Pic­ture this: you’re in your mid-20s and get a job with a ma­jor firm.

Weeks be­fore your 30th birth­day, you are named vice-pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny.

For many, this may be con­sid­ered a for­eign con­cept or a Hol­ly­wood script. For Bren­don Mo­hammed, it’s re­al life.

In Oc­to­ber, Mo­hammed was named vice pres­i­dent of cor­po­rate strat­e­gy at Ramps Lo­gis­tics, mak­ing him the youngest mem­ber of the T&T lo­gis­tics com­pa­ny’s ex­ec­u­tive lead­er­ship team.

Mo­hammed said the achieve­ment was a tes­ta­ment to the pro­gres­sive and in­clu­sive cul­ture at the com­pa­ny.

“I think it’s an amaz­ing feel­ing, and it’s a tes­ta­ment to the cul­ture that has re­al­ly been built in­side Ramps. I mean, I start­ed here four years ago, came in as a young pro­fes­sion­al, and they al­ways talk about op­por­tu­ni­ty, cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty for young peo­ple, and it’s clear that they didn’t talk it, they ac­tu­al­ly walked that talk as well. Be­cause four years lat­er, I’m ac­tu­al­ly sit­ting on the ex­ec­u­tive board now along­side some in­dus­try gi­ants that have so much ex­pe­ri­ence and wealth of knowl­edge,” said Mo­hammed, in an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian at Ramps Lo­gis­tics’ of­fice in Cunu­pia.

He said the com­pa­ny’s be­lief in youth, while al­so main­tain­ing a syn­er­gy with ex­pe­ri­enced pro­fes­sion­als, has been key not just the its evo­lu­tion but much of its re­cent suc­cess.

He ex­plained that find­ing a hy­brid be­tween new ideas and proven strate­gies has helped the com­pa­ny push for­ward sig­nif­i­cant­ly, when oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tions have strug­gled to bridge the gen­er­a­tional gap.

“I think that it’s a unique space. Be­cause even in the past, I used to view that as sort of a chal­lenge, and then even when I came in, it seemed as there was sort of a chal­lenge.

But the more the lead­er­ship team spoke to us, do­ing meet­ings and push­ing the cul­ture, we start­ed to re­alise that might ac­tu­al­ly be a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty for cre­at­ing some­thing new. What I mean by that is so you have the younger gen­er­a­tion push­ing ideas of tech­nol­o­gy. They have a unique way of prob­lem solv­ing,” said Mo­hammed, who grad­u­at­ed with first class ho­n­ours from the Uni­ver­si­ty of West In­dies with a de­gree in po­lit­i­cal geo­science,

“They have a pas­sion­ate dri­ve for things. But the old­er gen­er­a­tion pro­vides that struc­ture, that ex­pe­ri­ence, that strate­gic knowl­edge and that re­al-life ex­pe­ri­ence and risk. So in­stead of look­ing at it as in­no­va­tion ver­sus ex­pe­ri­ence at Ramps, we kind of do a hy­brid mod­el with in­no­va­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing to­geth­er to bridge that gap.”

He ex­plained that this hy­brid ap­proach was key to the es­tab­lish­ment of the Ramps’ award win­ning AI so­lu­tion Mawi and has in­formed sev­er­al im­por­tant de­ci­sions made by the com­pa­ny in terms of its lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al op­er­a­tions.

“That is heav­i­ly in­grained (in our) cul­ture right now, and that push­es in­to a lot of things. So the award that we won for Mawi at the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, it was 20-year-old soft­ware en­gi­neers that we had work­ing on that project. They are able to now com­pete on a glob­al lev­el, and we hope one day to dom­i­nate on a glob­al lev­el. But they were on­ly able to in­no­vate and put that prod­uct out through the guid­ance and the ex­pe­ri­ence that they gained from the old­er ones and the team that helped them along the way, and that in­cludes our CEO and the VP of tech­nol­o­gy, Ki­ran De­osingh as well,” said Mo­hammed.

He said the AI so­lu­tion is a good ex­am­ple of how the hy­brid mod­el works, be­cause Ramps T&T was the first Caribbean coun­try to launch a soft­ware so­lu­tion that fast to mar­ket, which was able to reach in­ter­na­tion­al lev­els and sat­is­fy both re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al clients.”

