For the past 37 years, Langston Roach has built up his com­pa­ny Langston Roach In­dus­tries Lim­it­ed from a garage/small cot­tage op­er­a­tion and mould­ed it in­to a suc­cess­ful group of com­pa­nies in Trinidad and To­ba­go; the LRI Group of Com­pa­nies.

That group of com­pa­nies in­cludes Langston Roach In­dus­tries Lim­it­ed, Ro­jan Mar­ket­ing Lim­it­ed, Lazuri Ap­par­el Lim­it­ed, and LRI Au­to­mo­tive Lim­it­ed, Roach Cap­i­tal In­vest­ment Ltd, Sad­dle Eight Lim­it­ed, and Shangri La Gar­dens Lim­it­ed.

The orig­i­nal com­pa­ny, Langston Roach In­dus­tries Lim­it­ed is well known as an in­dige­nous man­u­fac­tur­er of House­hold Clean­ers and Per­son­al Care Prod­ucts in Trinidad and To­ba­go with brands such as Lan­her, Smart Choice, Fire Bright, Soft & Silky, and Na­ture’s Col­lec­tion. The Com­pa­ny now man­u­fac­tures over 100 dif­fer­ent items, em­ploys over 200 peo­ple, owns and oc­cu­pies an 80,000 sq. ft. ware­house and of­fice com­plex and ex­ports its prod­ucts to 12 coun­tries through­out the Caribbean such as Guyana, Grena­da, Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, St. Lu­cia, An­tigua, St. Vin­cent, Do­mini­ca, St. Maarten, Be­lize & Suri­name.

How­ev­er, de­spite his suc­cess, Roach is aware of how unique his po­si­tion is as an Afro-Trinidad en­tre­pre­neur.

“What are the oth­er large black busi­ness­es do you see in the en­vi­ron­ment?” asked Roach, who point­ed out that while there were sev­er­al promi­nent black pro­fes­sion­als and busi­ness­men with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go, there were few large-scale busi­ness­es that were still owned by Afro-Trinida­di­an en­tre­pre­neurs.

“I don’t think we have made the kind of progress that we should have made. Let me put it that way,” he said.

Roach ex­plained that this was due to a few rea­sons, but he not­ed the lim­it­ed as­sets hin­dered as­pir­ing Afro-Trinida­di­an busi­ness op­er­a­tors from get­ting fi­nan­cial sup­port, as well as a lin­ger­ing men­tal­i­ty that of­ten saw them with­out the back­ing of their own so­cial group­ings.

Roach’s sto­ry has been one where he had to over­come both.

While his fa­ther was a well-es­tab­lished pub­lic ser­vant who helped many get in­to busi­ness, he tru­ly in­her­it­ed his en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it from his moth­er.

“She was do­ing a lot of stuff, do­ing dress­mak­ing, de­sign and cake dec­o­ra­tion, teach­ing peo­ple how to sew dur­ing de­sign and do­ing stuff for wed­dings, and so on. So I grew up, see­ing her work­ing at home do­ing this sort of stuff,” Roach told the Busi­ness Guardian.

How­ev­er, the re­al push for Roach to go in­to busi­ness came when his fa­ther could not fi­nan­cial­ly sup­port one of his dreams.

“I did chem­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing, but I didn’t com­plete my course. I left in my fi­nal year and one of the rea­sons for that is I was study­ing some­thing I didn’t want to study. What I re­al­ly want­ed to do when I left sec­ondary school which was QRC is that I want­ed to go to Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in the States,” he said.

“I want­ed to go to Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty to do in­dus­tri­al en­gi­neer­ing and busi­ness man­age­ment. And my fa­ther at that time, when I was 18 years old, said he couldn’t af­ford it. And I de­cid­ed they wouldn’t have to tell my chil­dren that so of course, that re­in­forced the idea that I wouldn’t go in­to pub­lic ser­vice I would earn my own in­come. So that con­vinced me to go in­to en­tre­pre­neur­ship.”

From the ear­ly 1970s to the ear­ly 1980s, Roach start­ed and fold­ed three busi­ness­es. It prompt­ed some re­flec­tion and un­earthed a cru­cial les­son that would in­form his fu­ture suc­cess.

