Senior Cop urges promoters to ditch the ‘eat a food’ mentality

At a specially arranged meeting with party promoters, bar owners and business operators in the Old Harbour community in St Catherine, Senior Superintendent of Police Chris Phillips urged party promoters to organise themselves.

Phillips, speaking at the event held at the Old Harbour Courthouse last Sunday, chided some promoters for not organising themselves as business operators. He said that "some people still have the 'eat a food mentality' approach to business".

"And if you have that approach, you not going to reach anywhere far. Get out of that eat a food mentality approach to business and start to operate like real business persons," Phillips advised.

He also encouraged them to take a more serious approach to the business and engage the Human Employment and Resource Training/National Service Training Agency (HEART/NSTA), so that they can be better equipped to manage their businesses.

He said that the staging of round-robin activities as an example of genius at work, but argued that if people fail to manage their investment in the venture they will not maximise their returns.

"If you are making so much money and you have the eat a food mentality, you going fail after a while. So, I am saying to people, you have to organise yourselves, get to be far more effective and to have a voice out there," he said.

The senior cop encouraged the promoters to get organised. He told them that it is important for them to have a representative who can participate in the wider discussion about the entertainment industry.

"Get yourself organised and have a rep to speak on your behalf, because there are so many things to fix in the entertainment industry," Phillips said.

He reasoned that many of the long-promised initiatives to improve that would benefit the entertainment sector have not been implemented, and argued that an organised body, which includes party promoters, could influence positive outcomes on behalf of the sector.