"I'm... going... to... be... rich."
That was me talking to myself slowly, savouring the thought of a rich "me", after Bobby, my friend (a former P&G manager turned entrepreneur) showed me the Best-case-scenario Lotus 123[1] spread sheet of the Gary V. concert project that we were going to produce to make tons of money and at the same time promote the retail casual clothing store, TEED, that we had just put up the year before.
Talk about the proverbial hitting two birds with one stone! We were geniuses and Bobby and I looked at each other agreeing silently with our Cheshire cat smiles that we were geniuses, albeit in our own minds.
I was actually feeling like one of those cool jeans and t-shirt clad young entrepreneurs in their 20s that you read about who were on the verge of success.
Bobby and I were scheming and talking with really good pepperoni pizza in our mouths in the cramped studio that I was renting from an elderly lady who lived next door with her dad, her daughter and her three children. This family turned their garage into a studio and had the courage to charge P7,500 a month (a fortune in the early 90s) for the space to unsuspecting suckers...like me.
There was a room above me which happened to be rented by my girlfriend, Tingting, and her sister, Chilet.
The room next to mine was where my landlady's father slept. The walls were so thin that I could literally hear my landlady's father breath when he slept. If I had cared, I would have blessed him whenever he sneezed. But I was too full of myself to say "bless you." (That's what happens, I guess, when you're young and ambitious and have two more years of car payments to make. I just didn't care enough.)
Anyway, any picture of two guys talking about making money while eating pizza with their hands in a studio carved out of a garage and you've got the makings of a success story. Come on, you've got to agree. Every entrepreneurial success story I had heard of or read seemed to involve one or two young punks who had dropped out of school or from the corporate world, eating pepperoni pizza with their hands and talking about conquering the world from their dinky garage cum office.
I had just decided to resign from a well-paying job in an international publishing company to start up two different businesses. It was a decision that I made without too much thought or prayer (simply because I did not know how to pray or really believed in it). I had a next to the corner office in Citibank Tower with a view of the park and if I played my cards right (meaning suck up to our Jewish publisher in Hong Kong and promise that I'd make more money for him next year)—who knows, I would have had that corner office in another year or two.
But I had all these ideas of the different businesses that I wanted to put up and they had a life of their own. They all whispered to me during the day and in my sleep like baby Aliens growing in my tummy, begging not to be aborted and blasted away:
"Squawk! Start me up!"
"Squawk! Start me up!"
"Do it now! Do it now!"
I remember writing in my journal that I knew I wouldn't have peace until I had become an entrepreneur. I had worked for seven years and had the "7 year itch." At that time, there were no Masters in Entrepreneurship (ME) courses offered at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) where I could get a scholarship if I wanted to (being the son of a professor). There was no Entrepreneur Magazine being published in the Philippines yet to help scratch that itch. There were livelihood courses on Prawn farming and dress making and stuff like that but that was about it.
Inc. Magazine published out of Boston and Guy Kawasaki's book about his adventure as being part of the team of Steve Jobs, when he founded Apple, watered the entrepreneurial seedling in my soul. The fertilizer and sun that brought the seedling into a sap/tree was a book that I am sometimes ashamed to name. The book was called "How to Work a 4-Hour Day." (But hey, I guess there is nothing to be ashamed of that now, because there is a newer book published in 2008, titled "Work a 4-Hour Week"!)
That title got me excited. But please don't get me wrong. I was a hard worker. Having worked in a start up magazine before sometimes required me and my team to work 23 hour days straight to make our publishing deadlines. I liked the thrill and bragging rights of having done that especially to my friends who worked in banks.
My job at this particular international publishing company required me to read or review new business or self-help titles from 3 or 4 big publishing companies including McGraw Hill, Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins. I decided which books got featured in our Books By Mail, mail order catalogue (you can tell that this was during the pre-Amazon days) that was doing really well—well enough to get noticed by the big bosses.
I read the book during office hours (which tells a lot about my work load and my corporate work ethic) and I kept on reading until I found out how to work a 4 hour day (and not get fired.)
It turns out that you could only really work a four hour day—surprise, surprise—if you owned your day. Most employees don't own their days enough to tell their bosses that starting today they would work 4 hour days; but their production output would be like they worked 8 hours ("so please Boss, allow me to work just 4 hours a day"). What the author concluded was that it was best if you could own your day—just like those who owned a business.
