Calvin Murray.
JAMAICA · A PERSONAL RECORD
JAMAICA
Calvin Murray
I was the customer before I was the agency.
I have run my own businesses in Jamaica for thirty years.
Six months on somebody else's payroll. The rest of it, my own.
I learned to build websites because my own business needed one and I could not afford anybody to do it.
01 ── BEFORE ANY OF THIS
I have run my own businesses here since I left school.
I started in tailoring. When people began buying ready made clothes and the work dried up, I moved into art and craft, and wood carving. When carving got hard, I took the only job I have ever had: six months in a sewing factory in the Freeport in Montego Bay. Then I went back to working for myself, and I have been there ever since.
In 2009 I started a cooking gas retail business with my first wife, Christine, in a town we had just moved to. We opened a deli alongside it.
So when I sit with somebody who runs a shop in Jamaica, I am not guessing. I have had the slow months, the stock sitting there, and the days the phone does not ring.
Read the longer story
Tailoring
I left high school and learned tailoring. For a while it was a living. Then people started buying ready made clothes, the work came in slower and slower, and I could see where it was going.
Wood carving
So I moved into art and craft, and wood carving. I liked it and I was good at it. It is also why I understand the people who make things for a living and why their work is hard to sell.
That got difficult too. Craft is seasonal, and it depends on people having money to spend on something they do not need.
The only job I have ever had
For about six months I worked in a sewing factory in the Freeport in Montego Bay, making t-shirts. Then I left, and I have worked for myself ever since.
That is the whole of my employment history. Six months.
2009. Cooking gas.
I got married and moved to a new town, and I saw that nobody there was doing cooking gas properly. I started a cooking gas retail business with my first wife, Christine.
It worked. We later opened a deli alongside it, as a second arm of the same business.
Twelve years in that trade taught me more about customers than any course has since. People do not call you until the gas runs out. You learn to be the one they remember.
2016. Starting again.
In 2016 I was overseas for an extended stay, and I needed another way to earn.
I looked for work. A friend told me about a contact centre job and I went for the interview, but the position I was suited to was not available. So I went looking online instead.
One evening on YouTube I came across a way of earning online that I had never heard of. It needed a website, and I had no idea how to build one.
Learning it
I took courses on Lynda, which is now LinkedIn Learning, and on edX, and watched a great deal of YouTube. I built my first website in early 2018.
It was not good. The next one was better. And the one after that was better again.
I did not learn this to become a marketer. I learned it because my own business needed it and I could not afford to pay anybody.
2019. ChoiceGas.
I built an online cooking gas shop with a working checkout, at a time when nobody in Jamaica was selling cooking gas online. Registered with the Companies Office on 2 August 2019.
I wrote the articles myself. How to make a cylinder last longer. Why the cheap gas is cheap. How to keep children safe around the kitchen. People read them, and some of them became customers.
That was the first time I understood that writing something useful brings you business.
2020. The lockdowns.
The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management gave us permission to keep delivering cooking gas while the country was shut down.
We took card and online transfer at a time when most small businesses here were still cash only. People could not leave their homes. We went to them.
2022 to 2025. Other people's businesses.
I started building for other people under my own name. Websites, Google listings, and the writing that goes with them. Mostly small businesses, mostly people who had been told they needed a website and had no idea what to do with one.
2026. Why I started again.
The way people find a business changed.
They are not only searching now. They are asking ChatGPT and Google's AI where to go, and the answer comes back as three or four names. Most Jamaican businesses are not in that answer, and most of them do not know it yet.
That is what I work on now, through ReachMax Limited.
I have been the small business owner who could not be found. That is the only qualification I would want.
02 ── HOW I ENDED UP DOING THIS
2016. I needed another way to earn.
I was overseas, and I went looking online for something I could do from anywhere. I found a business model on YouTube that needed a website, and I had no idea how to build one.
I took courses on Lynda, now LinkedIn Learning, and edX, and watched a great deal of YouTube. I built my first website in early 2018.
It was not good. The next one was better.
03 ── WHAT I BUILT WITH IT
One problem led to the next thing.
First for my own business. Then for other people.
2019
ChoiceGas.
An online cooking gas shop with a working checkout, at a time when nobody in Jamaica was selling cooking gas online. I wrote the articles, ran the ads and set up the tracking myself.
Registered with the Companies Office of Jamaica on 2 August 2019, number 7007/2019.
2020
The lockdowns.
The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management gave us permission to keep delivering cooking gas while the country was shut down. We took card and online transfer when most small businesses here were still cash only.
2022–25
Building for other people.
Websites, Google listings, and the writing that goes with them, under my own name.
2026
ReachMax Limited.
The way people find a business changed again. They are asking AI tools now, and most Jamaican businesses are invisible to them. That is what I do today, through ReachMax Limited.
04 ── CONTACT
Get in touch
If you want to ask me something directly, this reaches me.