“My interest is very deep as it relates to the digital creative economy and its development in Jamaica.” — a simple start line from Tyrone Wilson, founder and CEO of Icreate, as we prepped for the interview about his sojourn into business, fresh out of university.

But iCreate, a creative institute developed with the aim of filling the gap in skills training and development of creatives in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, as outlined by the entity’s website, is not the first business Wilson started.

“We started eMedia as eZines Limited. That was as far back as 2008. That was me coming right out of college with no work experience, but wanting to be an entrepreneur,” he outlined to the Jamaica Observer. Wilson had studied banking and finance and would have been expected to work in that field, but his heart was elsewhere.

“I had an experience at UWI where I was on the Guild executive as the publications chairperson, so I was responsible for student magazines, student newspapers and all of those things which piqued my interest in media.”

Wilson said as part of his “training”, he had a stint at the The Gleaner writing for its Youth Link pages. “While there my curiousity increased to understand the business and apply that experience at UWI and inspired me to start my own company,” he continued.

“I was broke then, extremely broke,” he told the Business Observer. He, however, said he was confident his idea would work, because the world was increasingly going digital at that point. A pitch was made to investors to finance the business and Wilson was successful. He said he decided to make the pitch because “we really don’t go to banks to finance our start-up ideas.”

“I got the investments and moved forward,” he said of the launch of eMedia which published e-zines — a number of digital magazines exploring different topics. “Very shortly after that I was able to attract Sagicor Investments who approached me in 2011 and invested US$350,000 in eMedia. Since then, one thing has led to the other and then we decided to go public and attract capital through the stock exchange.” That decision to go public was with iCreate. eMedia is now a holding business for iCreate. Some of the things that were operated in eMedia were transferred to iCreate.

Of the transition, Wilson said: “We were doing production in the digital media space and I realised that my passion went deeper than digital media and went to the overall creative economy. I saw the opportunity to build a business that can play in multiple spaces in the digital creative economy.”

“From an investment perspective in terms of driving profits, attracting capital and expanding the overall potential of it…with the parent company, eMedia Interactive Group, we are involved in building production, agency, video, TV content, advertising content, all of that. And we had a very robust internship programme that we actually coined iCreate. The idea around the internship programme was to attract young people from universities and give them the opportunity to work early in the creative industry. So we attracted people from Carimac, UTech, Edna Manley and they would work as graphic designers, content creators, photographers…we had maybe about 10 young people, and in doing that internship programme, we realised that on top of what they were learning in school, there was a gap, and we needed to fill that gap. It was more the application, the more practical element of executing the work and that led us to start iCreate. We said, why not do it ourselves and that’s how iCreate started.”

But before venturing into the business, Wilson said a market test was done from as early as 2017 and the results were encouraging. With market acceptance, Wilson said he decided to structure the company and registered it as its own limited liability company in 2018 and in 2019 listed on the Junior Market of the Jamaica Stock Exchange after raising $70 million in February 2019.

“So the business moved from e-magazines to an agency to training and now to real estate and now I am even bringing back festivals like Reggae Sunsplash. So I am bringing everything together to form what is a creative conglomerate that seeks to exploit opportunities within the entire space.” Not bad for “a young man from the ghetto who just finished his degree and had nothing but an idea and a dream,” said Wilson who hails from Kintyre, St Andrew.

Listing

He said the decision to list was an eye-opener for him, especially given that iCreate was a start-up unlike most of the other companies which are listed when they are more mature entities. “So it was a bit more challenging for a company like iCreate to gain the trust of the public to raise capital.” But that challenge was seen as an opportunity for Wilson “to go out there and sell the vision of what we want to achieve.”

He was also quick to admit that things were not rosy in the beginning.

“iCreate’s starting phase on the market was really rough. In 2019, our first year of listing, we made huge losses. When you start making losses, you start having problems all around. The board, the management all start to doubt what you are capable of. You can imagine how tough that was, I lost a lot of sleep. But this business is something that I care about. I put my name on the line, making promises about what the business is capable of but was just not getting there for whatever reason, we were not hitting the targets. Then people started to sell off, the stock price fell and at one point was 50 per cent below the IPO price. Then people started to leave the company, staff and the board for various reasons. Then in 2020 it got worse. Even before COVID, it got worse. There were clashes between members of the team and more people resigning.”

