Finding The Path To El Dorado in Guyana South America
In June of 2017, I came to Guyana on business for the first time after I had sold a 150 foot offshore vessel to one of the families I work with in the Caribbean. I am a former FINRA Registered Investment Banker and Fortune 500 Management Consultant who has spent his career building companies, running companies, and when needed shutting companies down. I went to the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta Georgia and have been a merchant banker, entrepreneur and financial consultant my entire career.
My partner and I founded a Fortune 500 Management Consulting practice in November of 2005 called Flashpoint Group and over the past 15 years we have worked with and advised some of the biggest brands in the world including Delta Air Lines, Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, and many other Consumer Packaged Goods Companies both domestically and internationally as well as Governments and their agency’s foreign and domestic. We made millions, lost millions, dealt with the politics of Fortune 500 companies, and have impacted millions of lives around the world with the work we have done as trusted advisers to the Presidents, Board Room’s, CEO’s and the dedicated teams that support them.
During the aftermath of the 2015 Oil & Gas recession I stepped back from working in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and Corporate Development specialist and became a Chief Restructuring Officer focused on helping manage the dramatic changes in the Offshore Oil and Gas sector that my High Net Worth Families, friends, clients, and partners were going through. In our Louisiana Family Office Management and Consulting Practice we utilize a Bain Capital/Bain Consulting model for those families who have created multi-generational O&G oilfield service businesses, but are too small for the major accounting and consulting firms to work with. Through that work I got to understand the dynamics and background of how the entire Offshore O&G supply chain works.
The practice was built when my partner and I identified a need for Fortune 500 level consulting to the myriad of families and business who were living in Houma, Louisiana and Fourchon, Louisiana and had spent generations helping develop America’s offshore oil and gas industry. It was a niche that we stumbled into, but with our backgrounds working in some of the biggest board rooms and C-Suites in the world at the Fortune 10 and Global 2000, we worked hard to help educate and grow the families that entrusted us to help them take their businesses to the next level.
Our mantra has and always will be, that we are not here to take over your core business, we want to work on a fee for service basis to bring some of the best practices we have learned and developed working with the major international brands and companies down the bayou to the center of the US Offshore Oil and Gas support and services industry. For a lot of these families their CFO was nothing more then a book keeper and their core team of professional advisers were not as sophisticated as they needed to be to deal with the needs of Single Family Offices and High Net worth individuals.
Once we got their multi-generational family owned business running more efficiently, we would look to partner with our clients and families and work with them to invest in institutional quality opportunities. From our work on the ground we realized that these wealthy clients had gotten involved in what I consider “vanity investments” rather than true financial investments. By their background and nature they all hated the public equity markets and would end up investing in local businesses that consistently lost money and couldn’t be managed effectively as our partners were incredible at running their core business, but didn’t know how to manage and oversee businesses that were at the outside of their core operations.
It was through this work I ended up in Guyana and found my true calling. Helping to build an entire nation and we launched our Merchant Bank — Smart City Clearing Company Ltd. www.sc3.ltd and the first full service western style commercial real estate firm — Acarai Properties Guyana www.acaraiproperties.com.
Since landing in Guyana I have been focused on getting to know the people, culture, and community that has so much untapped wealth and potential. I look forward to sharing the journey with you. If you ever find yourself in Georgetown please feel free to track me down. I would love to buy you a beer and see how we can work together to help build a true #startupnation and be a part of the historic and unprecedented growth Guyana will see over the next two decades as one of the poorest nations in this hemisphere becomes the wealthiest.
Thanks for taking a read and feel free to reach me directly at: sjasmin at sc3.ltd. I hate writing and I am sure their are a bunch of typo’s but I have always believed that perfection is the enemy of success. I believe the Guyana story needs to be spread and the facts shared, I hope you join me on this journey. It will be a great book one day, and for those that know me — everyone says Jonah Hill will end up playing me in the movie.
Till next we meet on the Path To El Dorado, stay safe and keeping doing the work. It’s the only way to move the ball down the field.
Steven Jasmin
The Guyana Banker
