“If you ask me what factors have contributed most to our success,” says SOS Safety International’s Managing Director, Carmen Nieves, “I would have to say it is a healthy combination of hard work and effort, a lot of negotiating, a lot of sales and ultimately a lot of satisfied customers.”
Since 1991, SOS Safety International has been a premier distributor of industrial safety supplies and services. Committed to providing quality products and service for the safety and protection of its customers, their employees and facilities, and the environment, the company supplies loading equipment, fire fighting equipment, remediation and oil spill equipment.
“From our initial work of selling industrial hoses to storage terminals we gradually evolved into a business capable of meeting all manner of needs across a range of core industry fields including fire fighting,” Nieves continues. “As we grew, so too did the level of positive word of mouth about SOS Safety International and this further assisted in our expansion from our original base of Central America into Latin America and the Caribbean.”
With each task it carries out, SOS Safety International operates under the belief that quality service is key to ensuring customer satisfaction, that establishing open and honest relationships with said customers is vital and that it must be prepared to think outside the box in order to meet their needs. Of course none of this would be possible without the efforts of the company’s employees, whose drive, passion and determination Nieves credits as being SOS Safety International’s greatest strength.
“As a team we have all contributed to creating a business with more than 20 years of experience within our chosen fields of expertise,” Nieves highlights. “What this gives us today is a company that is a lot more than just a supplier of equipment. In addition to this we have developed the ability to perform other critical services such as risk management, emergency response and emergency pre-planning. It was our offering of these services that helped catapult business even further forward with our sales increasing by some 40 percent in the space of two years.”
In that time the reputation of the company has increased further still and this has led to SOS Safety International gaining a number of significant contracts in the region. These include the Terminal Fire Assessment contract awarded by Statoil South Riding Point in Grand Bahama, Bahamas. As part of this the company will be responsible for fire protection engineering, risk management and emergency response consulting services as well as the procurement and installation of fire systems replacements.
Meanwhile, the company has also been awarded the Petrojam Newport Fire Systems project bid. In this particular project the company provides the Petrojam Newport terminal with a Fire Systems Assessment and was subsequently proud to announce that it had won the project bid for the supply of the bladder systems and all fire equipment as required per the bid.
As Nieves goes on to state, being a multi-skilled business has also allowed SOS Safety International to overcome a number of the external challenges facing the industry, not least of all the volatile economic climate of today. “By being flexible and multi-faceted we are able to move quickly when the market shifts, moving into other geographic locations and adding in-demand services in order to avoid the negative impacts that arise from a slow economy.”
Taking into account the above, it comes as little surprise that the company’s immediate objectives include continuing to grow at a healthy pace. Part of its growth strategy currently sees SOS Safety International looking into moving to a larger facility, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and measuring some 5,000 square feet. From here the company would look to act as a service centre for hydrostatic service and testing of SCBA gear, which caters to their region’s marine and municipal departments.
“By developing part of our business to deliver service centre style needs we are again going to be meeting a pretty significant demand from the marketplace,” Nieves concludes. “There really is no one else, not in our sector of the market at least, providing this type of service, especially to parts of the region such as Honduras, Jamaica and other islands. It is for this reason that I can easily envision a scenario where five years from now we will have at least three of these centres up and running, providing yet another revenue stream into the company.”
Nieves finishes our conversation by simply saying that she is excited about the future, and who can blame her?
Written by Will Daynes, research by Vincent Kielty
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