Paul Velox – A jack of all trades at ECGC

Paul Velox is the operations manager at the Eastern Caribbean Group of Companies (ECGC).

“My job entails everything that nobody else wants to do,” Velox jokingly commented during an interview last week.

Velox has been with the company since November 1, 1981, but prior to that (in 1976), he was involved with the construction of the dock at the Campden Park plant as a diver with Dive Masters St Vincent and Caribbean Limited.

Velox also worked on the construction team that built the silos for the feed mill and from there moved into the company as a trainee miller.

He is now in charge of maintenance, Information Communication Technology (ICT), health and safety and is also the chair of the pension committee, among other tasks.

“I am involved in keeping the plant running from the dock to the gate,” said Velox, who added that the company has seen serious expansion over the years.

He said during his years at the company, he has seen people move on and new people replace them, but what has remained the same is the company’s ability to produce quality products repeatedly and deliver in a timely fashion.

“We have always prided ourselves in customer service. ECGC has always been a nimble manufacturer. We can respond to a customer basically now for now and that has been our greatest strength and the fact that, over the years, the quality of the products is something that you can depend on; those are the main things that ECGC is known for,” said Velox.

In the absence of the chief operations officer (who spends a lot of time in Guyana), Velox is also the consultant manager for the production department and noted that the job can get very tiresome at times.

“It gets much lonely at the top and quite hard, but I enjoy what I do. It’s a 12-hour job on the average day, seven days a week,” said the long-standing employee.

He, however, remembers the days when things were much harder and is glad that a number of things have been put in place to make employees’ lives easier.

Among these are employee benefits, initiatives such as health insurance (family can be added on), scholarships and uniforms for employees.

Velox said he is also proud that the company has been able to create employment for more persons with the re-opening of East Caribbean Bottlers Inc (2014).

“Quite a lot of employment was created with bottlers. Bottlers is a venture that was outside of our core competencies, but once you understand manufacturing and processing, nothing is difficult and once you put your mind to it, you can do it.

“At inception, we had one or two little hiccups, but now it is on par with most of the other products. We are grabbing more market share and steadily increasing, although we are a in big market,” said Velox.

The operations manager said he is slowly transitioning to a younger staff as his time at the company nears an end.