Julian Francis is a director at a number of major international and domestic businesses, including the current chairmanship at Commonwealth Brewery Limited. In 1997, he was appointed Governor General of The Central Bank of The Bahamas. He also served as the chairman of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) and served as the lead negotiator during its privatization.

Guardian Business: What is the biggest challenge facing your business or sector? What measures need to be taken to solve it?

Julian: I have to say that my business involvement includes several sectors across the wider economy. I think that the biggest challenge facing us is competitiveness - in productivity, labor cost, efficiency throughout the economy and cost of services. I think the government understands this and wishes to tackle these issues, but in the medium-to-long term, the only way to get the economy to respond to the need for competitiveness is by exposing ourselves to competition.
An essential part of the infrastructure, which needs to be in place to facilitate competition, is a formal policy and legislation. We don't have it at the moment, except in the area of communication. I think that a useful priority would be the establishment of a proper competition regime.

GB: How has your business or sector changed since the financial crisis?

Julian: I think we generally understand that we live in a broadly weaker economic environment, with limited prospects for historically strong growth in the short-to-medium term. Under these circumstances, business is obliged to keep cost and expenses under careful control, and it does not have the luxury of being able to generate revenue easily.
It is important, also, to realize that these conditions are being experienced in our external market economies, or those which supply much of our business demand, as well as those economies which compete against us. This fact underscores the point that, as a services economy, we need to figure out how to compete more effectively - domestically as well as internationally.

GB: Briefly, can you describe a life experience that changed how you approach your work today?

Julian: Not one in particular, but my experience and contact with business generally has convinced me that you have to be good at what you do, and you have to work real hard if you want to be among those who really succeed.
My own experience is that if you prepare well and you're willing to make extraordinary efforts along the way, it pays in the long run. The fact is that there are no real shortcuts to success! If you are not prepared to invest the time and effort, you are unlikely to prevail in the longer term.

GB: What are you currently reading?

Julian: I am usually reading bout four books at a time; it depends on my mood. But the one most relevant to economy is "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. It's a study on what makes some societies succeed and others fail.

GB: Has the high cost of energy hurt your business? What solutions have you initiated or considered to combat it?

Julian: In an environment such as this, where the consumer is already stretched to the limit, cost increases, which have to be passed on, will inevitably result in reduced business. So in brief, higher energy costs will force businesses to operate more efficiently, but will inevitably shrink business at some point.
This is a huge problem for services economies such as ours, with limited marketable natural resources we know about for the present.
Looking at the larger picture, I fear that unless we are able to significantly improve the average education and skill level throughout our economy, we will have great difficulty improving the economic position of the average Bahamian. This is far more of a problem in difficult times such as now.

GB: What makes a great boss? What makes a bad boss?

Julian: I don't consider myself an expert on this question, but I think that a great boss is a good manager of the business itself, and one who inspires his employees to want to be the best they can, and to make the business succeed. A bad boss would be just the opposite, or one who demotivates his people.
Perhaps I may add that we do have a significant "management" challenge in The Bahamas; there are not nearly sufficient persons trained to run businesses. Also, I think that there are special sets of skills needed to manage business in small developing economies, and needless to say, interpersonal skills are even more necessary due to the personal nature of working relationships.

GB: If you could change one thing concerning business in The Bahamas, what would it be?

Julian: We do not have, in my view, a sufficient sense of delivering for the customer. We need to get our businesses more focused on that one objective - everything flows from that.

GB: What keeps you grounded? Do you have any major interests other than work?

Julian: Absolutely! Like most, my family is by far the most important part of my life, and why I work. I also would like for my generation to be able to feel that we have improved on The Bahamas which we will leave in place. Otherwise, I love to be learning, to travel and working on new projects. I am always busy, and not really happy when I don't have some urgency to attend to, except at Christmas time, when I simply love doing nothing other than being with family and friends and eating.

GB: What should young businesses keep in mind in this current economic climate to survive?

Julian: They have to be creative, find new ideas to sell and new ways to do things. This is getting harder all the time, and requires increasingly better preparation. Secondly, they have to know how to manage their cost while getting the business started. Too many new businesses fail because they take on costs which cannot be absorbed during start-up, especially during economically slow periods.

GB: How would you describe or classify the ease of doing business in The Bahamas?

Julian: From my perspective, this is a difficult environment within which to do business. I'm not sure that sufficient organized thought is focused on facilitating business within our economy. There is more work to be done by organizations like the Chamber of Commerce in this area.

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