Clairmonte Cummings, the 25-year-old Operations Director at United Investment Trading is an International Business graduate of Florida International University and the most senior executive of what, arguably, is the country’s single largest department store.
More accurately, the five-storey building standing on 60,000 square feet of real estate at the south-eastern corner of Camp and Regent streets houses three stores that were once separate business houses – Essential Shopping Complex, Footsteps and Home and Beyond. Inside the same space there is a café called Upper Crust, a pharmacy, a Western Union outlet, a Chester Fried franchise and a facility that offers cellular phones and accessories. Still under construction on the sixth floor of the shiny new complex is a restaurant already named Gravity Lounge.
Taken together it is a mammoth undertaking and ‘the boss’ is a decidedly unruffled-looking woman called Sabita Narine, who leaves the business of marketing her investment to her son.
Investments of this magnitude in Guyana inevitably give rise to speculation as to motives for such significant risks.
Cummings makes light of it. That’s his mother; she is a businesswoman and, by extension, a risk-taker and he leaves it there.
What he does not make light of, however, is the magnitude of his own job as Operations Director. Clad in shirtsleeves and slacks he does not cut a corporate figure. Nor does he appear to fit naturally into his spacious glass-walled office on the fifth floor of the complex. He is, however, thoughtful, articulate and keen to talk about standards and customer service and quality; issues that continue to create a great deal of fretfulness among Guyanese consumers.
Cummings concedes that the scale of what he seeks to accomplish is in itself a formidable challenge. That is why, for example, the company has sought to hire a cadre of trained employees. An older brother is serving as the company’s Finance Officer and numbered amongst the other senior employers are trained Marketing and Human Resources managers.
But the environment which Cummings says he seeks to create goes beyond qualified senior managers.
He seeks, he says, to create a working environment which offers employees opportunities for upward mobility. It is a radical departure from that which obtains in much of the local commercial culture, but Cummings appears to have worked out that employee loyalty is critical to the fortunes of the company.
Below his fifth floor office, the traffic of visitors to the newly opened complex is brisk. Most of them are simply casting critical eyes over what the new complex has to offer.
It’s not difficult to tell that the complex is a new business venture. The staff, still fresh from their training and orientation sessions evince a level of politeness not to be found everywhere in the local commercial culture. Cummings says that after the company had recruited 170 employees and reassessed its circumstances, it had discovered that there was a need to recruit additional staff. They are in the process of employing a further twenty.
Cummings takes his authority seriously and says he never forgets that it was his mother’s efforts that built the business that he now runs. He is loyal and supportive yet seemingly determined to make his name in a manner of his own choosing.
That is not to say that the job of Operations Director is not one that he relishes. From the start he was intimate with the multi-million dollar project, made possible, he says, through a loan from Citizens Bank. When we ask if the structure could properly be described as a shopping mall he insists to the contrary. It is, he says, several stores with a single owner that have now been rolled into one.
The timing of the launch of the new complex – just over ten weeks before Christmas – is itself a challenge. No less challenging is the fact that it is situated at what is by far the busiest commercial junction in downtown Georgetown. Managing the throngs of visitors to the complex is likely to be one of the more challenging aspects of running Georgetown’s newest and probably largest shopping complex. Cummings doesn’t appear in the least intimidated. He is – at least so it seems – too busy trying to create a new downtown shopping culture.
