Trade Minister, E.P. Chet Greene wants small and medium-sized businesses in the
country to understand the value of making money and the importance of quality to
the business’s success.
Speaking at the closing exercises of a one-week workshop for small business
enterprises on ensuring quality standards as key pillars to their businesses, Greene
told the participants that the two must go hand-in-hand.
“When I sat and I heard the course coordinator speak of the language of business
being money, think of Antiguans and Barbudans, who have heard Prime Minister
Gaston Browne speaking about us, nationals, making money. For some, this came
across as something negative, something bad, almost something unholy. He never
said you must love money, as this translates to evil, but to make money while
doing business, certainly, there is nothing wrong about it,” he declared.
The trade minister expressed the hope that the exposure at the workshop would
result in converts who take the comments by the prime minister as an
encouragement, to take the country to another level and that those involved in
enterprise/business do so consciously, understanding that the language of business
is money.
“As minister of trade and commerce, I want you to focus not only on making
money but also on understanding the other part of the programme, quality. Let’s
not compromise quality for making money. The two must be married and
harmoniously live together. I will go further; as long as you are involved in
business you should never contemplate divorce between money and quality,” he
emphasized.
One participant at the workshop, Wendy Nicholas, who spoke on behalf of the
attendees, described the one-week-long training as ‘an excellent’ initiative, adding
that she and the other trainees were able to learn many new techniques on how to
manage and grow their businesses, based on the concepts that were taught.
The training was an undertaking of the Antigua and Barbuda Bureau of Standards
and financed through the 11 th EDF and CARICOM Regional Organisation for
Standards and Quality (CROSQ).
The training was conducted by Sheryl Anderson of QSSI Global, a Jamaican
company.
