San­dra Chouthi

At­tain­ing Safe To Work (STOW) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for Fran­cis-Lau Con­struc­tion Ltd in March 2014 was an ex­pen­sive in­vest­ment to al­low it to ten­der for con­tracts in the en­er­gy sec­tor, said Rhou Fran­cis-Lau, 29, the com­pa­ny's pol­i­cy and strat­e­gy man­ag­er.

"We want­ed to en­ter the en­er­gy in­dus­try and it is a pre­req­ui­site to be STOW cer­ti­fied, man­dat­ed by the En­er­gy Cham­ber," he said.

His un­cle, Christo­pher Fran­cis-Lau, 49, who is the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, and fa­ther Wayne Fran­cis-Lau, 62, who is chair­man, cred­it­ed Rhou with do­ing all the STOW-re­lat­ed work over six months.

Two gen­er­a­tions of this fam­i­ly were seat­ed in the board­room of the com­pa­ny at the e-TecK in­dus­tri­al park in Ca­roni last week Fri­day for an hour-long in­ter­view.

Up un­til two years ago, Royce Fran­cis-Lau, broth­er of Christo­pher and Wayne, was the gen­er­al man­ag­er at Fran­cis-Lau Ma­chin­ing Tech­nolo­gies Ltd, now in­te­grat­ed in­to the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny. He has since re­tired. An­oth­er broth­er, An­dre Fran­cis-Lau, han­dles ex­port man­age­ment in the re­gion.

Fran­cis-Lau Con­struc­tion was start­ed by Clif­ford Fran­cis-Lau, Wayne and Christo­pher's fa­ther, in 1963. He passed away in 2005. Ini­tial­ly, the com­pa­ny was based at the In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion in­dus­tri­al es­tate in Sea Lots, Port-of-Spain, spe­cial­is­ing in wrought iron work, bur­glar proof­ing, gates, etc.

The com­pa­ny has since un­der­gone ma­jor shifts in what it does.

The framed STOW cer­tifi­cate hang­ing on a wall of an of­fice cor­ri­dor at Fran­cis-Lau Con­struc­tion is a gi­ant leap in­to a new sec­tor.

"We've just done a project for Schlum­berg­er, an ex­pan­sion to their ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties in La Ro­maine," Christo­pher said. "We want to try and get work from bpTT and en­er­gy com­pa­nies, es­pe­cial­ly in south Trinidad."

The Schlum­berg­er job in­volved retro­fitting a two-storey build­ing, for which the orig­i­nal cost was $1.8 mil­lion, but with ex­pand­ed works, rose to $2.5 mil­lion when the job was com­plet­ed in April. The main con­trac­tor was Point Fortin-based Hook Mal­ly Ali.

The com­pa­ny has al­so ten­dered for a bpTT off­shore project, which is be­ing fa­cil­i­tat­ed by Massy Wood.

"We'll be sup­ply­ing work, not work­ing off­shore," Wayne ex­plained.

Wayne said Fran­cis-Lau Con­struc­tion would not have been asked to ten­der for the bpTT job were it not for STOW.

"We want­ed to grow. Ab­solute­ly. That is the bot­tom line," Wayne said.

"We re­alised it has giv­en us some promi­nence," Christo­pher added.

Christo­pher said quite a few com­pa­nies are try­ing to be­come STOW cer­ti­fied, but it's cost­ly. The cost of pay­ing a con­sul­tant, which is op­tion­al, is $250,000. The process in­volved train­ing in man­age­ment sys­tems, health and safe­ty train­ing, first aid train­ing, ob­tain­ing weld­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and risk man­age­ment. Rhou said de­vel­op­ment of the man­age­ment sys­tems dic­tat­ed the roles and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of the com­pa­ny's staff, from man­age­ment straight to work­shop em­ploy­ees.