Very little has been written about businessman Langston Roach. And he likes it that way. He is quite proud of the fact that he has succeeded in escaping public glare for the past 14 years, while building Langston Roach Industries Limited, a privately owned company which manufactures personal care and cleaning products.

"There is such a thing as bad publicity you know," he joked, even before the interview began.

It is for this reason, too, that he has turned down invitations to participate in the Entrepreneur of the Year awards, hosted by Republic Bank and Ernst and Young, for the past three years.

His name may not be well known, but his products are. Lanher, Smart Choice and Soft and Silky products (about 100 different products in all) grace grocery and parlour shelves and cosmetics counters across the country and this week the company will launch one other product - purified, bottled water.

Roach began his company back in May 1985 with a $20,000 loan from his mother. He was heavily indebted to a commercial bank, more than $250,000 at the time, and could not secure another loan anywhere else.

"I had been involved in two other businesses before this one that failed and I was owing the bank a lot of money. So when I went back to them with this idea and asked for a second loan they told me, get the business going and maybe you can come back later," Roach recalled.

He said he was not entirely disappointed because he knew his heavy debt would not have made him a good risk for the banks.

With the loan from his mother, Veronica Roach, he started up Lanher Investment Company Limited and began bottling locally manufactured cleaning products under his own label. Roach is one of three directors in the company, the other being his wife Symoniez and brother Richard.

"It was really a holding company I had formed some time earlier, but I decided to operate the business under that name rather than set up a separate company." Roach had met the distributor for the local firm, who was selling the cleaning products to a friend of his family and the man had advised him that he could buy the product in bulk and bottle it himself. Besides, it would be cheaper than having the product bottled at the factory.

It took six weeks, he said, for him to pull the equipment and material together, to design labels and buy bottles, buckets and jugs. His home in Santa Cruz became the factory. His garage was the bottling centre; the back porch was the storeroom and the bedrooms became offices.

Roach began selling his products to stores and supermarkets and even door to door. Within six months, he had paid back his mother and went back to the bank to get his loan rescheduled. "It was not very difficult for me to get the products moving because I had the experience of running two other companies before so I knew about distribution, marketing and sales."

In 1970, Roach managed the Opals Afro boutique in the Janouras building in Port of Spain with his mother and sister which closed down after seven years. Then, he started Home Shop Limited and became the agent for Black Heritage Cosmetics, a United States brand which sold well in Trinidad and Tobago.

Around that time, he was also a frontline member of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and participated in the militant student movements, which had their genesis on the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies.

"It was during that time that I made a promise to myself that if we were going to talk about black people owning business and not being just workers, that I would never work for anyone. I would own my own business," he said, leaning back in his office chair.

It was in fulfilling that promise that Roach never got to complete his Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering, even though, he had gotten to his third year. He now holds an Executive Masters Degree in Business Administration from the Institute of Business/UWI.

"It is because of that promise that this venture could not fail, else I do not know what I would have done. I don't think I would have had the strength to go on to something else."

He did not have to. After six months, Roach and Symoniez were mixing their own products, from formulae they had purchased from foreign companies. "With my background in chemistry, it was not too difficult to understand what we needed and by the following year we were making all the products ourselves."

Roach said there was a large market for cleaning products because imported products had become so expensive and the recession of the 80s forced consumers to look for cheaper products. "We felt we could deliver a good product at a cheap price and the market welcomed it."

And since starting the company in 1985, Langston Roach Industries Limited has made a profit each year of the last 14.

In 1989, Roach moved his business out of the house and into a warehouse on Boundary Road in San Juan. Having moved about every two years since, the company finally settled into a 70,000 square foot compound on Saddle Road, San Juan formerly owned by businessman Ram Kirpalani.

"When we got the property, the buildings were severely vandalized because they had been empty for a while.

We spent close to one million dollars making it operational." While he admits the local industry is highly competitive, he revealed a prevailing attitude that is remarkable.

"There was a lot of goodwill among the local manufacturers - surprising, eh? When we need certain chemicals or ingredients we will sell to each other.

We realized that we are all growing and there is nothing really wrong with working together in that respect."

The professional goodwill has developed, he said, because close to 90 percent of the chemicals used in the manufacture of the products are imported from the United States or Europe.

"In fact, it costs less to import these products than to have some company import it and you in turn buy from them. It is better to do business directly."

Currently, 80 percent of the company's total production is sold locally with the remaining 20 percent exported to Guyana, Antigua, St Vincent, St Lucia and other islands.

In fact, this week Roach flew to another island to discuss an expanded distribution plan. "We hope to switch those figures around within five years.

I want to export up to 80 percent of my products. That is what companies like Peakes and SM Jaleel do and I want this company to get like that." This week the company will begin distributing its newest product, "Everlasting Flows," purified drinking water.

Roach invested more than $200,000 on a water filtration system to improve the water supply for his range of cleaning and cosmetic products. "When we realized the quality of the water was so high we decided to bottle it under our own brand."

Roach said when he had studied the bottled water market in Trinidad and Tobago just about a year ago, there were a few local brands being sold. Today there are more than ten.

"IT is a highly-competitive market and maybe a little risky for me but I believe in the product since we have invested a lot of money in the reverse osmosis system."

The risk that he is taking today with this product is not unlike the risk he took on a little over 14 years ago.

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LANGSTON ROACH counts himself as lucky that he was able to get a loan from his mother to start his business. Many fledgling companies have severe difficulties finding start-up capital, something that is especially true for black businesses.

"When you look at other groups, Syrians, Chinese and Indians, they have built a strong family network that they can tap into for support, financial or otherwise.

We (blacks) do not necessarily have that. How many young entrepreneurs out there have a mother or father or uncle that they can get a loan from?" The results, he said, is that many of them have to go to the State and private lending agencies, that, he described, as risk adverse.

"And what else is a new entrepreneurial venture if it is not risky? So there are many entrepreneurs who just cannot get the support they need." He is also fortunate, he said, to have grown up in a home where entrepreneurship was the order of the day.

"I did not grow up in a home where we were told to go out there and start a business. However when I was a boy we saw our mother doing just that. So it was not something that was new to me when I decided to go that way.

"We have perpetuated this fallacy that blacks cannot run business and we all began to believe it and so, too few of us are willing to try. In fact, our history is quite the opposite." It is the same way he has chosen to organize his household. The father of seven sons, Roach has never insisted that his sons follow him into the family business.

"But it is there for them. And hopefully, one day, at least one of them will join me," he smiled. In the meantime his eldest, Ronald, has gone off into his own venture ad started a bold hi-tech company called, New Hope Computing.

And what gems of knowledge has father passed on to son? "Not a word. He would never listen to me anyway. I have not even invested in his new company, not that anyone would believe me. I am just here to help, when he decides he needs it."

Roach also believes that the State lending agencies could be more supportive of entrepreneurs. "Too many of them are run by people who know nothing about business and about taking risk. First of all, I do not believe you can run an organization that is supposed to help entrepreneurs if you know nothing about entrepreneurship."

Secondly, he said, these organizations need to encourage more mentoring programmes, where the successful business people are harnessed and brought in to counsel the up and coming ones. "I would do it, once the framework is there."

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