Blades
Laura Tanna, Contributor
Desmond Blades is to be inducted into the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica's Hall of Fame on Thursday.
DESMOND BLADES, chairman and managing director of Mussons (Jamaica) Ltd., this year's inductee into the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica's Hall of Fame, says: "I don't know that I deserve such an honour to sit in the same place as people like Mayer Matalon. It impresses me tremendously."
Blades was born November 22, 1928 in Bridgetown, Barbados, where his father was a company director of H. Jason Jones and his mother was a housewife. Blades was the eldest of two brothers and one sister.
"I took the blame for everything," he says with a twinkle in his eye as he sits in his simple office in the T. Geddes Grant building, two Susan Shirley prints of old houses decorating the wall behind him.
Educated at Harrison College, a well-known public school in Bridgetown, he grew up during the war years and took his first job when he was almost 17 as a clerk at the Royal Bank of Canada. He met his future bride, Peggy Florence Robinson, when they were both teenagers, living in a village suburb of Bridgetown.
Peggy, educated at Queens' College, was a clerk at Barclays Bank, who gave up her job to marry Desmond on February 18, 1949. They kept their engagement private because: "In those days if you'd announced your engagement they would have transferred you to St. Kitts immediately," he says.
Blades left the bank after four years, explaining that bankers then didn't make much money.
In his next job with J.B. Leslie & Co. Ltd. he travelled up to four weeks at a time.
"One of my responsibilities was to travel up and down the Windward and Leeward Islands marketing the goods which they had. Manufacturers' representatives took orders from the customers which were supplied direct to the customers. The representatives drew a commission.
"Travelling up those islands I would go with ten or 12 suitcases of samples. You'd check into a boarding house. Sometimes you could arrange for the customer to come to your room and look at the samples nicely displayed. When you had to take the samples to them, it would have taken all day to make six trips carrying two suitcases at a time, so you hired a gang of young fellows to walk behind you, each with two cases in their hands!"
Today's executives chuckle at the image of Desmond Blades walking along island streets with little boys traipsing after him, suitcases in hand, but back in 1949-1954 that's how a salesman did business. Inter-island travel wasn't much better.
"You travelled mainly by old propeller-driven planes and there were small airstrips. In St. Lucia you came down between two mountains and ended up just at a graveyard. You looked through the window; the gravestones were right there!"
He changed jobs a third time when executives of Musson, a Barbados company competing with him, wanted him on their side and offered him a position as managing director of their branch in Trinidad.
He remembers: "It was losing money and I had to change everything, personnel to start with, then the type of business. It was doing the same old-fashioned manufacturers' representation business. I made it into a distribution business, in other words, importing, stocking and selling. The days of going around and taking orders was dying. We wanted to expand rapidly, so we changed the basis of the business." He turned Musson TT into a profitable company within a year.
In 1960 Musson asked him to visit their branch in Jamaica and, based on his recommendations, he was sent in 1961 to become managing director of Musson in Jamaica. "It was still the same old type of thing that I found in TT. I found it here and changed it, in the same amount of time."
At Independence in 1962 Musson split. Blades acknowledges: "I am by far the largest shareholder in the Jamaican company, between myself and family members, we own in excess of 80 per cent. The other shareholders are mainly people who work with me who have bought shares over the years. The Barbados and Trinidad companies have nothing to do with me."
He feels that "Developing the Musson identity has probably been my greatest satisfaction. Musson is by far the oldest trading name in the Caribbean, continually trading from 1820."
Today his group of companies has in excess of 2,000 employees. Blades adds: "Another thing which I'm very proud of, Musson has never had a one-hour work stoppage EVER, even though we have had all of the unions representing the workers from time to time. The workers feel confident and comfortable. The door is never locked. They can come anytime if they have a problem and talk to me. We have never refused to help any of our workers. We don't encourage them to borrow money for frivolous things. We don't lend money to buy TV sets but we have never had a man come to borrow money for illness and been turned down." Blades himself drives a 1989 car, the oldest in their system, to work.