Even the auditors raised questions in the 2020 financials.

“We draw attention to…the financial statements which indicate that the company made a loss of $29,064,713 (2019: $45,950,076) for the year ended December 31, 2020 and has accumulated deficit of $89,862,844 (2019: $60,798,131) as at the end of the year. Further, as at December 31, 2020, the company’s current liabilities exceeded its current assets by $22,983,209 (2019: $33,543,299). From inception the company has not achieved the level of revenues projected and required to sustain its operations. This indicates the existence of a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” Crichton Mullings, iCreate’s auditors, said in the audited report for 2020.

Wilson pointed to the coronavirus pandemic as one of the main reasons behind the downturn. “Between the quarter, January to March 2020, we made $24.5 million in revenues and $1.4 million in profit…a big turnaround and then came covid.” The revenues earned in the first three months of 2020 were almost 50 per cent of all revenues earned for all of 2019. With the company facing losses in 2020, Wilson spurred into action.

“We were one of the first companies to put out a COVID plan on the JSE. We were already making lots of losses, we were near bankrupt, we had no cash, so we had to change quickly. We started to close locations. We closed down Montego Bay, we scaled back in Kingston and we moved classes online and started a plan to reduce costs by 60 per cent. We were able to stabilise the business even better than before COVID. Still the other quarters began to show the effects of COVID with revenues slowing down, but we were able to manage costs and keep the business viable,” he told the Business Observer.

With those changes, Wilson hailed the year 2020 as pivotal for the company “because later down in the year we were able to add some new members to the board who were more aligned to what I wanted for the company. That is not to say that the previous board members were not. However, it was a combination of board members that I was comfortable with and they gave me the room and the latitude as the CEO to really implement the strategies that I wanted for iCreate, which is for iCreate to become a creative conglomerate. At our AGM in 2020 we outlined the way forward for iCreate involves diversification. So training, while it was our core, it was to be just one aspect of what we do. Then we were moving into the agency side, bringing the agency build up for eMedia under iCreate.”

Its financials for 2021 are delayed, but the last report for the nine months to September 30, 2021 shows revenues of $31 million was down a third from the previous years. At the bottomline, profits of $3.8 million was realised.

Wilson said iCreate also has plans to venture into infrastructural development, which he said will be called a creative city. He shared that this project will build real estate spaces for the creative economy.

He said one of the biggest challenges that the creative industry faces is a lack of proper infrastructure to host events. For this, he said his company intends to build spaces which he said will be owned by private investors. A Hall of Fame museum is also planned, which he hopes will be completed by next year.

“We also created iCreate Opportunity Ventures that will acquire and build businesses that weren’t trained, so everything other than the business institute will fall under the opportunities ventures,” Wilson said.

However, Wilson admitted that the company has faced difficulties such as being indebted, but said it was able to move past this challenge through making wise decisions and by maximising its profits.

“ At the end of 2021, we raised about $70 million in convertible debt that has enabled us to clean our balance sheet, so when you look at the iCreate balance sheet, all the debt is reduced,” he said, adding that the debt was converted into shares.

iCreate has acquired the rights for music festival Reggae Sunsplash, and Wilson told the Jamaica Observer that this is another area of development that the company is targeting.

“We believe that a reggae music festival is probably the one true display of creativity in motion — you’ll have musicians performing, photographers and videographers at work, graphic designing and advertising …a festival is an outlet of so many creative offshoots and it’s also a breeding ground for our creatives who we train to get experience at that high level,” he said.

Wilson added that there is much to gain from a big festival such as this one, and said it is a good attraction for tourists as well as locals.

Although Wilson admits that he regrets not starting his company sooner, he said it has been a rewarding journey.

“My biggest win was listing iCreate on Jamaica Stock Exchange; I was heavily involved in that process from legal to investment structuring the board — just being able to look at starting a company from a hunch, to bringing it to the highest level in operating in a business environment in the country… I think that is a big win for me and an experience that I’m committed to,” Wilson said.