Franchise Times: No entrepreneur is an island, Part 2

Saturday, January 14, 2006
Manila Times

FRANCHISE TIMES
By Rommel T. Juan
No entrepreneur is an island, Part 2

As mentioned last week, a successful business is often surrounded with brilliant people, beginning with mentors. Aside from mentors, we should also seek the help of pros and pick the brains of colleagues. To continue:

2. Get consultants

I have never hesitated to hire consultants to help me with Binalot. I recognize that I don’t always possess the knowledge for many disciplines. So when we decided to franchise the Binalot business model, we didn’t think twice about getting the services of GMB Franchise consultancy. We found an effective partner in developing our franchise as well as generous and comforting friends in Mr. and Mrs. Butz Bartolome, the force behind GMB. The decision proved fruitful as franchising became our main growth strategy in the recent years.

I also sought outside help when it came to financial and accounting matters, which was my particular waterloo. My ME classmate Mr. MJ Madrid put me on the right track when it came to accounting while my former Drill Master at AIM Mr. Dennis Ang is helping me plot the financial direction of the company.

Consultants help you focus on what is necessary, thus helping you reach objectives faster and more efficiently than when you do it yourself. This is especially true if the particular area is not your field of expertise.

3. Network

I cannot even hope to enumerate all the benefits I have gotten from networking. I’ve learned many lessons from small conversations, from long discussions, while networking with peers.

The first association I seriously joined was the Association of Filipino Franchisers. Here, I met members who were much like me and whose businesses were just like mine. We were all Filipino owned, homegrown SMEs that were (or was planning to) franchise our business concepts.

Through AFFI meetings and activities I learned so many things from co-members’ experiences and experiments with their own enterprise. I would always catch myself thinking: “Hey, I can try that with Binalot!” whenever a good idea was being discussed. People at AFFI also pushed me to greater heights by giving me more responsibilities in the association, sharing their suppliers with me, keeping me abreast with current trends and even in nominating me for as one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs for 2005.

Another effective network I stumbled into was my AIM Master of Entrepreneurship batch in back in 2003. I met the most diverse, passionate and exciting business people in my life. Our batch consisted of 90 colorful individuals spread across a vast number of industries and disciplines.

In this one venue I was able to discover virtually every kind of supplier I would ever need in my businesses.

We were all business people who wanted to learn more in order to improve our existing businesses.

I learned just as much through discussions with my ME classmates as I did from our classroom lectures.

After I graduated I ended up setting up businesses with some of my classmates and I still sometimes seek the advice of some of them before I decide on something major.

Watch out next week for Part 3: Employees.
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The Franchise Times is a public service project of the Association of Filipino Franchisers Inc. (AFFI) and The Manila Times. This week’s contributor, Mr. Rommel Juan is AFFI PRO and president of Binalot Fiesta Foods Inc. For feedback, please email editor@filfranchisers.com. For more info on AFFI, log on to www.filfranchisers.com, call the AFFI Secretariat at 873-8144, or text AFFI to Smart 326.