Loving and living life on her terms

“These are the best years of my life,” an ear-to-ear-smiling Nayana Williams declares.

The drab, grey, cloudy weather Mother Nature is serving on a mid-week afternoon stands in vivid contrast to the beaming aura of this bottled spring-water head honcho.

Williams, founder and chief executive officer of Life Span Company Limited, recently joined the 50 club and is feeling fabulous about the milestone.

“I am so much wiser than I was and more accepting of who I am. I know myself so much better, and I’m still learning, but I am so much more acquainted with who I am,” the reflective boss lady shares in a Sunday Gleaner conversation on the balcony overlooking the pool at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel.

The road to 50 was far from a smooth ride, with hairpin curves along the way.

First-time pregnancy complications and the birth of her special-needs daughter. Business start-up teething pains. And the COVID-impacted fallout on Lifespan’s operations. Harking back to what led to the here and now, she is thankful for every obstacle faced.

“The definition of success for me on the personal front is happiness and being at peace and [being] able to enjoy the present moment,” she tells The Sunday Gleaner. “Peace is everything for me.”

“On the professional side, it’s being able to see my business and team grow and everyone flourishing as a result of what I have created.”

Adolescent dreams aflutter, she left The Rock at 17 to pursue a tertiary education in California, United States, at the Institute of Technology, now LA College. There, the Marking Stone, St Mary-raised Williams would secure a business management degree.

She gave birth to her first child, Elizabeth, with her Titchfield High School sweetheart-turned-former-husband Devon Williams, but complications arose during Nayana’s third trimester.

“At 21, when I was seven months pregnant, she was turning [in the womb] and the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, cutting off her oxygen supply,” she explained. “So they had to do an emergency C-section, and as a result, she was born developmentally delayed.”

In the midst of a baptism of fire at the time, the new mom remembers: “I was prepared to give her everything she needed because I knew she would not be able to live a normal life and go through the different experiences of the average child. I decided [that] whatever I had to do to make her life as stress-free and comfortable as possible, that’s what I would have to do. I think she has been the biggest inspiration for me in my entire life.”

Nayana and Devon tied the knot in Jamaica at her parents’ St Mary home shortly after Elizabeth’s birth. On account of the issues facing their newborn, Nayana decided it was best to return to the States. “I wanted to get Elizabeth the help she needed, and California was one of the best places for that. There were programmes in place for children with disabilities, and I had persons coming to my house, for example, to give her speech therapy. She even went to school.”

Remaining fiercely devoted to her now 30-year-old offspring, Williams does not shirk from the reality of time being seemingly frozen. “I think of her as my 10-year-old still. It’s as if she is stuck in that body ... there hasn’t been any kind of phase that she’s gone through. The only phase that I can speak of, she has fine motor skills and walked when she was seven years old, but she does not speak, but I can understand her. She can look directly in your eyes and you can tell everything. I think, for me, Elizabeth has taught me to be a strong person. She gave me the strength to just go out there, and never take no for an answer.”

Motherhood lessons – thanks to her second-born Milan, now 21 – have also been a replenishing source of enlightenment. “My son is very practical. He loves cars and has taught me about men. I am still trying to get to know him because he is changing. He has all of these phases that he’s going through. It’s a learning process as a mother to see him develop and become a man.”

A dapperly attired Milan, who has accompanied his mother to the interview, has politely seated himself two tables away, attentively focused on day-trading on his phone. He is currently studying business administration at the University College of the Caribbean, and Mama Bear proudly shares that “he is doing his own thing on the side, and presently a management trainee at Lifespan.”

The spring-water business started 21 years ago after Milan’s birth when Nayana, then a resident in downtown Los Angeles, opted to return to Jamaica with her young family to live in her hubby’s north-east coast home parish.

“Portland is such a beautiful, laid-back parish, but there was no industry and no career opportunities, so I had to create one for myself,” the business college alum shared. “I did a lot of research, and one of the things I identified was the abundance of water, as there was much rainfall and so many springs.”

What would actually trigger the intrepid entrepreneur into action, though, was an episode with a water provider.