In his role, Mo­hammed is tasked with as­sess­ing po­ten­tial ex­pan­sion op­tions for Ramps from T&T to new mar­kets, new ser­vice lines over­seas, while main­tain­ing home op­er­a­tions and al­so in­still­ing rev­enue dis­ci­pline giv­en the volatil­i­ty seen in the glob­al mar­ket as well.

“It takes a lot of re­search and an­a­lyt­ics. So right now, we put so much fo­cus on trade pol­i­cy re­search. We know there’s so much re­gion­al con­flict, even as sim­ple as the price of oil, puts em­pha­sis on new re­struc­tures and how we ap­proach things,” he said. Mo­hammed ex­plained that even in this re­gard, he had some guid­ance as the com­pa­ny had done suc­cess­ful ex­pan­sions in­to Guyana and Suri­name.

“We al­ways tend to look at a new en­vi­ron­ment we’re go­ing in­to. What’s the pol­i­cy frame­work? Do we have any ties on the ground there, with any part­ners?

“Do we un­der­stand the land­scape and the cul­ture in which we need to op­er­ate in­side there? And I think we’ve done a good job of it, be­cause Guyana and Suri­name are good ex­am­ples. So we start­ed in Trinidad, and then we ex­pand­ed in­to Guyana and Suri­name, well in time for the oil boom, and that’s be­cause we an­tic­i­pat­ed the geopo­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment there. We ex­pand­ed our op­er­a­tions, and now we have of­fices that have been run­ning for more than eight years in both Guyana and Suri­name,” he said.

Rev­enue dis­ci­pline, he ex­plained, was al­so very im­por­tant giv­en mar­ket con­di­tions as it not on­ly fu­elled the ex­pan­sion of the com­pa­ny but ul­ti­mate­ly its long term sur­vival.

“We usu­al­ly ap­proach eco­nom­ic dis­ci­pline on two fronts and a unique way, be­cause most peo­ple on­ly fo­cus on the front end, which is sort of your strate­gic end, but we al­so fo­cus on the back end. So I’ll give you a bit more de­tail on the front end.

“That strate­gic end in­cor­po­rates every­thing from your fore­cast and crunch­ing your num­bers, en­sur­ing you un­der­stand all your ex­pens­es, etc. With that, we make sure that at any point in time we don’t over­play our hand,” he said,”So when things are go­ing well, when the growth is high, when oil prices are high, we make sure that we don’t over­lever­age our po­si­tion or spend too much. And that puts us in a po­si­tion where, dur­ing down­time, dur­ing volatil­i­ty, dur­ing the low pe­ri­ods, we are still able to func­tion well and take ad­van­tage of new op­por­tu­ni­ties that come along.”

Mo­hammed said the oth­er as­pect of rev­enue dis­ci­pline is over­looked by com­pa­nies is the col­lec­tion, but the Ramps team has main­tained fo­cus on col­lec­tions all through its op­er­a­tions.

He said, “The back­end is col­lec­tion. So some­thing that’s usu­al­ly over­looked is as much plan­ning and strat­e­gy as you do, one of the most im­por­tant prin­ci­ples that’s core to us is cash­ing back. That’s one of your lead­ing in­di­ca­tors for your suc­cess and health as a busi­ness. So we’re very, very dis­ci­plined about ex­e­cut­ing five-star ser­vice, in­voic­ing on time and col­lect­ing our cash on time and our back end has served us so well over the past cou­ple of years, be­cause it keeps our ac­count and our busi­ness healthy. So even dur­ing pe­ri­ods of volatil­i­ty or when the op­por­tu­ni­ties come up, we can act quick­ly and jump on it im­me­di­ate­ly. “

Mo­hammed said while much of his port­fo­lio has sights on in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pan­sion, his fo­cus cur­rent­ly is on T&T, where there are sev­er­al lanes open­ing up through for­eign in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties. He point­ed to the re­cent Exxon­Mo­bil deal in par­tic­u­lar as one which promised much for the lo­cal mar­ket.