He learned the value of money by losing some at an early age. Knowing that sailing is one of the greatest loves of his life, I asked when he'd got his first boat and, considering his reputation today for being a frugal investor, heard a most revealing story.
He loved the sea so much that as a schoolboy he saved his pennies until at age 15 he was able to buy a 12-ft. boat from a school friend.
When he sailed it to Bridgetown, he recalls: "Very proudly I anchored my boat down by the yacht club. Next morning I came out. Didn't see any boat. The damn thing had sunk in the night! I brought it up onto a friend's beach who did boat repairs. He took one look at it and said: 'Burn it! It's worth nothing!' It was the savings of a lifetime. I don't know if you can imagine the trauma of a 15-year-old boy who had saved all his pennies for years and years, Oh God. I was so upset that my father was kind to me and had another one built of the same size. I never thought! he was going to replace the boat because he wasn't rich and it was quite a sacrifice for him to make up this money. I kept the boat and enjoyed it for many years until I met my wife who said sailing was not for her. Eventually I sold the boat to buy the engagement ring. I love sailing," Blades admits. "One of the things that impressed me coming to Jamaica was the beautiful harbour. This was one of the decision makers for me. Shortly after I came here, I bought another boat, a 30-ft. Dragon racing boat."
Greatest influence
Blades considers Carlton Alexander of Grace, Kennedy to have been his greatest influence in his early days here, a competitor with whom he enjoyed a mutual feeling of friendship.
When I asked Blades what advice he would give a young businessman today, he said: "There is no wonderful secret of success. Hard work, perspiration, is the only recipe that I can give to you.
"You may be fortunate in some things if you step into them, and they go very well.
"You could step into something else. It looks much better and doesn't go well. I haven't had a hundred per cent success, you know. I've had a number of failures but what I've had to do is immediately say: 'This isn't going the way I wanted. Let me get away from it.'"
He cites as one of his failures a venture that he, Carlton Alexander and two others had in making whiskey in Jamaica during the 70s when the importation of whiskey was banned. Despite winning "more votes for our whiskey than all the others put together" in a taste testing competition at Liguanea Club, with all the other major brands of imported whiskey available, his Mark Royal brand never sold.
"You couldn't get anybody to drink the damn thing because they had a prejudice against the idea of drinking a local whiskey." So he gave it up and took his loss.
He admits that handling money responsibly is a key to his success: "I never try to borrow money which I couldn't pay back immediately. You know there is no banker who could come and embarrass me, at any time, EVER! If he came this morning and said: 'Give me my money.' I'd say: 'Sure. Have it.'"
He is very much against the way FINSAC handled the bailing out of companies, telling me: "They should have gone to the wall, even though I would personally have lost quite a bit of money but I would have accepted the loss as my own fault. I think Government should have let everything go to the wall. I had money in Citizens bank which I would have lost. I would have been prepared to lose it because I thought it was quite wrong to bail them out."
Says Blades: "The culture is wrong. The banks encourage a borrowing culture. The Government encourages it. The Government tends to tax equity and encourage borrowing, which is quite wrong. It should be the other way around completely."
Now, at the age of 73, Desmond Blades surveys his family business and notes that his wife Peggy is a company director, along with her many public service activities.
Blade's son, Paul, was working in business with him here when at the age of 19 he died on the operating table at UWI Hospital as a result of a tragic motor car accident. Daughter Susan went to Priory, then to school in England where she met her husband and settled in the UK. But both her children now work with their grandfather in Jamaica.
Grandson Paul Barnaby Scott, better known as PB, is involved in the food distribution in Musson and Facey, while granddaughter Melanie Scott is involved in Stanley Motta.
Blades tells me: "That the two grandchildren are keen to return to Jamaica to carry on the business, I feel of course that that is the biggest thing that has happened in my life."
