Personal – Jahmone Salmon

I didn’t become an entrepreneur because I had a business plan. I became one because of small moments that changed how I saw things.

In my late teens I was unemployed. One afternoon a few younger kids from my community asked how many CXC subjects I had. “Fifteen,” I said. One of them turned to the others: “He has fifteen subjects, leads the youth club, and still can’t get a job.”

They weren’t making fun of me. They were trying to work out what it meant for them. If someone who did everything they were told was still struggling, what chance did they have? That question stayed with me. I realised I couldn’t just tell people things would get better. I had to build a life that answered it.

A few months later someone invited me to an Amway meeting. People were reading, sharing ideas, setting goals and working on themselves, and it felt like I’d found my people. But one thought kept interrupting: if I was going to dedicate my life to building something, why not build something of my own?

So I did. I sold on the phones at VXI by day and studied marketing at UWI by night. In 2018 I started Hubmark®. Every dream I once filed under “someday”, including finally visiting New York City, reminds me that where you start doesn’t have to decide where you end up.

That’s still the work. Since 2018 Hubmark® has served 240+ clients across the Caribbean, North America and Latin America. As a Zoho Authorized Partner, I help businesses map how leads become customers and how their people deliver, then build the systems in Zoho One that make it repeatable. The sales floor taught me the customer side. Running a business taught me the rest.

Years ago my director and I signed off on a supplier’s report. We’d double-checked it. But when it came time to update our system, something didn’t add up. We went back in and found a small error that had already rippled into later reports.

I emailed the supplier straight away. It was Boxing Day. She replied the same day, and she was furious, though I was never sure whether it was about the report or the holiday. When we finally met face to face this year there was no awkwardness at all. She even invited me to her event.

The lesson stuck: a report being signed off doesn’t mean you stop asking questions. Sometimes a problem only shows up when you follow it far enough downstream. And yes, I also learned to schedule my emails.

It’s why the journeys I build for clients have checks downstream: approval routing, validation rules and dashboards that catch an error before it ripples into the next report.