“I’ve always been an avid water drinker. When I came back, there was a water company just up the road from us. I sent to buy a case of water, but when I drank it, [it] was not to my liking... . I knew Jamaica [had] really great water, so why was the water tasting like this?” Williams knew at that moment that she could do better.

To this end, she crafted a business plan, crunched the numbers, and presented projections to her ex-husband, who she lauded as “a technical person with being a pilot and marine navigator. He was very hands-on in constructing the plant”.

“We had a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was erecting the plant right by the source at Spring Garden, Portland. But then we had to apply to the Government for certain things, and that took a very long time to come through,” she recalled of the company’s beginnings. “Once we realised, we had [to effect] a Plan B. We had land, which was 15 minutes away from the source, and decided to erect the plant there, truck the water to the plant and do the bottling there. Five years later, we were able to realise Plan A.”

For the little company that could, Lifespan’s organic growth mushroomed into a raging success from its 40-acre property in Buff Bay. Expanding over 14,000 per cent in its first decade of operation, Williams recalled that “we started off with three persons, including myself, my former husband, and another employee, and today, we are at about 127 employees, which can fluctuate depending on the season.”

Angling to scale up, plans were afoot three years ago to make the multimillion-dollar-valued Lifespan a publicly listed company, but the pandemic’s arrival and ensuing global fallout was an unceremonious disruption.

“The lockdown impacted revenues because sales would have declined, and with the after-effects, we had a supply-chain nightmare. We were unable to get the materials to do our full production. Shipping costs went up 500 per cent. Those are issues we had to contend with, coming out of the pandemic, but we bounced back, and I am grateful.”

Speaking against the background of production normalcy now in place, Williams told The Sunday Gleaner: “We have had to restrategise. Now we are looking at going public within the next 18 months.”

Immensely proud of Lifespan being the only National Sanitation Foundation-certified bottled water plant in Jamaica, she is happy, too, with the trove of international awards that have been secured over the years. This includes taking home the Monde Selection Gold Quality Award in the superior water category for five consecutive years from the Brussels, Belgium-based International Quality Institute, which tests thousands of consumer products across the world annually.

“Just to consistently hear the testimonials of persons who consume and love our water and being able to get past the first 10 years and sitting down to tell you that we are 20 years old, that for me is gold,” said Williams, who received word last week from Europe that Lifespan is set to receive its sixth award from Monde Selection.

Away from running her growing business empire, the divorced mother of two is a budding, prolific wordsmith.

With the 2022 self-published memoir The Lifespan Movement: Progress, Purpose, Happiness already under her belt, coming soon is a how-to guide for entrepreneurs-to-be.

“It’s about 95 per cent complete and focuses on entrepreneurial tips and giving different scenarios I have had experience with and how I was able to manoeuvre past them,” she revealed of the book’s status. The multitasking business woman also has a fictional novel in the works, whose plot she outlines is “about three female friends who are decades apart and how they navigate the different eras of their lives.”

A self-professed bibliophile, a number of books have occupied recent space by Williams’ bedside table. Among the tomes are late activist and former South African President Nelson Mandela’s autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom (which she is rereading), actor and musician Will Smith’s memoir Will and Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by psychologist Angela Duckworth, that explores the tenets of achieving success through self-interrogation.

She traces her love of disappearing into the narrative worlds imagined and real back to adolescence, which found her at the time an avid fan of novelist Sidney Sheldon’s work.

“When I was 17, I read his book Bloodline, whose main character’s name was Elizabeth Williams, and she was this business tycoon. I always wanted to be like her, and in fact, I became her,” she reflected on the serendipitous path her life took, which also inspired the name of her firstborn.

Chalking up the string of successes she has achieved as a female corporate boss to discipline, a positive disposition and focus, Williams has learnt, too, to strike a work-life balance.

“I used to think I was a superwoman and invincible. I am so much wiser now, I know that does not exist,” she readily admits. “I was trying to do so many things all at once. Being a mother, being a wife, running a business, and at times, it became challenging, and I think you have to have support, and sometimes, if you don’t, one area might suffer as a result. I had to learn and understand the different areas and how to cope and make it work.”

Forecasting what life might resemble 20 years from now, her broadest smile yet appears as she gives thought: “I think I will be in a cabin somewhere writing another book.”

lifestyle@gleanerjm.com