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FIRST JOB
'If you overanalyze, you will be paralyzed'
Posted: 3:24 AM | Mar. 12, 2006
Tina Arceo-Dumlao
Inquirer
(Published on page B1 of the March 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)
NEGROS Navigation Co. was sailing through very rough waters in 2004 when Sulficio O. Tagud Jr. was called in to save the sinking ship.
Creditors were pounding on doors of the country's oldest domestic shipping company, demanding payment for a combined debt of about P1.8 billion.
Losses were mounting because sales of about P2.5 billion were not enough to cover the P2.6 billion in direct operating costs, and it was fast losing the trust of the seagoing public.
Given its myriad and mounting problems that stemmed from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, most executives would not have touched Nenaco with a ten-foot pole.
But not Tagud.
Tagud has never run away from a challenge, and the prospect of turning around a revered name in the shipping industry was too hard to resist.
Thus, he took over the helm of the company starting March 2004 as the appointed receiver by the court, which granted Nenaco's petition for protection from its creditors to give it time and resources needed to get back on its feet.
With the legal issues sorted out, Tagud's next order of business was to win back the patronage of the passengers who shied away from Nenaco because some of the trips were cancelled or delayed.
"We needed to impress upon the public that we were in business," Tagud tells the Inquirer. "To do that, we made sure that trip schedules were kept."
Nenaco serves major destinations like
To raise badly needed revenues, Tagud says the Metro Pacific group, which owns Nenaco, put in about P250 million to complete the repair and upgrade of four more ships, bringing the fleet up to nine vessels by February 2005.
Tagud says he also had to oversee the further reduction in Nenaco's personnel from about 900 when he came in to the current force of 600, only 390 of whom are regular employees.
Tagud says it was especially painful for him to see some people let go in the course of the restructuring of Nenaco. But it was something that had to be done to keep the company afloat.
"One of the factors that made me accept this job is the prospect of helping these people, mostly blue-collar workers who won't get a job elsewhere, preserve their jobs," Tagud says. "But if we don't do this, the company will have to close and everybody will lose their jobs."
Tagud displayed the same indomitable will when he pursued the plan for Nenaco to get back the profitable food and ticketing business from third-party providers.
The decision was met with much protests and even threats to his person as many companies have been profiting for years from the food and ticketing businesses, and are loathe to let their cash cows go.
But Tagud forged on and Nenaco got the businesses back, and more profitable they have become.
The cut in costs and the increase in revenue have resulted in Nenaco reducing its net loss at the end of 2004 to P400 million from over P1 billion at the end of 2003.
By the end of last year, Nenaco posted a modest profit of P17 million and the company is looking at improving further on its bottom line this year.
Forcing the issue on the food and ticketing businesses was not the first time that Tagud went out on a limb to do what he believes is right, even if it's unpopular or may come at a cost.
Tagud, for instance, zoomed into national prominence in 2003 when he blew the whistle on the alleged overpricing of the President Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard, the construction of which went up to P1.1 billion.
Tagud was a director of the Public Estates Authority at that time, and he was instrumental in the filing of graft cases involving former top executives of PEA and officials of the Commission on Audit before the Sandiganbayan.
The hearings on the case continue and he remains a principal witness.
Tagud likewise stood up to Manuel Villar in 1998 and convinced him as chief executive officer of C&P Homes that going into middle-income housing was the right thing to do.
Tagud led the team in reorienting C&P Homes from the declining "low-cost" housing market to the growing mid-income housing market, pioneering and tapping more extensively the overseas Filipino workers when no housing developers dared in the early '90s.
"Management for me is really just about common sense," Tagud says, "if you overanalyze, you will be paralyzed."
He has been living by this principle since he was six, when he started helping his mother sell fish in the public market in Cagayan de Oro.
His father was a fisherman.
The fifth of seven children knew then that if he were to get ahead in life, he had to help himself.
Thus, he applied himself to his studies and was a scholar from grade school to college, which was just as well as his parents would not have been able to put him through school.
Tagud got his bachelor's degree in Business Administration from
He went to
Tagud then moved to the Ayala group in 1976 after getting his Master in Business Administration from the Ateneo de Manila University.
He would stay with them for 20 years in various capacities, from vice president to the Bank of the Philippine Islands to assistant vice president of Ayala Land Inc. and general manager/director of Cebu Holdings Inc.
He credits the Ayala group for showing him the ropes in the corporate world, which was invaluable in handling his subsequent posts at Nation Broadcasting Corp., C&P Homes Inc. and Nenaco, which he considers his payback to society.
"Some of us have to be there to save jobs in danger of being lost," he says.
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