Come April 23 a Guyanese businesswoman with a passion for hard work and a seeming limitless determination to succeed will leave Guyana for Switzerland hopeful of receiving an accolade that will lend local and international recognition to her own business enterprise while serving as a source of inspiration for the many Guyanese women who continue to strive to emulate her entrepreneurial success.
Late last year, Lucia Desir, founder of the firm D&J Shipping Services, situated in Fifth Street Alberttown, learnt that she had been selected as one of ten finalists for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) second EMPRETEC Women in Business Award.
EMPRETEC is a training and motivational programme designed by UNCTAD that seeks to encourage entrepreneurship in developing countries. The programme, which was started in 1988, currently operates in 32 developing countries, has trained more than 150,000 aspiring entrepreneurs and, in the process, provided hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The EMPRETEC Award is bestowed based on a competition aimed at selecting successful women who have benefited from the business development services of the EMPRETEC programme in their country, and have demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit and innovation. EMPRETEC centres across the world are invited to nominate women who attended local EMPRETEC training and demonstrated “an extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit.” Lucia’s 2009 nomination as one of the top ten performers follows the similar nomination in 2008 of another Guyanese woman, Linden-based craft designer and creator, Irene Bacchus-Holder.
Lucia’s own story begins leagues away from the perch of the international entrepreneurial recognition on which she now sits. Her experience in the world of work began in the late 1970s as a shipping clerk with Alfred Sanmogan Shipping, one of the earliest businesses of its kind to be established in Guyana. The fact that the former Christ Church Secondary school student, who is one of seven children, grew up in Kitty and is herself the mother of three sons, has spent her entire working career in the shipping business, attests to what she says is “a passion for interacting with customers and looking after their interests.”
Nine years as an employee with Alfred Sanmogan’s brought with it a wealth of experience in the shipping business, the accomplishment of being one of the first Guyanese women to successfully complete examinations that earned her a Customs Brokerage Licence and more than sufficient experience to take her first halting steps into the world of business.
D&J Shipping was first established in 1988 in partnership with a colleague, Ingrid John, who had also made a mark as an employee in the shipping sector and been successful at the Customs Brokerage examinations. Lucia says that when the two parted company she was left with the smaller portion of the enterprise, little experience in running a business and the formidable challenge of going it alone.
What Lucia Desir may have lacked in managerial experience she sought to make up for in sheer grit and determination. She talks eagerly about a physically and mentally demanding period of taking D&J Shipping forward, virtually on her own; the 2005 floods that devastated both her home and her business operations and of her frustrating engagements with a banking sector that appeared to question her ability to recover from adversity.
Lucia’s strengths, unquestionably, lie in a ‘never say die’ disposition that led her to lift herself above the devastating floodwaters of 2005, to persuade her bankers to look past her travails and, as she put it, “to constantly look for ways of doing things better, more efficiently.”
She is unambiguous in her evaluation of the role which EMPRETEC has played in her own growth as an entrepreneur and the success that D&J Shipping has become. “The EMPRETEC programme helped to raise me off the floor. I discovered that I had gone through a period where I was simply not doing the right things.” What she says she learnt from the EMPRETEC experience, among other things, was that she could not hope to build a successful business without competent support. “I was seeking to do far too many things on my own and I came to understand that I needed support. I was forced to hire people.”
The turnaround, by Lucia’s own admission, has been significant. D&J Shipping, she says, is now a thriving enterprise, boasting office and warehousing facilities and connected to the global freight forwarding fraternity through its links with the international transportation specialists ECONOCARIBE, which has receiving terminals in sixteen states in the USA and origin terminals in Canada, Europe, Asia and Latin America. In essence, D&J Shipping, through its association with ECONOCARIBE, handles cargo from various parts of the world.
At home, Lucia works hard to build the reputation of a company which she says has had its “ups and downs.” Apart from the routine commercial cargo freight forwarding services which her company provides for the business community, D&J also provides for the freight forwarding needs of car dealers and also provides specialized packing and shipping services for the diplomatic community. Success has brought expansion plans and the recent acquisition of premises – which will require complete re-building – at 63 Fifth Street Alberttown, immediately east of the rented premises which D&J currently occupies. It is Lucia Desir’s most recent challenge to her own capacity to grow and prosper.
Lucia dismisses the notion that the freight forwarding industry is essentially a man’s world in which women must work doubly hard to earn a place. She says that it is “a profession like any other” in which you earn a place through your performance. Setting aside the firm’s specific business interest in the importing and exportiong of cargo, Lucia, in her role as a Customs Broker, also has responsibility for the policing of revenue for the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and specifically for the Customs and Trade Administration.
In making the selection of the top ten performers, Pierre Kunz of GENELEM, a Swiss association that provides coaching for start-up firms and Piero Formica of the International Entrepreneurship Academy of Jonkoping University of Sweden took into account such criteria as entrepreneurial talent, company performance, the extent to which a business and its outreach is local, national or international and the uniqueness or superiority of its products or services.
In Geneva, Lucia will attend the April 26-30 session of UNCTAD’s Investment Enterprise and Investment Commission where the winner of the prestigious award will be announced, and while she says that “coming out on top” and “carting off” the substantial monetary prize (which must be re-invested in the business) “would be nice”, Lucia says that she already feels like a winner. “I never expected that the EMPRETEC experience would take me this far,” Lucia says, beaming.
Perhaps no less significant is the opportunity which the occasion affords for Lucia to experience the international stage which her accomplishment affords and to interact with the nine other competitors for the prestigious EMPRETEC award from Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Jordan, Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe many, perhaps all of whom, may have faced similar challenges on their way to success. Lucia says that she will be treating the experience as an opportunity to expand her personal horizons, to come to an enhanced understanding of the world of business and, where possible, to pursue networking opportunities that will support the further growth of D&J Shipping.
Entrepreneurs are driven by various motivations, including a desire to seize unexploited market opportunities, to pursue lifelong dreams, to gain independence, to achieve self-fulfilment, to create jobs, to redress social problems or to acquire more flexibility and work balance. All of these motivations, to varying degrees, appear to have taken Lucia Desir on her tough but ultimately richly rewarding journey.