This sounded good to me. But looking back, I didn't realize that most of us in that office were really just working 4 hours a day. I mean the other 4 hours in our 8 hour work day could be spent this way:
· 1 hour semi-long lunch (12noon sharp to 1pm) at the corporate canteen; or when the bosses were away a looong 2 hour lunch at the Talipapa (fish landing),
· 15 minutes in the nice corporate men's room brushing teeth and talking about where we were going after 5pm),
· 1 hour talking to a colleague planning our next vacation to Boracay and how much it was going to cost,
· 45 minutes reading the newspaper to scan the competition in the business pages or check out their advertising (yeah right) and well, fill up the crossword section
· 45 minutes buying (including taking orders for others and try to look helpful and caring) and eating "merienda" from the entrepreneurial lady who went from office to office selling greasy "turon" (banana fritters), "balut" (day old duck eggs), or cheese pimiento spread in pan de sal.
· 15 minutes for ______________ (fill in the blank yourself).
(Of course, this may be a little bit exaggerated if I'm being really dishonest.)
Anyway, I guess that book gave me a picture of what could be my typical day as an entrepreneur. I could work hard for 4 hours and then have enough time to do the "important" things in life. Make a marriage and family work, play golf, watch movies, contribute to society or volunteer and make the world a better place to live in.
And so I took the plunge.
My best friend in the office, Bernie, and I submitted our resignation letters at the same time. I would received about 3 months salary as separation pay and I thought that would be enough to keep me afloat until I hit paydirt with the two businesses that I was going to start up or had already started up in the few months before I had resigned. First was the T-shirt/casual clothing store that I started with my golfing friend, Bobby, which we positioned next to the Levi's outlet in the one and only real Mall in Cagayan de Oro City; the other business was a List Rental and Direct Marketing agency that I was going to start with Bernie, whom I ate "turon" with and talked about golf and future vacations.
I borrowed money from my Dad, at that time the professor of International Marketing at AIM, to help start business #1. Although I had some savings, that money was "no-touch" moola for the wedding that Tingting and I had scheduled to happen in a year or two.
Actually, funds or no funds, I preferred it—the wedding—to happen sooner, because something weird was happening to her. All of a sudden she was talking about us "living in sin." I told her that, technically, we weren't 'living in sin' because first, she lived upstairs in a separate room from which she tiptoed to my room when everybody else was asleep, and secondly, I loved her and we did agree that we were going to get married.
I was surprised that she didn't buy that reasoning being the smart woman that she is and the irresistible agent-007-of-entrepreneurship-man-on-the-verge-of-untold-riches that I was. (And by the way, she said, aside from thinking that having premarital sex was a bad idea, Tingting thought our concert project which we decided to make into a two night concert deal, was also a bad idea. That she had this "bad feeling" about it.)
Anyway, I felt bad about not being able to "express how much I loved her" that no matter how much I tried to seduce her with my wet puppy eyes, bottom line was she didn't want to make out with me anymore.
Alas, being an optimist, I looked at the cup as half-full. I thought to myself, "Fine...okay, I'll go with her vow of celibacy. Now, I'll have more energy to pursue my entrepreneurial start-ups." (Which looking back without rose-colored glasses, was really a lame excuse, because there was always Lipovitan, the precursor of Red Bull.) But I was so full of "Think and Grow Rich" positive self-talk that if she had told me to take a hike, I would have taken it literally and hiked to Mt. Kilamanjaro...or Mt Everest. Take your pick. I was going to climb every mountain, search near and far, follow every rainbow...ta da ta da ta da.
I didn't care if my future wife was going Julie-Andrews-Sound-of-Music-pure on me.
I was going to be rich. (And heck, I was going to show her! I was planning to surprise Tingting with a honeymoon in Paris and a new house to come home to afterwards.)
As I looked at the spreadsheet that Bobby left, the concert promoting business actually looked even more promising than the retail shop business itself. And hey! You know who we got as our very first concert artist to promote? The very best. The concert King. We tried getting Lea Salonga and then The Eraserheads, but through the advertising rep in the office who moonlighted as an agent dabbling in tv and entertainment, we were able to book THE Gary Valenciano.
Bobby told me that the last time he performed in Cagayan de Oro, there was literally a stampede for tickets.
Gary V was the concert king and no one had ever lost money producing a Gary V concert*. Definitely, I was not going to be the first one.
"I'm
going
to
be
rich."
I said that to myself in my best positive self-talk voice ala James-Earl-Jones'-"This-is-CNN"-voice-over that I could muster.
It was a statement that could only be matched in history by the definiteness of the Titanic's engineer when he said, "This ship is unsinkable."
++++
[1]For you kids out there, Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet app before there was Excel. So this dates me back to 1993.
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