A decade and a half ago, Ter­ry Ortt turned an ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly long wait in­to a rev­o­lu­tion­ary busi­ness, which he hopes will con­tin­ue to lead by ex­am­ple with­in the T&T man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor.

He is aim­ing to turn his com­pa­ny, Do­mus Win­dows & Doors in­to an gen­er­a­tor of for­eign ex­change by 2025.

It would rep­re­sent an­oth­er evo­lu­tion of the com­pa­ny, which is a Caribbean-based man­u­fac­tur­er of UP­VC (un­plas­ti­cised polyvinyl chlo­ride) win­dows and doors that has in­vest­ed over $70 mil­lion in­to T&T.

“Well, it start­ed when I or­dered some PVC win­dows and doors in An­tigua, many, many years ago, and it took me six months to get the win­dows and two years to get the doors. And I thought, good­ness, these are good prod­ucts, but there’s got to be a bet­ter way of do­ing this,” said Ortt, of his de­ci­sion to start Do­mus Win­dows & Doors Lim­it­ed in 2007.

At that time, he was at­tempt­ing to get the busi­ness go­ing in An­tigua, but cir­cum­stances took him else­where.

“We were go­ing to start in An­tigua. We end­ed up ac­tu­al­ly start­ing in St Kitts, be­cause they had a build­ing avail­able. And so it’s been a steady pro­gres­sion since then. We start­ed off with some very ba­sic units. We now have sev­en dif­fer­ent prod­uct lines. We have 1,000 dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions, and we have the high­est hur­ri­cane stan­dards in the world. We’ve come quite a long way,” Ortt in an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian on Mon­day.

“So any­way, I start­ed the busi­ness in 2007 and we moved the fac­to­ry here to Trinidad, in Ch­agua­nas, at the be­gin­ning of 2018,” said the Do­mus CEO, who was born in Cana­da.

Last month, Do­mus Win­dows & Doors Ltd took an­oth­er ma­jor step. How­ev­er in this case it wasn’t a move but rather an ex­pan­sion as it launched op­er­a­tions in Ja­maica. The com­pa­ny took a look at Ja­maica’s con­struc­tion and home im­prove­ment in­dus­try as a promis­ing av­enue that it had to ex­plore.

In a press re­lease ahead of the launch, the com­pa­ny not­ed, “Ja­maica’s con­struc­tion sec­tor has ex­pe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant growth in re­cent years, par­tic­u­lar­ly in ur­ban ar­eas such as Kingston, Mon­tego Bay, and Ocho Rios, dri­ven by both pri­vate and pub­lic in­vest­ments. The in­tro­duc­tion of Do­mus aligns with on­go­ing projects aimed at im­prov­ing hous­ing in­fra­struc­ture, com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ment, and even tourism-re­lat­ed fa­cil­i­ties. The com­pa­ny’s lead­er­ship sees Ja­maica as the ide­al mar­ket for its prod­uct of­fer­ings, with lo­cal ar­chi­tects, builders, and home­own­ers ex­press­ing in­creas­ing in­ter­est in high-qual­i­ty, en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient ma­te­ri­als.”

In the in­ter­view, Ortt ex­plained that the com­pa­ny had sim­ply ex­am­ined the po­ten­tial of the Ja­maican mar­ket and took a leap of faith, al­beit a weighed one.

Asked how the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­pand in­to the north Caribbean coun­try pre­sent­ed it­self, Ortt said, “There was no re­al op­por­tu­ni­ty. We ac­tu­al­ly just felt it was a very vi­brant mar­ket, very ro­bust in terms of con­struc­tion, larg­er than Trinidad prob­a­bly two to three times the size. And so we just jumped on a plane and we start­ed do­ing ex­plo­ration. It was not easy,” said Ortt, of the Ja­maica launch.

So far, the gam­ble has ap­peared to take off.

“Well, we’ve been re­ceived very well by the clien­tele. They seem to speak well of our prod­uct lines, the pro­fes­sion­al­ism that we show, and so on. So we’ve start­ed get­ting or­ders rolling in al­most from the get-go,” he said.

It fell in line with the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus be­yond T&T, as Ortt ex­plained that while the com­pa­ny had en­joyed sig­nif­i­cant suc­cess in the do­mes­tic mar­ket, in the past year it has placed fur­ther em­pha­sis on ex­ports and ex­pan­sion.

“In Saint Kitts, the do­mes­tic mar­ket was very small, so when we came to Trinidad, we fo­cused on the do­mes­tic mar­ket for some num­ber of years, but in the last three or four years, we’ve been fo­cus­ing on ex­ports a lot more. To the point now where our ex­ports match our do­mes­tic mar­ket rev­enues, and we hope to change that quite dra­mat­i­cal­ly, and in terms of prob­a­bly be three times ex­ports rel­a­tive to one do­mes­tic,” said Ortt, adding that push­ing the ex­port mar­ket had be­come all the more cru­cial giv­en the for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion in T&T.

Ortt said a few years ago, the com­pa­ny had to re­ly on the Ex­im­bank for for­eign ex­change, but as it has since im­proved its po­si­tion sig­nif­i­cant­ly with re­gard to for­eign ex­change.

“A cou­ple of years ago, we were quite re­liant on the Ex­im­bank for forex. And luck­i­ly, they were there at a very crit­i­cal time for us, so we’ve now been able to grow to the point where we ex­pect to be a net for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tor by prob­a­bly the end of next year,” said Ortt.

He was hope­ful that oth­er mem­bers of the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor would take steps to im­prove for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tion amid the de­clin­ing re­turns of the en­er­gy sec­tor. How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that his com­pa­ny had ben­e­fit­ted from its grow­ing rep­u­ta­tion across the is­lands for the pro­vi­sion of prod­ucts that have been able to with­stand the se­vere im­pact of ad­verse weath­er con­di­tions as a re­sult of cli­mate change.

“We’ve had oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers come along and they tell us that we’re prob­a­bly the most so­phis­ti­cat­ed man­u­fac­tur­er in the en­tire Caribbean, re­gard­less of what in­dus­try. I guess the point I would make is that we use tech­nol­o­gy a lot, and I think that the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor is now mov­ing in that di­rec­tion. And that is a very pos­i­tive thing for the whole sec­tor,” said Ortt.

He lament­ed that lack of at­ten­tion paid to cli­mate change and its im­pact on the busi­ness sec­tor in par­tic­u­lar.

“We find that there’s very lit­tle in­ter­est in hur­ri­cane prod­ucts gen­er­al­ly. But there are a cer­tain num­ber of peo­ple, and cer­tain­ly in a large mar­ket, we’ll get enough busi­ness in that area. So cer­tain peo­ple search us out be­cause of those stan­dards. By and large, though, I think hur­ri­cane risk is large­ly ig­nored, I think, to the detri­ment of the Caribbean,’ he said.

Ortt said he had been try­ing to help in that re­gard.

“There’s a re­al lack of knowl­edge. So I’ve been do­ing a lot of ed­u­ca­tion. On June 26 for in­stance, I had a train­ing ses­sion for the Ja­maican Ar­chi­tects As­so­ci­a­tion, and as a pro­fes­sion­al en­gi­neer, a big part of my fo­cus is to ed­u­cate peo­ple on hur­ri­cane risk and al­so how to pre­vent it,” said Ortt.

While the Ja­maican ex­pan­sion has seen ear­ly pos­i­tive in­di­ca­tors, Ortt said the com­pa­ny had not yet con­sid­ered push­ing ex­pan­sion fur­ther just yet. He ex­plained that for now the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus would be the de­vel­op­ment of its busi­ness in Ja­maica.