How Early Entrepreneurship Shaped My Path: Lessons from Selling Box Drinks, Bag Juice, and June Plums

 

Entrepreneurship is commonly represented as something that starts in the adult life - through business plans, investors, and corporate organizations. In my case, the journey towards being an entrepreneur started a long time before I even knew the term “entrepreneur”. It began in the very center of Shaolin which is the Jamaican ghetto I grew up in with the most basic of businesses: selling box drinks, bag juice and June plums. These initial encounters were not just a way of getting pocket money. They formed the core of my attitude and values and the style of leadership-there are some lessons that I still use today as a global engineering executive. In From Grit to Glory, I give an account of how these formative years were not only the foundation of my career, but my personality, as they taught me what no classroom could teach me.

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Living in Shaolin, there was little to be done, yet there was much to be created. People in the neighborhood were hustlers, innovators, and committed. I observed how my parents, grandmother, and the community members struggled to make a living with the little resources they had. Their spirit of entrepreneurship did not only inspire me, but compelled me to join in. Commerce was my initial acquaintance with selling box drinks and bag juice. They were plain merchandises, yet the morals of them were strong. I got to know how to shop massively, deal with little profits and the necessity of consistency.

The plum business in June at school provided a new dimension of knowledge. It did not entail merely providing something that people desired, it involved initiative, planning and risk taking. I began to pick June plums out of my yard trees and preserve them to sell them to classmates. This was not merely selling a snack but this was about finding a need and fulfilling it in an inventive way. I grew to be referred to as June plums and with that came a responsibility.

Financial responsibility was another lesson that I learned. All the dollars were counted and my few gains were used to sustain my education, my personal interests and my general development. I was taught on saving, reinvestment and how to be strategic when using little resources. These financial leanings at an early age have served me well when it comes to covering university fees, travelling, and subsequently even in the process of migrating to Trinidad, then moving to London, and eventually to the United States. Being trained on how to stretch a dollar gives you the skill of approaching problems in innovative ways and you are good at it when you grow up and you are taught to be innovative in solving problems of an engineer worth billions of money.

However, the most important experience entrepreneurship has taught me was confidence. My small businesses made me feel capable in a community where a number of youths were hard to cope with because of their situation and low self-esteem. I understood that I could make something good even being a boy in a neglected ghetto. That ideology influenced my approach to academics, sports, body leadership activities at the University of the West Indies, and eventually my shift into corporate engineering. It also enabled me to confront some difficult moments in my life, like my life endangering motorbike accident, financial hardship in a foreign country and also when I felt unsure about where I belong in a new place.

These initial teachings stayed at the forefront as I ascended global engineering firms such as SmithGroup, WSP and Introba all in the Sidara network. All the rough times brought out the “grit” that I received when selling drinks in the Jamaican sun. All leadership issues were tied to the duty that I had acquired as a schoolboy serving the customers. And each rebirth was the ingenuity of making opportunity of June plums.

In From Grit to Glory, these are not just stories, these are the reflections of my life moments that shaped who I am today. And also to demonstrate how effective early entrepreneurship can be (in the case of children in underserved communities). Selling box drinks and bag juice is not much, yet they have shown me a lot, instilling discipline, strategy, consistency, communication, and resilience in me.