Dvance p raise for minding Their Own Business

party
of
a
lifetime
61
Back in Trinidad
Gina’s yearning for being an independent businesswoman first 
showed its signs in the story she told about herself and her friend, 
Rita, when they were very young girls. While Rita and Gina were in 
grade school, they decided to knit some goods and place them for 
sale on a table at the end of Rita’s garage so that passersby could see 
their wares. Everything was going along well for a long time, with 
the girls selling items and using the money to buy more wool and 
craft items so that they could sell the goods at their “store.” Unfortu-
nately, Rita’s brother came to visit his parents one day and told the 
girls to remove their table and the goods and not return to that site 
again. Gina laughed as she recounted that “he ran us out of the place 
and that was the end of the business, we closed down business.” But, 
she pointed out that the experience “had to have been integral” to 
the development of both of the girls because they now run successful 
businesses on their own.
On the other hand, to hear Andy, Gina’s son, tell the story, his 
mother “started back from [Vege Kingdom], the restaurant back home” 
as the first step in this business adventure called “the party of your 
life.” Andy believes that “entrepreneurship comes quite naturally to 
her,” and it was no surprise to him that “she was able to pick it back 
up” once she got settled in the USA. Daniel, Gina’s former spouse, 
recalled that once Gina had the restaurant in Trinidad “up and run-
ning” his role was to be “the background person in terms of buying all 
of the juice, and working with her in establishing pricing” and man-
aging their accounts. In fact, Gina gave her ex-spouse, Daniel, credit 
for his role in the early development of her successful business career. 
She said quite spontaneously that “the first person that I would say to 
take credit if I had to give credit for where I am now business wise is 
[Daniel].” Her former spouse remembered clearly that when Gina was 
employed at a bank in Trinidad, Gina was very certain that she really 
wanted “to get out of the bank and look into an opportunity to get into 
[business]” where she could build herself into an independent financial 
entity. At that point in their marriage, Gina was shopping overseas and 

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62
minding
their
own
business
selling goods in Trinidad from her home while holding down a job at a 
bank and raising their two children.
Gina was getting important experience in customer relations, mar-
keting, trading, and foreign exchange transactions while she worked 
at Banner’s Bank in Trinidad. While Daniel recalled that Gina “always 
had a desire not to be the best [Banner] bank employee but to be the 
best that she could be in her own environment,” Gina learned to trade 
stock. She explained that:
I had to look at all the foreign sales from credit cards and how that money 
was being used by the bank …. I had to get a sum total of all the credit card 
purchases that came in. We had just begun to get computerized and the 
report would come to my desk every day and I had to go down to foreign 
trade and determine where this money would go because this money was 
used for the bank to make profit … the bank had all that money just sitting 
there and they used it … and when it came time to pay they would pay from 
a big fund.
This was where Gina learned to track accounts and understand the 
world of investing. It made her aware of the banker’s role in any busi-
ness venture, and a good worker who would protect the investments 
of a business that monitored “where the money was and where it was 
being placed, and what the profit coming back was, to make sure that 
[they] were getting some profit out of this thing.” The language of loans 
and foreign investments became second nature to Gina during this part 
of her working life.
When Gina decided to move on to her own business venture, 
it meant that she had the full support of her then-spouse, Daniel. 
She explained that she was able to run her business with her family 
for several years in the food industry because she “had subliminal 
knowledge and exposure of running a business, due to the fact that 
my father owned a pharmacy” and even though she was not involved 
there she believed “that it was able to give me the opportunity to 
know that it was something that I could achieve without thinking 
about it.” She went on to run several restaurants on her own before 

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gina
’
s