Oil Brokerage chief executive James McNicol has been a busy man lately.

That is what is required when you are trying to build a serious shipbroking business from scratch.

“If you want people to come and broker ships for a company that hasn’t historically brokered ships, or isn’t a heritage player, you do have to make an amount of effort to explain what’s behind the projects, who we are as a company and how it fits with the rest of the business,” McNicol told TradeWinds on Friday in an interview from Oil Brokerage’s London headquarters.