Con­car­go Trans­porta­tion, a ware­house, trans­porta­tion and lo­gis­tics com­pa­ny based in In­di­ana USA, has cho­sen Trinidad and To­ba­go as its re­gion­al home as it seeks to cap­ture Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can cus­tomer mar­kets.

Con­car­go is one of the largest mi­nor­i­ty-owned com­pa­nies in the State of In­di­ana.

Brighton Dube, the com­pa­ny’s African Amer­i­can own­er/en­tre­pre­neur, out­lined his ra­tio­nale for choos­ing T&T.

“My key de­cid­ing fac­tors in choos­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go were the in­vest­ment cli­mate, which I found to be very wel­com­ing to for­eign in­vest­ment, the po­lit­i­cal­ly sta­ble en­vi­ron­ment, a rel­a­tive­ly low rate of elec­tri­cal pow­er dis­rup­tions com­pared to oth­er places where I’ve worked, and the avail­able sup­ply of an ed­u­cat­ed pool of work­ers,” he said.  “Where the job mar­ket is not enough to meet the sup­ply of labour, com­pa­nies like mine find that most at­trac­tive.”

In­vesTT pres­i­dent, Sek­ou Al­leyne, sees Con­car­go’s en­trance as a boost to the lo­cal lo­gis­tics in­dus­try, and an em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty for youth.

“We are pleased to wel­come Con­car­go to Trinidad and To­ba­go. They are young and in­no­v­a­tive and have a unique method of de­liv­ery that will rev­o­lu­tion­ize ware­hous­ing and lo­gis­tics in T&T,” Al­leyne said.

He added: “In­vesTT is ex­cit­ed to work with Con­car­go in ex­pand­ing their op­por­tu­ni­ties, specif­i­cal­ly the es­tab­lish­ment of their BPO dis­patch off­shore lo­gis­tics ini­tia­tive.  Our team stands ready to as­sist Con­car­go and fa­cil­i­tate their fu­ture re-in­vest­ment in­to T&T.”

Con­car­go own­er/founder, Brighton Dube re­vealed that es­tab­lish­ing an of­fice in this coun­try was more at­trac­tive to them than “work­ing with a part­ner here”.

“Set­ting up our own of­fice in Trinidad rather than work­ing with a part­ner here is cer­tain­ly more af­ford­able for us. In­vesTT was very in­stru­men­tal in re­mind­ing us to keep this coun­try in our ex­pan­sion plans. The Caribbean as a whole is a big mar­ket, and we want to be able to use our own em­ploy­ees. We plan to in­vest a lot of mon­ey in train­ing,” he said.

Con­car­go be­gan op­er­a­tions on Wright­son Road, Port of Spain in Ju­ly 2022 with a vi­brant and en­er­getic of­fice staff of 11 lo­cal em­ploy­ees—dis­patch­ers, man­agers and ad­min­is­tra­tive staff—and has plans to re­cruit at least 10 dri­vers. In the ini­tial stages, the com­pa­ny will in­tro­duce house-to-house prod­uct de­liv­ery via mo­tor­cy­cles, in ad­di­tion to the more tra­di­tion­al use of vans for larg­er items. Fu­ture plans in­clude pro­vi­sion of dis­patch ser­vices to oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al lo­gis­tics firms, with Con­car­go act­ing as the out­sourc­ing agent.

Brighton Dube says he is very proud al­ready of his ini­tial staff com­ple­ment in T&T.

Kern Phillip, a tal­ent­ed young lo­cal Di­rec­tor of Op­er­a­tions who man­ages the of­fice while Dube is away, al­so ex­pressed great pride in work­ing with Con­car­go:

“One good thing about for­eign com­pa­nies com­ing to T&T is that there are lots of new jobs avail­able. I’m a re­cent uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate and I’ve seen the strug­gle to find em­ploy­ment in T&T af­ter grad­u­a­tion—af­ter so many years of study­ing, you can’t use your tal­ent,” he ob­served.

“In a lo­gis­tics busi­ness like this one,” he said, “there’s op­por­tu­ni­ty for self-im­prove­ment and growth. Crit­i­cal think­ing skills come in­to play in or­der to solve lo­gis­tic is­sues be­cause in the trans­porta­tion busi­ness there can be many dif­fer­ent ways to move some­thing. There­fore, it re­quires think­ing out­side of the box.”

Phillip added: “At Con­car­go, we be­lieve in team­work and we treat every­one equal­ly. We en­cour­age a lot of team bond­ing as this is how we gen­er­ate ideas. We want to cre­ate an en­cour­ag­ing work­ing space where peo­ple will want to come to work and en­joy their work. We want peo­ple to build their ca­reers with us in­stead of for us.”

Brighton Dube al­so em­pha­sized that Con­car­go Trans­porta­tion is not just a mon­ey-mak­ing ven­ture.

“In ad­di­tion to pro­vid­ing ef­fi­cient and cost ef­fec­tive so­lu­tions for our cus­tomers, we have a strong in­ter­est in cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty just like we do in the USA,” he as­sured, “and we’d like to give back to and make an im­pact in the com­mu­ni­ty in any way that we can.”