Call it a rags to riches story, call it being in the right place at the right time, call it luck, whatever you may wish. For me it is a case of a man who decided that in his business the customer must always come first.
Says Berry Ferdinand, managing director of Bewil & Company Limited:
"If one of my employees carries a piece of office furniture up to the ninth floor of a building via steps, the client says it got scratched, the employee would have to bring it back down, yes the emphasis is on customer quality and satisfaction."
This, in a nutshell, is the reason for the almost meteoric rise of this businessman who started work at the end of his student days at St Benedict College in La Romaine, in his uncle’s drugstore, Imperial Pharmacy, as a general assistant at the counter. Yesterday, Saturday April 15, Ferdinand was the proud host at the opening of his company’s new peach and green building at Nos 5 to 7 Philipps Street in Port of Spain.
In 1983, with just two thousand dollars in his pockets, Ferdinand started Bewil at No 29 Warner Street, Newtown. Bewil was a combination of his name and brother, Wilfred, who was at that time interested in the business.
"I was working for $10,000 per month as an office equipment salesman at Technicentre Limited. But had a belief I was going to change the outlook of the business services being provided. At the time I was definitely against the attitude of businesses towards customer service. I had a conviction then that it was possible to change and my goal was to encourage people to demand a certain quality of service, once they were putting out money." Bewil was primarily about the servicing of office furniture (refurbishing and repainting), the motto then was "we mend everything inclusive of a broken heart."
By 1986 Bewil moved to 101 Tragarete Road, where a leading Art Gallery is housed to-day. And gradually added new services, such as, selling office furniture, while still maintaining as its priority - servicing.
Speaking to Ferdinand, I wondered how many of us realised that there is a company which regardless of a request, has a reputation of being the fix-it people and will find a solution to your problem. "We are really a solution oriented organisation, people come to us with requests for something or other, we do not know how to say no." With more capital, and with Berry managing the organisation on his own up to very recently with good staff who understood the rule of thumb "if a customer calls complaining that the service was not good they would have to go and repeat the repair without my verifying whether it was true or not", the company purchased No 5 Philipps Street in 1990. Still expanding, No 7 Philipps Street was acquired next, and in October 1998, construction of the new, spacious building started, and was completed last November. Ferdinand has followed what he advocates in his new building. "Our present facilities show the latest in office furniture innovations. It is called "Ability" to change an office environment on a regular basis. The office is no longer a fixed place, it is now a very versatile place, everything in this office is on castors, so that I can change the environment at the drop of a pin."
"Offices should be designed in such a way that you can convert any room into a meeting room,with everything on castors, tables, chairs, and screens dividing the place to make the space total by the ability of the furniture to be moved around."
"We try to go into an office even before the walls and electrics are decided. If we come in at the same time with the architects, we are part of the planning of the building so that the electricals will be in the correct place, or you can end up having outlets not where you want to put the desk. This way we advise on office furniture layout and where the electrical connections should be, otherwise electricals have to be moved when we are not in from the start, and it will be then more costly, this is the importance of our input."
Bewil offers total consultancy, for free, on choice of whatever type of furniture the company stocks. While some of the furniture is manufactured locally, Ferdinand deals a lot with the Global Group of Companies in Canada because of the testing ability. "In Trinidad there are factories that manufacture furniture, but there is no testing so that a person can buy a chair from a local manufacturer and it might not be ergonomically comfortable, no stress test, no endurance test as the case may be. Abroad, there are independent testing bodies which go into the facilities of all manufactures and give reports on whether they have met the criteria or not." Global has also invested a lot in education of office furniture and its proper application. "You learn how to select a mechanism, chairs for proper posture, they are heavy into ergonomics." This education is passed on by Ferdinand to his staff on a daily, ongoing basis.
Bewil’s new building fully meets all of the company’s needs, administration offices, a large showroom, and warehousing space of over 7000 square feet, as the idea is to meet requests for furniture in a very, very short time.
A national golfer from 1984 to 1986, Ferdinand, now busy from dusk to dawn as could be seen from our 7.15 a.m. interview, does not find time for the golf course. "Up to about three years ago I handled all the sales, service, management of the office, everything. Over the last couple of years we have moved into different management for accounting, services and other areas, it is no longer a one-man operation."
"Servicing is still top of the list, because of the amount of customers requests we remain pointed in the direction we have always had that the office environment must be a friendly one. So that we are constantly looking for ways to make the office environment enjoyable." This astute, hardworking business entrepreneur who has recently introduced a Point Lisas branch explained "realising that customers from far off areas needed a castor changed on a chair, or a lock on a filing cabinet fixed, our customer base has grown so Point Lisas is to service the central area."
What does the future hold for Bewil. "We see ourselves growing, without going into manufacturing, the gap between manufacturing and importing is too close in price, but we will continue to service every corner of Trinidad and Tobago. We are aspiring to start up branches in four directions, north, east, west and south, and of course Tobago, with similar convictions in service and care in meeting the needs of our customers."
"Caring is the vital overriding factor, once you care it is easy to find a solution to a customer’s problem" says Berry Ferdinand.