Charles Kong Soo
Elyse Henry, Head of Marketing, Corporate Secretary, and Managing Director at the family-owned engineering services company, K E Henry & Associates Ltd, can easily switch between her heels in an office setting and her safety boots in the fabrication workshop.
The 36-year-old entrepreneur, mother and wife, regaled us with stories of her journey to small business success when interviewed at her company’s engineering workshop in Enterprise, Chaguanas.
“I’m not your typical woman executive.”
Henry shouted over the rattling noise of the angle grinder being used to clean a six-inch gate valve in the distance behind her. “My days aren’t typical either. When I get up, I never know where I could end up. I could have a day filled with filing paper or one filled with filing steel pipe. Though I’m probably better at filing paper,” she laughed.
As the sole female on her team, she is not fazed by the male-dominated industry in which she operates. In fact, Henry believes it’s quite the opposite. She explained that being the only woman on the team wasn’t as hard as it seemed. All of her team members treat her with respect. “But then again, I am the boss,” she grinned.
However, she wasn’t always in the lead though.
Henry began her corporate career at a leading local bank when she was just 18 years old. In her career, she has held 11 posts from 2006 to 2023. She spent most of her time in finance, serving four major commercial banks and a local stock exchange broker. In manufacturing and distribution, Henry worked within the roofing, mattress production, Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, and air conditioning sectors.
Henry was also a former brand manager at CNC3 from 2014-2017.
When asked which of her tenures she enjoyed the most, she said in each of these roles she functioned predominantly in a marketing or client-interfacing capacity.
Henry said, however, that she had the most fun at Guardian Media and the most growth at First Citizens.
Throughout her development, she kept honing her skills and progressing her education. A true believer in lifelong learning, Henry’s “learning journey,” as she fondly calls it, did not end when she achieved a full CXC certificate from Holy Name Convent in 2004. Her mother was instrumental in her educational path.
She was adamant that her daughter pursue further education. Henry reminisced that at the time she just wanted to work and make money. She explained that she couldn’t appreciate her mother’s vision then, and she just did it out of obligation. She asked rhetorically: Which 16-year-old wants to sign up for more school?
Henry holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) from the University of New Brunswick (2008) and a Master of Marketing (MM) from the University of the West Indies (2011).
Fully embodying the spirit of lifelong learning, a passion of hers, she continued her learning path, adding certificates in Welding Fabrication, Work at Heights, Confined Space, and Project Management and has even been certified by the Scaffold Training Institute in Texas as a Certified Scaffolding Inspector in her quest to build her array of engineering-related skills to match her new portfolio.
Henry added that she was passionate about foundation education and continuous and alternate forms of learning.
She said while she was a fruit of the formal education tree, she has seen firsthand that one can be just as effective and impactful without formal education. Henry dreamt of one day becoming her own boss and implementing her own strategies for people empowerment and engagement.
Some of the challenges she faced on her path to business ownership were that she had been fired twice, survived retrenchment, accepted positions way below her qualifications, struggled through micromanagement, and a few other corporate horrors.
It seemed she could never find a place that embodied her vision. Henry said when she met her husband, he had already found his passion. He was supporting his father in their engineering workshop and spent his life being mentored by him.
She said that coming into the family, fully seasoned from all her years of theoretical studies, she saw the mass potential of her husband. In 2018, two years after joining their lives together, Henry and her husband joined their talents to form a partnership. After they were married in 2016, a concept started churning in her consciousness. Henry said she was working on a name.
They already had their daughter, and she carried both their initials. K E Henry was her husband, herself, and their daughter; it would be all of them and more. And that’s where the “Associates” came from.
In January 2023, she retired her heels and traded them in for a pair of steel-toed safety boots when she resigned from her full-time position at a Jamaican-based commercial bank in Port-of-Spain to exclusively take up the mantle of managing partner.
When asked if that was an easy decision to make, Henry replied that in 2021, after three years of dormancy, the partnership became fully activated suddenly and quite unexpectedly. Their client base grew quickly, and work became a lot to manage. In what seemed like a frightening decision at the time, she left the security of her stable job to take up her role at K E Henry full-time.
By December 2023, after just a few months under the stewardship of Henry, the company transitioned into a limited liability corporation.
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Words of advice from Elyse
Henry offered some advice for young, female entrepreneurs like herself.
“I have three guiding principles and questions I use to guide my decisions.
Does it bring me joy? Will anyone get hurt? Am I adding value?”
She added, “Find your passion, trust your instinct, and give it your best shot.”
Missed the target?
Henry said, “Regroup, recalibrate, and go again. Do this as many times as it takes until you get where you want to be, and when you get there, slow down and enjoy the view, but don’t ever stop. Keep going, keep reinventing yourself, and keep on learning.”
