Dvance p raise for minding Their Own Business

party
of
a
lifetime
67
however, “it would be black tie from hors d’oeuvres to a sit down meal, 
full course meals, palate cleansers and the whole nine yards.” The 
point of the business is to make the client happy and by that goal being 
achieved, a good recommendation will be passed on to another poten-
tial client. Gina boasted that Island Caterers is “the only provider of 
the type of authentic menu in the … metro area …. And offering it with 
the flair and expertise of the reputable catering companies in the area.” 
The result is that the company does not follow trends in the catering 
industry, and is now “going way beyond the Caribbean community 
and well into the mainstay of the wedding industry because everyone 
wants something different.” Her clientele are among those people who 
travel to the Caribbean and return to the USA with a need to share their 
experiences of the sunny islands, and admittedly, to show off to their 
friends what exotic cuisine has been part of their experience while they 
were out of the country.
Furthermore, Gina extrapolated:
Particularly for the wedding, brides and grooms typically …. They really 
don’t know what it takes and how many services they have to get and what 
those services cost. My website allows them the opportunity for some reality 
…. So that point of comparison is very good and because we started off help-
ing them, they feel comfortable to call us because they know that we are help-
ful people …. Even though they go somewhere else [to do their wedding], 
we’ve had people come back and say that we have been the only ones to give 
us this amount of information, so we must know what we are doing! [They 
say], “We going with ya’ll!”
Getting a client to sign a contract includes many steps that lead to a 
positive result for the employer and Island Caterers. Gina is involved in 
doing “the site visit, the floor plan” and works to get “the place looking 
spiffy.” Not only do the caterers provide planning support for an event, 
they have diversified their services so that they are “doing cakes and 
pastries and do more of that baker type work” and they will make sure 
that if a client only needs “somebody just to help you so that you don’t 
have to be in the kitchen all night, [so] you can enjoy your guests” they 
will staff the event. Diversification in the party planning business has 
extended to “party staffing, servers, bartenders” and various details 

---

68
minding
their
own
business
that novice organizers might not think of when they decide to host an 
event. Gina has recommended that photographers and entertainers be 
fed at an event, since they are in essence part of the celebration. So, in 
the face of “another emerging company,” Gina called herself the presi-
dent of the first tier that supports “the second tier of another company” 
that has several little pieces that she is working to build.
As a matter of fact, Gina explained that she did not consider herself 
the “president” of the company any longer since her staff really made 
Island Caterers what it has become. She made a simple point by stating 
that “without having the support that I have [from the workers]” it 
would be impossible to do any of the work by herself. While she knew 
that she could “do all the jobs that are to be performed within my com-
pany, my company can only be as big as how much I can do, if I were to 
do it on my own.” So she continued to use the approach to doing busi-
ness with which she started years before in Trinidad with Vege King-
dom. She lets people know that she always wanted to “give my staff 
ownership of what they do and the outcome of their work.” This means 
that everyone who is employed in the company understands that she 
sees herself as “president of an idea more than a president of this entity 
that exists in this company.”
The Literacy Rituals
Gina thanked her secondary education teachers in Trinidad and her 
family for giving her the educational skills and self-confidence to 
become successful in the USA. She said that “even the education that 
I had as to the secondary level sufficed enough for me to have what it 
took to survive the world of business, the world of business working 
for somebody else, the world of business doing my own business.” The 
importance that she placed on the values that her family supported was 
expressed in the statement that “the principles that my family held, it’s 
the principles that people around me had” that gave her the tools to 
make her way in a new country.
Having arrived in the USA with two children and needing work, 
Gina was hired to do a job at $13,000.00 a year. She moved on to other 

---

gina
’
s