Minister Walrond tours Regus Business Centre

─ says Guyana is open for business

Minister of Tourism, Industry and Commerce, Oneidge Walrond, MP, on Monday toured the Regus Business Centre in Georgetown, where she interacted with the Operations Director and several clients utilising the building.

Regus operates globally providing serviced office spaces and workspaces with more than three thousand business centres in a thousand cities across 110 countries, and has been operating in Guyana for more than a year.

The Centre located in the New Trafalgar Building at 165 Waterloo Street, Georgetown is the first centre opened in Guyana, and Minister Walrond is optimistic that the building will be “overrun” with clients because of the interest being placed in Guyana.

“Guyana is open for business; this is just one of the examples of the facilities that are gonna be available to the investors as they come and they seek to do business here in Guyana. This office is ready made, it’s quite an important solution especially to startup businesses, people who are coming first to check and see, to do their fact-finding missions, as investors, they have a temporary space they could come in that’s professional, this is an exciting solution to many of our investors that are coming in,” Minister Walrond said.

Operations Director, Stewart May said the company saw it fit to provide the service in Guyana given the many opportunities here.

“Not just that there are developments in the oil business, but also that mining and many of the other businesses and economic areas are seeing great development,” May said.

The company also received a lot of support from the Ministry of Tourism and agencies like GO-Invest.

“We would certainly urge companies to come to Guyana, explore the opportunities because Guyana is certainly opened for business and compared to many of the other Caribbean countries and other countries that we have clients and we ourselves entered into the ease of doing business is considerably better than any other areas, the processes are streamlined and there is a lot of support and advice being provided,” he noted.

He is urging persons to looking for opportunities in Guyana, to visit the country.

“It’s not a country that you can understand by googling it, there are opportunities but you have to come and meet with people and there is a piece of legislation coming to encourage companies to partner with local businesses, so that Guyana can develop as a nation and not just for the companies coming in,” May said.

May also expressed his hope that companies can support local businesses.

“I’m hoping that companies can come and support and not come and monopolise the opportunities here, you are going to find a highly educated workforce in Guyana that is going to be on par or above many of those you experience anywhere else in the world.

“All that needed is the right training and in my own experience here is that everybody wants to train, you don’t have to push someone to grasp an opportunity, they are seizing it with two hands and then exceeding the expectations you have placed in them,” he noted.

Regus Business Centre is a combination of office space, meeting room, co-working facilities and lounges.

Packages include private/dedicated office and workspace, virtual offices, membership, meeting spaces and workplace recovery.