Business View Caribbean September/October 2018

58 59 deal with residential and commercial builds? Proverbs: “We’re probably the largest block and concrete manufacturer on the island and we work with anybody who wants concrete –both commercial and residential.We have quite a few contractors who deal with us and us alone. They know that our quality is good; there are other suppliers out there whose quality is not as good as ours and they try to undermine us in price. But the contractors are pretty loyal to us. As they say, ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ In hard times, when people have difficulty paying their bills, we’ll hold their credit for awhile until they can catch up. Thankfully, the people we’ve done that for have stayed with us all these years. “Concrete is our major revenue producer. Omnidec is only used on specialized projects. Although, it does speed up the process by re- placing the form work and you need a lot less propping. Instead of every two-and-a-half feet, you put the props every eight feet. That cuts down on costs for saving private individuals who don’t own their own props, because they don’t have to rent as many. “We have 57 weekly and 15 monthly employ- ees on the payroll. All production is done in our single location in St. Michael, where we have READY-MIX LIMITED two concrete plants and two block manufactur- ing plants. If someone has an extremely large project that isn’t very close, we put our portable plant onsite. That cuts down on the road time for trucks going from our plant to the construc- tion site.We have 19 trucks in our fleet and four concrete pumps; three we use all the time, plus we keep the oldest pump as a backup. Last year, we imported a 47-meter pump, the largest on the island. It can pump up to 160 cubic meters an hour. That’s a lot…and a lot of money, too!” BVC: What is the biggest challenge for the construction sector on the island? Proverbs: “Competition. Right now, there are a lot more people out there producing the prod- ucts. Building has been slow here for the last three years because of the global downturn. We tend to rely on the European and American markets –people coming here to invest and so on. It’s picking up now in many of those foreign countries, but it takes a while to trickle down here to Barbados. “There is a lot of development going on here in the hospitality sector.We just cast the roof on the Crane Hotel. They also have a 36-unit housing project in a different location that will be ongoing over the next couple of years. De- pending on how those sales go, they’re looking to put multi-story timeshares there, as well - another three big timeshare buildings. “St. Lawrence Castle has started construc- tion, but we’re still trying to get in there with our product.We’ll get some work, but one of the contractors has their own concrete man- ufacturing plant, so we won’t get that part of it. The Hyatt has been on the drawing board for awhile; hopefully, it will start at the end of