Interview - Sitemasters

Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Ryan Wood, General Manager at SiteMasters Property Management, about their relationship-focus, moving towards net zero, and what’s on the horizon for construction.

By Daniel Baksi

Management was founded more than 22 years ago in Bridgetown, Barbados. Since then, SiteMasters team has developed a reputation within commercial and residential contracting across the board, specializing in general renovations, additions, and new builds, including the architectural design of hotels, offices and even pools and spas. The SiteMasters masonry and carpentry team focus on choosing materials that are sustainable and durable while also being decorative.

Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, Barbados boasts an economy with a substantial dependence on tourism revenues, and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic last year therefore hit the island hard. For SiteMasters, it was a change that precipitated a dramatic shift in business. “The pandemic changed the whole dynamic significantly: how you operate business, how you engage with clients, how you organize workmen on job sites, and more,” says Ryan Wood, General Manager at SiteMasters. “We’re now on the tail end of things, but the construction of hotels, the renovations, and the maintenance that goes on across the island has all been affected. We now find ourselves managing properties for clients who cannot travel due to the health and safety protocols.”

SiteMasters’ business approach places a strong emphasis on the integrity of its professional relationships. “Operating on a small island, you can do 10 fantastic jobs, but do one bad job and you’re the worst

person on earth,” says Mr. Wood. “We like to build a rapport with our clients, aiming to deliver exactly what they want – but at the same time, not neglecting to offer an alternative opinion. It’s common for someone in my profession to present ideas that the clients don’t agree with, but you can’t allow that to become a point of conflict. Instead, we take the time to explain things from our point of view, and quite often they come around. This isn’t possible without a strong working relationship, and it’s from this that we gain steam as a business, bringing in new clients and new projects. We have a lot of repeat clients, too. Some people may own three or four properties, and they want to look after them, whether it be residential or even commercial, like a coffee shop or a department store.”

This ethos isn’t just for clients – SiteMasters adopts the same attitude towards suppliers of its own. “Over the years, we’ve worked very closely with a local supplier, Carter’s General Store,” says Mr. Wood. “It’s a one-stop shop – whether it be recycled plastic, wood, or shingles, they have pretty much everything, using environmentally-friendly items as well. Everyone has their preference, but I feel committed to them. You build a relationship with the company, from the person sweeping the floor, right up to the owner and the general manager, you speak on a first name basis – it’s vital.”

Despite the challenges of the last two years, SiteMasters believes that the COVID-19 setback offers a means towards innovation across the industry, as companies strive to meet their clients’ changing demands. “Being locked in your own home can be difficult, so I think people are realizing they want to be comfortable,” says Mr. Wood. “We’re already seeing people more likely to want maybe renovated bathrooms, making them bigger, or adding a living room, for example. Whereas materialistic concerns are playing far less of a role in general thinking, whether it be clothes, vehicles, or something more. It’s a reflects the realities that lockdown has brought to light: that it’s important to have your own place, and to feel comfortable in it. In the next couple of years, we’re now anticipating see a construction boom. Most of our tourists come from the UK, and a lot of our clients who live off the island are dying to get back here. In the UK lockdown, they’re living uncomfortably, often in small apartments, crammed in on top of somebody else. In a lockdown here, at least you’ll have a bit of land, and you can walk outside to get fresh air. Likewise, we’re waking up to the fact that you no longer need to be in a physically present in an office to work, you can do so from home, and as office buildings stay empty, we expect to see the growth of residential construction.”

SiteMasters is a champion of sustainable construction materials, having first offered recycled plastic roofing products from Montreal more than 15 years ago. “I was actually the first contractor to be trained in installing the product,” says Mr. Wood. “The plastic shingles provided a more environmentally-friendly alternative to typical asphalt shingle. The plastic is produced from recycled bottles and comes with a guarantee of 25 years – underlining not only its sustainable potential, but resilience as a building material. We first installed the shingle on a large research center project for the Barbados Wildlife Reserve, with a significant square footage. Since then, we’ve used it countless times, and we promote it as a sustainable solution wherever possible. The more we can encourage our clients to go green, the better.”

To further this vision, the general contracting company is set to branch out, and is currently exploring the possibility of photovoltaic energy alternatives. “At the moment, the world is looking to go green,” says Mr. Wood. “We’re in the initial research stages for a solar farm project. The farm will hope-

fully be about 4 acres of land, starting with 1 acre and then we’ll develop and grow from there. We’d be creating electricity and selling it back to the main electricity company here in Barbados. That’s the direction we’re going in to generate funds, and the project is already approved and licensed. We expect that it will get cheaper as we develop, as we see reductions in the size of the panels and improvements in the infrastructure.”

SiteMasters is hopeful about what the future holds for construction. “We’ll continue to make our clients happy and continue to build green,” says Mr. Wood. “As people are inventing new stuff, we get to experiment with it, and I look forward to it to be honest. We’ve just finished a project using recycled plastic lumber rather to build decking, rather than wood. Likewise, I’m sure we’ll start seeing plastic-block work going forward. We have a world that wants to go electric. The next recyclable construction product could be painting products, paints that are odorless and environmentally friendly. Only time will tell.” c