WHEN Deborah Lanigan resigned her job and relocated to the United States in 2010 to be close to her mother who was showing signs of dementia, little did she know she would be returning to Jamaica 10 years later to once again operate her own company.

But, after being headhunted by the Ohio, US-based company, Proforma — an entity which specialises in printing, promotional products and packaging industries, she eventually gave in, and the rest, as they would say, is history.

“I migrated to Florida and Proforma kinda sought me out,” Lanigan, vice-president for sales and commercial development at Proforma Mega Marketing Solutions, told the
Jamaica Observer in a recent interview as she outlined how she got into being one of over 500 franchises worldwide bearing the name of the company.

At the time she was headhunted Lanigan said she was working in the printing industry in Florida.

“I don’t know how they found my number,” she continued, “They kept calling [and asking if I was interested in operating a franchise] and I kept saying no, and they kept calling, and finally I said, ‘If I go to the discovery day will you stop calling?’ “

Discovery day is an event Proforma hosts as part of recruiting new franchisees. Lanigan said the company flew her to Cleveland, Ohio, for the discovery day seminar and, after being there and listening for an hour, she started to wonder why she had been resisting.

After that seminar, Lanigan said, in July 2016 she resigned her job in Florida, where she was selling billboards, something she did before in Jamaica when she was operating her own company.

“I previously co-owned a company in Jamaica called City Graphics,” Lanigan said as she outlined the beginnings of her venture into entrepreneurship. At City Graphics, Lanigan said the company started out in printing and then got into outdoor advertising, erecting billboards along the highways. That business was then sold after “we got a nice offer” and merged into National Outdoor Advertising, which later became iPrint.

Before City Graphics, Lanigan said she was the training manager at the Wyndham Hotel in New Kingston and was invited by a friend to join the company as a co-owner — a move which she said she did reluctantly, but did because of the flexibility of owning her own business at the time with a young child.

“That was 1997 and I haven’t looked back since, and haven’t left the industry since,” she added even though she admits that, before that venture, she had never thought about owning her own business.

“Becoming an entrepreneur, as oppose to working for someone, means you make your own decisions and can make decisions that impact the company quickly,” she said with a glint in her eyes.

After selling City Graphics she worked for two years in the new company before moving on to do something “completely different”.

“I then took a job as a personal assistant to Brian Jardim for two years and made him coffee. And people were like, ‘What are you doing?’ “ Lanigan said. “I don’t know really what led me to do that, but it was one of the best decisions of my life, because he put me at a desk in his office and I got the opportunity to understand what made him such a good leader.”

Jardim is the founder and CEO of Rainforest Caribbean (previously Rainforest Seafoods).

“His type of leadership is, so like, heart-centred. And I so really, really cemented and learnt so much from him to be a leader. Fast-forward to this,” she continued, referring to her now company, Proforma Mega Marketing Solutions, which she started in Tampa, Florida.

“We started in 2016 and I just kept pushing Jamaica, pushing Jamaica, pushing Jamaica,” she said. After four years of pushing, Lanigan said she decided to return to Jamaica to operate from her home market which she knew very well.

“I came home, bought a laptop, pushed my bed up against a wall, and said, ‘Let’s do this!’ And that’s what I did.”

A small desk in her bedroom served as he base, and though she said she did not have a non-compete agreement with iPrint, she decided not to go after their clients, not wanting to start on a negative note. Instead, she decided to build her own portfolio of clients and turned to a familiar friend for her first business in the island.

“I just pushed and pushed and pushed and searched out everyone that I knew, and every company that was in my area, and in my first year I went after Jamaican businesses because my low-hanging fruit was Jamaica, and my first invoice was Rainforest Seafoods,” she continued.

“Brian took a chance on me,” she said as she acknowledged that her working with him a decade earlier came full circle to helping her in her now business. “My invoice number two was Jamaica Inn, and a couple of other people took a chance on me and it grew from there.”

For Rainforest, she said the first order was in August, with the company ordering branded mugs and cups from her before placing an order for branded aprons for Christmas. In the same year, she also got her first order outside Jamaica — in the Turks and Caicos.

Seeing potential in the Caribbean, Lanigan said she decided to focus on finding business in the region. Now, the region accounts for 30 per cent of Proforma Mega Marketing Solutions’ business. Jamaica, generates 40 per cent, and the other 30 per cent of business comes from the United States.

“We do it all. If you put your name on it, we do it. That’s how I simplify what we do to people when they say, ‘What do you do?’ I could say we bring your brand to life, but that’s so clich�, but literally, if you put your name on it, that’s what we do.”

Lanigan said with the company physically in Jamaica it has made more business.

