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Hong Kong
Speeches
(After 23 years of
work and rising to become the first woman Vice President of San Miguel
Corporation in the Philippines and the President of Fantastic Garments
Philippines, Inc., Zenaida Gonzalez Gordon retired to devote more time to her
family. She soon, however, returned to business and offers the following as
Lessons She Learned from Business Failures.)
I learned my first
bitter lesson in the process of going into business with something else other
than profits in mind. I decided to start a small handknitting operation to help
the underprivileged and squatter women living by the wall of the subdivision we
were living in Makati, Philippines -- Magallanes Village. I accomplished the
following: I enjoyed the work as it gave way to my creative juices, was able to
help thirty girls, pursued a marketing niche and sold the sweaters to the local
market and did my first export. However, I soon learned that I was not
competitive, and therefore began losing money until I bled enough and had to
stop.
Lesson No.1.
Business is business and one does not enter into it unless her primary objective
is to earn money. (If one does enter with charity in mind, she should be
forewarned that she might end up being a charity case herself).
My second venture
was to go into food processing, a position of strength since I worked for a food
manufacturing company for almost twenty years. I started doing industrial
processing of cashew nuts for more than a year until I decided that nuts was our
business and moved over to importation of other nuts such as almonds, pistachios
and others. I was catering to one set of customers -- ice cream manufacturers.
Then I became
ambitious and moved on to serve the retail customers -- supermarkets, hotels and
specialty stores. We ended up roasting, flavoring and packing the nuts into
retail sizes. After conquering the top fifty supermarket stores and outlets, I
again expanded our product line to include candies and sweets on top of the
retail nut snacks with the added strategy of running our own eight retail stores
in joint venture with a gift shop chain.
Opening up stores
meant additional work and additional people. Different kinds of activities on
top of each other resulted in scattered shots and loss of focus. Dwindling
profits came about due to poor supervision and too much money put into so many
things all at the same time.
Lesson No. 2
Once you have started a business, stay on track and do not scatter your shots!
Stick to the knitting, keep your focus and mind the store!
After having a
professional organization conduct an audit, we closed our stores as we found out
that we were losing stock due to pilferage. We saved the business by going back
to our basic activity of roasting nuts and preparing these for the industrial
customers plus roasting nuts and flavoring/packing the same for retail.
I had on my team
my husband who ended up as our manufacturing man-in-charge. We had our elder son
in charge of sales. Our second son, who wanted to work first before finishing
schooling, joined us to assist in the purchasing and roasting of the nuts as we
were doing almost half a ton a day. I hired an accountant to assist me in doing
the financials. I occupied myself more than fifty percent of the time with the
research, formulation and quality control of all our nut products which became
our real strength as I saw to it that we became very familiar with our products
which we produced with good manufacturing procedures.
As the Philippines
was doing quite well in the mid-nineties, the business expanded to allow us to
serve four major ice cream companies, the top five bakeries, and about eighty
top clients consisting of hotels, restaurants, supermarkets and specialty
outlets. My eldest son was tempted to increase his reach and expanded our
business by creating a joint venture company with a partner who supported us
with funds to import the goods. We distributed a whole line of imported branded
products for the total household to all the stores we were selling our nuts. As
a supportive mother, I responded positively and allowed him to use some of our
funds to buy delivery vehicles and grow the business. Then the Asian crisis of
1997 came upon us.
We quickly closed
the joint venture set-up of importing and distributing and my son soon left us
to explore other possibilities for himself. He figured that we could not be in a
position to support an import-dependent business in a downturn. My daughter who
just finished her college then joined us to be my assistant and my second son
then moved to help us in sales. This brings me then to the next lesson:
Lesson No. 3.
In the running of a business with family members as part of the team, please be
guided at all times that running a business means survival of the fittest.
One cannot be a
doting mother nor a forgiving father or be sentimental and be fatherly or
motherly when money is concerned. All have to understand that life is all about
challenges and difficulties and profits are made by overcoming and mastering
these difficulties.
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