Astute management under difficult conditions, as well as projecting where the company should be going have kept Demerara Distillers Ltd (DDL) in the competitive lane, so that it moved from being a single company to becoming a conglomerate and one of best known businesses in Guyana.
“If you are not able to project and predict where you are going, how you are going to get there? You are going to fall by the wayside, and we were able to survive many problems…” Chairman of the Board of Directors Yesu Persaud told the Sunday Stabroek in a recent interview at his High Street office.
Persaud refuses to take credit for the company’s huge success, as he said the success must be credited to team work; however he has been the man behind the company for many years and he is the one who has had to wage sometimes public wars with those in government to protect the company’s interest.
“But sometimes you have got to stand up and tell the politicians as it is,” he told the Sunday Stabroek, adding, “I have to do it because I represent twelve hundred people who have families, and those families are important, and if we want to keep those people work[ing] for us we have to protect them…” the Chairman said.
Persaud, who has worked during the tenure of all the presidents of Guyana, pointed out that the management of DDL does not run a government organization, “where people can do as they like, come as they like; we run a business and business has to be run with strict business lines and we don’t tolerate nonsense from no one…”
“I wouldn’t say I am the man; I would say over the years we worked as a team, we had some excellent people many of whom have left these shores and gone overseas, but we still continue with quite a few who had remained,” Persaud said.
One of those who has remained with the company over many years is Komal Samaroo, who is the company’s International Marketing Director.
Persaud said one man cannot run a business, as he would need people to work with him, and “the essence of management is to get people for you who believe in you and who think they have somewhere to go.”
He said they have been able to build that team spirit over the years, coupled with his open door policy, of which any aggrieved employee, regardless of their status, can take advantage if they are not satisfied with their manager’s ruling.
“We have maintained that policy over the years and it works,” he said.
In 1994 Demerara Shipping and Distribution Services Ltd (DSL) was launched under DDL, and both companies have been thriving. In that same year the company commenced producing its own soft beverages; in 2003 the Topco company was launched and there is also Diamond Fire & General Insurance. A company was bought in Holland in 1991 to do DDL’s distribution in Europe and some time later Demerara Distillers USA and Demerara Distillers St Kitts were formed in those two countries. There is also Demerara Bank which is a separate company and today is very successful. The Institute of Private Enterprise Development (IPED) was also started by DDL in 1986, and Persaud said he considers it to be “my baby.” Today it is a trust to which he and the directors give voluntary service. It is totally self financed and has offices in several areas in Guyana and some 85 employees. IPED, he said, was a way for him to give back to the country.
Having less than a hundred employees at one time, DDL and the various companies that come under it now employ over twelve hundred persons locally.
It was in 1991 the company began the concept of going into branded products for its international market and then the Eldorado 15 year old became a reality. And the bottle for the fine rum was well thought out. Persaud said they brought in a designer from England and gave him twelve Dutch bottles, and he had to come up with a design which included something from each.
“The first three dummies that he made were not up to standard, and we told him that and he came back, finished the design that we wanted and that was it,” he told the Sunday Stabroek.
Persaud boasted that today Eldorado rum – which now also includes the 3 year, 5 year, 21 year and 25 year old – is the only flagship brand out of Guyana that is known internationally. More importantly, the rum is the only brand that has won the best rum in the world category for over ten years consecutively. He said that the company’s biggest success story though, is its Ivanoff vodka.
And in the last few years the company embarked on a massive US$25M expansion project which included the building of a new bottling plant, a bio-methanisation plant and a new distillery, all of which will be finished by the end of the year.
‘Can’t afford to lose anyone’
Every year the company grants several scholarships to the University of Guyana and even overseas, and the company takes on about eight to ten graduates as trainee managers annually. But many of them will spend compulsory periods and then they leave, “for what they call greener pastures.“
“This country can’t afford to lose anyone; we are short of people. You may say yes, we have a great deal of unemployment but we have the unemployment in areas where skills are not available. Those people have to be skilled, there is tremendous shortage of skills in this country,” the businessman said. He went on to remark that even drivers are sometimes hard to find.
Persaud disclosed that he started working on Sandbach Parker’s sugar estate at the age of 17 as an understudy to an overseer, and that he later became a sanitation assistant and then the youngest supervisor at the Diamond Estate. That was the highest he could have gone, however, as the jobs above supervisor at that time were for Europeans.
Since he had reached his limit Persaud said he decided to pack up and move to England at the age of 24, but by then he was married with a young child. In England he said he “did everything the hard way,” but that readers will have to wait for his memoir for more on his life. The autobiographical work is expected to be out by this year end.
He later returned to Guyana as a chartered accountant and a Fellow at the Institute of Management and the Royal Society of Arts, and he “was reasonably well off.” He was recruited by the Crown Agents to come back to Guyana and work as a tax inspector, but he did not remain in the job for very long although he stayed in Guyana and “stuck it out,” and it was then he moved to the distillery sector which he has never left.
The father of three, who has won quite a few honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick and the West Indies as well as one of the highest awards in India, said while he knows he can’t continue forever at the company, there must be people in training to take over, and until then he would remain.
“I never expected that I would have gone this far, but whatever I try and do, I try to do well otherwise the wisest thing to do is don’t do it at all,” he said.
Persaud described himself as one not to bow to anyone, and because of this he may have stepped on quite a few toes in his lifetime. He pointed out that he lived through the colonial times in this country and he does not want some of the country’s people to behave as colonials.
“I remember the days when in Georgetown you couldn’t get a job if you are black or you are an Indian because those jobs were all reserved for the local whites or the imported whites,” he recalled.
He said he has stood up to politicians, and the infamous incident at the Pegasus with former President Bharrat Jagdeo then came up. In 2008 at the launching of the Guyana Times one of the Queens Atlantic Investment Inc (QAII) projects, Jagdeo had berated Persaud for asking that the tax concessions granted to this investor be accorded to others.
The former President told the audience that Persaud’s comment had exposed his ignorance of the tax laws. Jagdeo went on to say that the concessions had been granted on the basis of QAII’s pioneering industry status. In the end, however, the government was forced to amend the Fiscal Enactments (Amendment) Act 2003 to legitimize the planned tax concessions it had granted to the investor.
“I was proven right because I know what I was talking about, and that gentleman didn’t know what he was talking about at all,” Persaud told the Sunday Stabroek with a small laugh.
He recalled that he did not respond to Jagdeo’s comment at the time and “afterwards he [Jagdeo] had to wallow in his own folly because he had to change the law.”
“I worked through all the presidents… and the big thing here is that people tend to think that they would last forever; nothing in this world lasts forever and we are all transitory and when they forget that they are forgetting themselves. You may be big today but tomorrow you may be small as nothing,” Persaud said.
Persaud said he went through “hell” as he fought for free and fair elections along with others and all the work they put in for a change has gone to naught.
“My life was at risk in 1991 but I persevered… I did what I had to do, I was hated for it but I thought we would have had a change. But the change, yes there was a little change with [Cheddi] Jagan but after he went and he didn’t name a successor… we have never seen the change we really wanted.
“We are still a country ruled by a clique and that is sad.”
With a sad shake of the head Persaud said that “absolute power corrupts,” before ending the interview.
