Business View Caribbean | January 2021

41 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN JANUARY 2021 BAHAMAS BUI LDERS & DEVELOPMENT active on Facebook and Instagram, we’re trying to get more photos and keep them out there as we’re finishing projects up.” The firm draws from a wide range of subcontractors, suppliers, fabricators, and millwork companies in the Bahamas, Florida, Canada, and sometimes around the world. It all depends on the job. Being in a very unique custom market, no job is ever quite the same. “We don’t have our own in-house designers but we partner up with teams,” says Premock. “We offer design build services, where the designer, architect, structural engineer, and other engineers all work underneath us. With those, when a client comes to us that we have a reputation with, or has been recommended to us, they are just getting their project started. So we bring them under our wing and take them from start to finish.” The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of construction delays – the Bahamas has been in and out of lockdowns, curfews, shutdowns which has caused setbacks in trying to get materials. Premock reports, “It’s hard to pick up materials we need on a daily basis when you’re not allowed in the hardware stores. And a lot of our products come the U.S. and their lead times have been pushed back numerous times. Factories have been shutting down, picking back up, and then slowing down again. A lot of staff is working remotely, so since March it has definitely been a lot more challenging than in the past. The pandemic has really been hard on a lot of people… we’ve been fortunate to have a good workload and we’ve not had to let anyone go. We’re actually hiring and all of our clients kept pushing forward, as have we, and we’ve basically kept on schedule. Luckily, we were ahead of the game before all this happened.” The company culture at Bahamas Builders is enviable – people just don’t want to leave. According to Premock, “I have some staff that retired two years ago that have been with us since day one. They were well up in their 80s, so