Lifespan Company Limited

4 Business View Caribbean business in Jamaica isn’t easy. “In Jamaica it’s quite difficult to get financing to start a business,” says Williams. “It was a struggle in the beginning to raise the financing. We used our savings; we sold what we could to raise whatever we could. We sourced two continas, we built a contina, and we built a 1200 square foot building space. We were able to get start-up equipment from the U.S., which was the most basic, semi-automated equipment we could find. It took a year to get here. We registered in 2005 and were able to start trading in 2006.” Williams continues the Lifespan story, recounting, among other things, how she and Devon had to truck water to their first “factory” to bottle it: “We did exten- sive research on our own. The whole production ele- ment took us a while - to get the labor together, the source of bottles, and all that. But we were able to put the product together and we made our first batch. The next day we loaded it onto our pickup truck and went to East Portland, selling to all the little shops along the way. We sold ten cases that very first day, and from then on we were in business. “Within a year, we were able to purchase a truck and the business started increasing because we were able to carry more, and we were able to sign onto a major distributor.” Today, Lifespan has several distributors who dispense its products throughout Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the United Kingdom. As demand grew, the company outgrew its original fa- cility. In 2010, it acquired 40 acres of land by the water source and, in 2011, it completed construction on a