It was quite a few years after what was then Sylvie’s Variety Store was created before the current owner, 43- year-old Bramanand Persaud was born.
“My mom started with a snackette in the 70’s… opposite Trinity Methodist School on High Street. She had been a teacher and had taught at several schools in the hinterland. Her name is Prampattie Persaud. She was known as ‘Silvie’ and that was where the name of the establishment came from. Rajendra, my father, was the original owner. These days they do not play an integral role in the business.
As we spoke Silvie was holidaying in Guyana and was, at the time, looking in on the second of the two branches of the store in Georgetown. Over the years she has refused to detach herself from the growth of the establishment.
When the Stabroek Business met with the current owner of Silvie’s last Monday, we encountered an amiable individual, seemingly altogether unburdened by the responsibilities associated with marketing hundreds of items that are critical to the day-to-day operations of some of the country’s important economic sectors including mining, agriculture, agro-processing, building construction, poultry farming, and electrical engineering. By our count the store offers upwards of 500 different pieces of key equipment for these sectors in addition to which it must handle related services including spares and the provision of services associated with the administering of warranties and the settling of customer queries. One can only operate a business of this nature, ‘Bram’ assured us, if there is “structure” to the overall operations.
Behind his desk on the top floor, ‘Bram’ wears an expression that contrasts sharply with the weight of his responsibility. Amiable, engaging and seemingly entirely at home behind a somewhat cluttered desk he talks engagingly about the structure that he has helped to shape in order to manage a decidedly complex operation. Painstakingly, he goes through the various tiers of processes that comprise the sourcing and acquisition of the hundreds of items, entire pieces of equipment and spares necessary to meet the needs of what is a country and an economy in transition. The inventory is only a part of the operating equation.
There is, as well, the complex, multi-tiered assignment of paying attention to the new demands of what is now an emerging oil and gas-driven economy as well as continuing to pay attention to the complex and multi-tiered task of landing cargo in Guyana, a process that demands the navigation of the rules and procedures associated with shipping and entry requirements and afterwards ensuring that they meet with the satisfaction of demanding customers.
To do this, the former Saint Stanislaus College student told the Stabroek Business that Silvie’s can only function on a bewildering array of competencies including a comprehensive knowledge of the processes involved in ‘doing business in Guyana,’ and an acute awareness of customer needs, and an understanding of the incremental pressures associated with customer demands. Understanding those requirements and fashioning them into an efficient operating culture is ‘Bram’s’ mission.
These requirements, he says, can only be carried out by a staff that has an acute understanding of the importance of their own roles in the overall process and by a management culture that insists unapologetically on ensuring the seamless nature of the overall operation and of ensuring that each of the separate operating parts complement each other. Beyond this, the system as a whole must possess both the flexibility and the resilience to handle the pressures of a business environment that grows increasingly more demanding over time.
Perhaps surprisingly, ‘Bram’ does not wear either the appearance or the persona of what we may have come to envision a conventional CEO to be. Nor does he appear, in the slightest, to be burdened by the ‘weight’ of his responsibilities. Rather, he appears to have opted to both back his own management capabilities and to trust the competencies of his staff and the efficiencies of the systems that he has painstakingly put in place over time to cause the company to be run on rules and procedures that are unwaveringly applied in its day-to-day operations. To do this, he says, you have to be continually aware of the changing dynamics of both the local and global environment.
In the course of its growth process the company has taken the transformations associated with the emergence of the oil and gas industry in its stride, successfully ‘tweaking’ its operations to meet what, in many instances, are new service requirements and new customer demands. He concedes that both the operating culture and the physical demands of the oil and gas industry demand adjustments to the contemporary local business culture.
Sylvie’s, ‘Bram’ understands, will thrive or perish on the basis of the resilience of its customer service culture.
Nor is there any evidence that the ‘weight’ of operating a business which, for the most part, can only thrive by paying scrupulous attention to customer service has negatively impacted what one senses is an inherently relaxed persona. There are no noticeable furrows in his brow associated with the worries of an owner who lives on the entrepreneurial edge, burdened by the ever present fear that one day the systems that hold the business together will fold under the weight of the performance demands that it must endure day in, day out. This is an unmistakable indication that a great deal of his energies, over the years, have gone into putting those systems in place and continually testing them for both their efficiency and their resilience.
He is comforted though not complacent about the place at which Silvie’s has arrived. Where he is as CEO of Silvie’s leaves acres of space for his other preoccupations, his family, his social life, and his Christian teaching. His wife, whose former job in the banking sector and her training as a Business Coach continues to make her own invaluable contribution to enhancing the competencies of the establishment. The company’s fiftieth anniversary, ‘Bram’ says, has caused him to reflect on the sacrifices of his parents and the legacy that they have left to the family even as they both still lead active lives. If he may not have dreamt dreams of a Silvie’s that would, one day, come to represent a pillar in the contemporary Guyanese business edifice, what the company has achieved up to this time appears to have imbued him with a sense of his own responsibility to take the establishment to even greater heights.