“We have close to 300 clients whose business is recurring,” she added, listing consumer goods companies Seprod Group and Wisynco Group, National Commercial Bank, telco Digicel Group, and hotels Bahia Principe and Couples Resorts as being amongst her clients.

“Most of the large companies in Jamaica have been working with us, but we also have very large companies in the rest of the Caribbean. In the US we have a real estate client with 8,000 real estate agents. We have a hotel group that has 25 hotels across the US. We have two marina groups, one which is throughout the Caribbean, US, and Europe that has 35 marinas, and another marina group with 200 marinas across the US. So those are they types of companies that we work with to manage their brands, and they like to have one vendor to do everything for them and the business is recurring,” she shared.

With the Proforma name, franchisees get to access suppliers and get good prices for their products.

“Combined Proforma corporate and all the franchises generate over US$650 million in sales,” Lanigan’s husband and business partner Armando Pizzuti, who was mostly quiet throughout the interview, chipped in.

“We get the benefit of US$650 million worth of buying power. We get that benefit and pass it on to customers,” Pizzuti, who serves as the company’s president and CEO, said. He hails from Italy and previously worked in the hotel business in the Caribbean for 30 years, the last 20 of which were spent at Sandals Resorts International as the director of food and beverage for all the brand’s hotels throughout the Caribbean.

“In 2020, I finally stopped working in the hotel business and I looked at Proforma and said, ‘You know what, this is a great opportunity,’ “ Pizzuti said. He left and joined his wife.

He said having been on the side of the desk where people were trying to sell him stuff for the hotels, he understood what those who are in his previous position looked for and that experience proved valuable in taking Proforma Mega Marketing Solutions to the next level of growth.

“I don’t know one thing about this business, but I have the network, I have the connections, and so I stopped focusing on the hotel business. I have been in the Caribbean for almost 30 something years, so my name is known in the hotel industry. So, if I take up the phone and call somebody, they’ll know me or know of me, or whatever. So, that’s where our business has also exploded also into the hotel industry, and right now we are major, major suppliers to hotels.”

To hotels, the company supplies everything from branded uniforms and beach towels and also unbranded products such as linen, unbranded uniforms, and safety shoes. Only the hotels are sold unbranded products.

“There was a client that we had in The Bahamas. This client called me and said to me, ‘You know, I am looking for 25 signs to put on my front desk.’ It’s a hotel, a big hotel. So I said, yes, sure. You have no idea the amount of time that we spent on just 25 little signs that he is going to put on his front desk with QR codes and all sorts of things. Now one of the young women here worked patiently over two months on these signs. Now, long story short, that is the same resort that sent me a purchase order for one million water bottles,” Pizzuti added.

He said it is the single largest business the company has secured to date.

Another area of expansion for the company is in e-commerce, which the company uses as a value-added service for its clients who can use the platform to make orders seamlessly.

“This internal e-commerce is driving our success and in America, every large company has this to manage all of their branded assets,” he explained further.

“I am passionate about our service. We give exceptional service and we stand behind our products,” Lanigan added.

She told a story about how she ordered US$40,000 worth of dominoes, but all came with the clients brand smudged. She said she cried and gave them to the clients free to disburse as they wish. That episode was to see her getting more business from the client, who was impressed with how the situation was dealt with.

“I spoke to the CEO of that company and he said Proforma is the only company that he was going to do business with hereafter, because of the way we handled the domino issue. Her decision to give the dominoes away, saying, ‘Here, take them,’ impressed him,” Pizzuti noted.

The couple said, in the business, the core team of 10 young people are fully empowered to make decisions without having to turn to either Lanigan or Pizzuti. This puts the company’s growth down to the team.

So, what’s next for Proforma Mega Marketing Solutions?

“I think e-commerce in Jamaica is the next area of growth for Proforma.”

The company is also pushing its loyalty programme, encouraging employers to show more value to their employees by giving them gifts to reduce employee attrition, which can be very expensive for companies.

“We are not just your cup company,” Lanigan said.

“We bring a new approach to Jamaica in this industry. We have taken what we do in the States and brought it to Jamaica. Believe it or not, companies in Jamaica are so ready to embrace a new way and a more efficient way of doing business, and that is what I think our success has been. We didn’t come to Jamaica just to say we are selling a polo shirt or a hat. We come into Jamaica and say we are offering all of this that we have done, under one umbrella, giving you the technology, giving you the e-store, and giving you all of that, and then the end product is the cup. But any other company, they just sell the product,” Pizzuti added.

Today I can say we are the leading promo company in Jamaica, for sure with respect to revenues, the employees, a different approach, technology, and everything,” he concluded.