Raphael John-Lall

Lil­iana Rag­bir is on­ly 25 years and is al­ready gen­er­al man­ag­er of Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing Agency. Rag­bir who is about to com­plete her MBA with Heri­ot-Watt Uni­ver­si­ty al­ready has a vi­sion of the di­rec­tion she wants Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing to go in. What is even more in­ter­est­ing is that she is the youngest em­ploy­ee of the 15-per­son com­pa­ny. She start­ed off as a se­nior ac­counts ex­ec­u­tive at Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing in 2007. Be­fore Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing, she was an in­tern at the Fam­i­ly Court where she worked in the ju­di­cia­ry de­part­ment.

She start­ed her work life with the on-the-job (OJT) pro­gramme in ear­ly 2007 with the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment. By March 2007 she was made an of­fer by Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing which she im­me­di­ate­ly grabbed. She quick­ly worked her way up and, by 2008, she was ap­point­ed the di­rec­tor of fi­nan­cial ser­vices. She con­tin­ued her hard work and, by Au­gust of this year, she was ap­point­ed as gen­er­al man­ag­er. She de­scribed the move up the cor­po­rate lad­der as "chal­leng­ing." "It has its chal­lenges, earn­ing the re­spect of my peers, but I've had a good coach in my boss Den­nis Ramdeen, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor. I al­so lean on the ex­pe­ri­ences of the more ex­pe­ri­enced em­ploy­ees in the com­pa­ny. Af­ter all I am the youngest."

This she told the Busi­ness Guardian in an in­ter­view on Mon­day.

De­scrib­ing her feel­ings on be­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er she said there are still many things she has to learn. "The move up the lad­der has not been easy. Be­ing in the ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try there are many dead­lines and a lot of clients who want things done im­me­di­ate­ly." She al­so cred­it­ed her up­ward move to the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture of the com­pa­ny she works for. "We are a small com­pa­ny and it's a flat or­gan­i­sa­tion in terms of the lines of con­trol and au­thor­i­ty. I was able to move up quick­ly. For ex­am­ple if I were work­ing for a big­ger or­gan­i­sa­tion that move would not have come so eas­i­ly."

Projects

Right now she is part of a lead­er­ship team in which she was del­e­gat­ed with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to cre­ate a stan­dard HR pol­i­cy for the com­pa­ny. "I'm li­ais­ing with an HR con­sul­tant and we are set­ting up an HR pol­i­cy doc­u­ment, em­ploy­ee hand­book and look­ing at prop­er HR process­es in terms of re-en­gi­neer­ing our ap­pli­ca­tions for leave and that kind of thing. We are al­so look­ing at a per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem." In the area of strate­gic de­vel­op­ment, she said they are for­mu­lat­ing their goals and fi­nan­cial plan­ning for the medi­um- and long-term fu­ture.

Ad­ver­tis­ing

Talk­ing about the ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try, she be­lieves that T&T is in tran­si­tion be­tween us­ing on­line tech­nol­o­gy to ad­ver­tise and the more tra­di­tion­al forms of ad­ver­tis­ing. Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing, she says, cov­ers tra­di­tion­al me­dia and now on­line me­dia. Some of the ma­jor ar­eas in ad­ver­tis­ing are ra­dio, TV and bill­boards. She added that they have launched their dig­i­tal arm "Pep­per-e" which is re­spon­si­ble for on­line ad­ver­tis­ing like Web site de­sign and de­vel­op­ment, Google ad­ver­tis­ing, Face­book ads and main­te­nance and oth­er so­cial net­works like Youtube and Twit­ter.

She said the cur­rent trend in the in­dus­try is that some com­pa­nies of­fer tra­di­tion­al me­dia while some of­fer ex­clu­sive­ly on­line ser­vices. "We do both; in this way you gets an in­te­grat­ed cam­paign with us." She said some of the big brand names in­ter­na­tion­al­ly would launch a cam­paign on­line on­ly but she thinks T&T is far away from this stage. "Maybe we'll reach that lev­el in five years time. If you look at In­ter­net pen­e­tra­tion in T&T they are not the lev­el where we should be. We would reach there but it would take longer than the oth­er Caribbean is­lands and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly." She said Pep­per Ad­ver­tis­ing is still a young com­pa­ny and there are dif­fer­ent age groups where they draw on di­verse ideas from to help them re­main com­pet­i­tive in the in­dus­try.

"That's a big ad­van­tage for us we don't have on­ly 'old school' peo­ple or the younger crowd. We draw from all back­grounds."

Fu­ture

She be­lieves that she has a long way to go in the in­dus­try be­cause she is still rel­a­tive­ly new. "I still have along way to es­tab­lish my name in the ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try. I'm still fair­ly new." She in­tends to stay with the com­pa­ny in the medi­um term and as­sist it in achiev­ing its strate­gic ob­jec­tives but is less cer­tain about the long term. "If an­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty aris­es in­ter­na­tion­al­ly then I'll have to make a de­ci­sion. It's Pep­per Agency I'm with but, in the long term, I'll see how it goes."