THE LOCAL CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY is extremely challenging at this time, said Innotech Services Limited chief executive officer Martin Da Silva, and as a result his company’s focus had shifted mainly to keeping people employed.
“All of these projects are projects that we have to tender and the market is so competitive that your mark-ups are significantly reduced.
So we take on a higher level of risk, so to speak. In days of old you used to watch your profit and try to manage that. Today what you are doing is just being able to be awarded projects so you have work and keep people employed. So it is a lot more competitive and just as exciting,” he said.
Innotech Services Limited undertakes projects locally and in the region and has the contract for the construction of the new Barbados Water Authority (BWA) headquarters in The Pine, St Michael.
Forty people are working on that site and that number should increase to about 150 within the next three months as work intensifies.
“From our perspective, the projects today are far more competitive than they were, say, five years ago, and that goes without saying. We have had
to work [twice] as hard and [twice] as long to achieve half as much, but I guess we have to do what we have to do,” he said.
“My dream is to see the human resources element be able to manage and provide the kind of quality standard and quality management that is required for projects of this nature,” he said. (MM)
