Small entrepreneurs’ journey at Berbice Expo

…businesses turn different beginnings into opportunities for growth

A pandemic, a baking hobby, skills acquired overseas and lessons learnt in a grandmother’s kitchen are among the vastly different routes that led five entrepreneurs into business.
Those journeys converged over the weekend at the Berbice Expo and Trade Fair, where the Small Business Bureau (SBB) provided smaller operators with space alongside established companies and access to one of Berbice’s major commercial audiences.
For them, it was an opportunity to be seen, introduce their brands to new customers and test how their products stand up in a much larger marketplace.
The 20th Berbice Expo, held at the Welfare Community Centre Ground, East Canje, Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne), brought together more than 150 exhibitors occupying over 180 booths during its four-day run.
Among those numbers was Dawn Ogle, whose Caribbean Sea Moss Guyana business emerged from circumstances far removed from a trade fair.
Ogle was living in St Lucia when she returned to Guyana in 2021 to bury her grandmother, who had died after contracting COVID-19. Several other members of her family had also contracted the virus.

“I came to Guyana to bury my grandmother. That was during COVID. She had COVID and she died. Many of my family had COVID,” Ogle recalled.
She had brought sea moss with her from St Lucia and, believing in its health benefits, decided to develop a business around the product.
What began then has grown into an operation producing sea moss gels in different flavours and selling raw sea moss. Ogle subsequently returned to St Lucia but re-migrated to Guyana earlier this year and is again concentrating on developing the business.
Part of that development, she said, has come through training offered by the SBB.
“I did a lot of courses, things that I could have implemented in my business. I learned how to record financials. I learned a lot of stuff,” Ogle said.
She now encourages other small-business operators to make use of the Bureau, particularly its training opportunities.
The movement between Guyana and St Lucia is also part of Siobhan Crawford’s entrepreneurial story, although hers developed in the opposite direction.
Crawford started Shevy Q as an agro-processing business in St Lucia, taking with her products familiar to Guyanese consumers, including achar, hot pepper sauces and gravy browning.

“Everything that we have here in Guyana, I took into St Lucia and that’s what I started SHEVYQ with,” she said.
Having taken those products outward, Crawford has since brought another part of the business back to Guyana.
Shevy Q now produces sea moss powder, gels and shakes here, with Crawford also working on additional products.
The presence of two sea moss businesses at the Bureau’s showcase might have suggested a common path into enterprise. A few displays away, however, Anjali Singh’s experience could hardly have been more different.
There was no move between countries and no decision initially to establish a business. Singh simply enjoyed baking.
“It was just a hobby and I turned it into a business after getting lovely reviews from my family and friends,” she said.
At the time, Singh was working with her parents and looking for something else to occupy herself.
“I always wanted to do something. I always like to keep myself occupied. So, baking was the way out.”
The hobby eventually acquired customers. Today, Singh caters for events and produces cheesecake cups and jars, chocolate-covered strawberries and other sweet treats.
Her cheesecakes have also found their way onto supermarket shelves, taking something that began as a pastime into a more formal retail space.
Elsewhere at the same showcase, Melba La Gadoue has been trying to build a market not around food, but around things made by hand.
Her work spans bamboo, leather, ceramics, straw, knitting and floral pieces, but bamboo has taken her particularly far, literally.
La Gadoue travelled to China in connection with bamboo craft and, after returning home, became involved in passing those skills on to others.
“I went to China. I come back and I went to the river area to train the people to do the bamboo work,” she recalled.
Her relationship with the SBB has included assistance with financing and materials for her bamboo furniture and weaving.
“At one time, Small Business, they gave me a loan. They helped me with the loan,” she said.
But La Gadoue’s experience also speaks to what happens after the excitement of starting a business has passed.
There have been periods when slow progress caused her to consider walking away from craft altogether.
“Sometimes I dare not give it up because it’s like we’re going nowhere,” she admitted.
She nevertheless continues, and the opportunity to exhibit through the Bureau reduces one of the difficulties confronting operators at her level — the cost of securing space to put their work before a large audience.
La Gadoue, another of the entrepreneurs brought into that space, continuing has an entirely different meaning.
The bottles carrying her GENUINE brand represent a commercial operation that is about eight years old, but Lou traces its beginnings much further back.
The range includes pepper sauces, concentrates, syrups and other processed products, including Bilimbi Pepper Sauce. Yet behind those products is a childhood memory of watching and assisting her grandmother, in the kitchen.
“I must say, it’s a legacy. My grandmother, the late Kitey Jones, used to make a lot of these things,” Lou said.
“When I was like a little girl growing up, I can recall helping or assisting her in the kitchen. So, I need this legacy to go on.”
Interestingly, Lou had also tried her hand at craft before concentrating on food processing.
“I was producing craft, but I noticed the craft is not so marketable. So, I turned to this here which is a legacy. And I decided to let this legacy continue,” she explained.
In that sense, the neighbouring businesses at the SBB’s showcase were connected by more than their physical location.
La Gadoue continues trying to make craft commercially viable. Lou moved away from craft when she found the market difficult. Singh discovered a market for something that had never been intended as a business. Crawford has moved products between two Caribbean markets, while Ogle is rebuilding her operation after re-migrating to Guyana.
Different products and different journeys ultimately lead to the same question: can a small entrepreneur find enough customers to turn an idea or skill into a sustainable business?
For four days, the Berbice Expo could not answer that question for them. What it could provide was an audience.
Through the SBB’s presence, the five entrepreneurs were able to put their products before patrons walking the same exhibition ground as some of the country’s more established companies.