“In ’85, af­ter three of those lack of suc­cess­es, that’s what I call them in­stead of fail­ures, I sat down to do some analy­sis on why this was hap­pen­ing to me, and I re­alised that when mon­ey came in­to my hand, I would go lim­ing with my part­ners on a Fri­day evening and I would spend it on every­thing else, ex­cept the busi­ness. So I wasn’t han­dling mon­ey prop­er­ly,” said Roach.

That les­son about mon­ey man­age­ment, was some­thing he not­ed was not taught in schools, and par­tic­u­lar­ly not in Afro-com­mu­ni­ties in Trinidad and To­ba­go com­pared to oth­er groups in the so­ci­ety.

“Oth­er peo­ple they learned com­ing up, grow­ing up in their fam­i­ly, they see their fam­i­ly han­dling mon­ey. They talk busi­ness over the din­ing ta­ble and you don’t learn these things. The crazy thing is that they don’t learn any of this in school, in uni­ver­si­ty, or even an en­tre­pre­neur­ship course. They just do not teach you what mon­ey re­al­ly is and how to han­dle mon­ey. They don’t teach it,” he said.

Roach al­so ex­plained that Afro-en­tre­pre­neurs were al­so at a dis­ad­van­tage due to the ten­den­cies of most fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“We don’t have risk-tak­ing or ven­ture cap­i­tal type banks in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and then the African pop­u­la­tion does not have a his­to­ry of suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neur­ship. The banks feel more com­fort­able lend­ing you if you have prop­er­ty or if you have some as­sets that it could take a lean on, and un­for­tu­nate­ly, a lot of black peo­ple who want to go in­to en­tre­pre­neur­ship do not have those kinds of as­sets,” he said.

Roach ex­plained that on his road to­wards the es­tab­lish­ment of Langston Roach In­dus­tries, he was re­ject­ed by every sin­gle bank in Trinidad and To­ba­go. He got the busi­ness off the ground ini­tial­ly with the fi­nan­cial sup­port of his moth­er and it was on­ly af­ter the busi­ness grew did the banks be­gin to re­act pos­i­tive­ly to his ap­pli­ca­tions. He not­ed not much had changed in that re­gard for Afro-en­tre­pre­neurs who al­so need­ed to over­come an in­her­ent lack of sup­port from their fam­i­ly and so­cial groups as well.

He not­ed that of­ten, mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty were dis­cour­aged from fol­low­ing un­fa­mil­iar paths.

“The en­vi­ron­men­tal land­scape is not con­ducive. There’s some­thing in the en­tre­pre­neur­ial space we call your men­tal par­a­digm, hat is the main thing that’s miss­ing,” he said, “You tell them I want to do so al­so, say you see ever see any­body in your fam­i­ly do that, and they beat down on most every up­lift­ing, pos­i­tive, imag­i­na­tive, cre­ative thing that you got in­to a child or young per­son’s mind. Af­ter a while, you de­vel­op a mind­set of what you can­not do, and not what you can do and that’s ex­act­ly what is the miss­ing, the ma­jor thing that needs to change.”

He added, “It is not an en­vi­ron­ment which gives peo­ple the self-con­fi­dence and if it is one thing an en­tre­pre­neur needs is self-con­fi­dence. “

Con­verse­ly, he not­ed, sev­er­al new busi­ness op­er­a­tors at­tempt to run be­fore they can walk and in­vari­ably crip­ple them­selves be­fore they can set­tle. He not­ed that in a re­cent busi­ness class, he reg­u­lar­ly saw busi­ness pro­pos­als that re­quired mil­lions of dol­lars for start-ups as op­posed to more man­age­able fig­ures.

“My ad­vice would be to start small be­cause there are so many things that you’ve got to learn in your ear­ly months and years that you don’t know, whether it’s ac­count­ing, whether it’s cus­tomer ser­vice, whether it’s sup­ply chain is­sues, whether it is han­dling mon­ey, there are so many things that you need to learn es­pe­cial­ly if you learn it when you start in small group rather than try­ing to start big, be­cause when you fail when you are big, it’s a big fail­ure It’s a hole and it tends to pull you down in it. If you start small you might be held up in a place where you can still re­cov­er, well you haven’t lost your self-con­fi­dence,” he said.