sal­ly ac­knowl­edged that most busi­ness­es do not make a prof­it in their first year of op­er­a­tions, so you must en­sure that you have ac­cess to a sum of mon­ey, at least equal to your pro­ject­ed rev­enue for the first years of the busi­ness, in ad­di­tion to an­tic­i­pat­ed ex­pens­es," he said.

Grow­ing cus­tomer base

Roy is op­ti­mistic about So­lu­tionOne's fu­ture. "Our vi­sion for this year is to ce­ment our po­si­tion in the in­dus­try and cre­ate a foun­da­tion for the com­pa­ny to move for­ward with strength. "We aim to be the favoured provider to our clients in the ar­eas we are spe­cialised in. One of our ma­jor per­son­al goals is to build a state-of-the-art work­shop fa­cil­i­ty to en­hance our core com­pe­ten­cies," he said. Lenin said in the next two to three years, So­lu­tionOne hopes to con­struct a state-of-the-art work­shop fa­cil­i­ty in south Trinidad. "It will be used for elec­tri­cal and in­stru­men­ta­tion and me­chan­i­cal ser­vices as well as for ar­ti­fi­cial lift sys­tems test­ing," he said. Roy said the com­pa­ny wants to ex­pand its cus­tomer base."In the next five years, we hope to in­crease our cus­tomer base con­sid­er­ably and ac­quire agen­cies and agree­ments for the prod­ucts we of­fer," he said.