Entrepreneurship - Aquabest (Day 4)

Success stories of Filipino Entrepreneurs - Carson Tan.

Day 4, Continuation... Carson believes that if an entrepreneur has a vision and commits his plan to God, and works hard, God will eventually lead him to success. He also believes in not just jumping into the bandwagon, but being original in some way, tweaking the concept to give the market better, innovative products.

Keep on visualizing the future. It's not the product, it's the idea. It's the concept of what you have to offer. Today, we have a lot of services and products that are truly innovative. Take the barbershop. The old barbershop had basic services before and catered only to males. Now, even females can go to the new "barbershops" that have been transformed to something like spas, thus offering much more. Some establishments even have swimming pools so families can partake of the services.

It's the concept, like I said. Right now after Aquabest, we are trying our best to visualize our future. After pure water, there's alkaline. Next time, it will be oxygenated water. We also want to venture into the "air" business. For now our vision for Aquabest is "An Aquabest store in every barangay!" patterned after Bill Gates' "A computer in every home."

Aside from vision, Carson believes that timing is also very important. Therefore entrepreneurs should be able to time the carrying out of their visions perfectly. Part of this is having the conviction to forge ahead even if those around you do not support your vision.

There are a lot of people who have a vision but are easily discouraged. They have no conviction and patience. Thomas Edison could have stopped at 999, but in his 1,000th experiment, he discovered filament. Now that's real perseverance. A lot of people have excellent idea, but most of them don't spring into action. They don't have the conviction to execute their plan.

Carson believes one big advantage that Filipino entrepreneurs have is their creativity. He is amazed at the constant innovations being done on existing products. He calls the people who are behind these "innovators."

Carson also wishes that small-and medium-scale entrepreneurs can be given more access to capital. As a longtime businessman, he has seen how large businesses are given better access to loans and how they are able to haggle for better interest rates. This, he believes, is the reason good concepts from small entrepreneurs fail - big entrepreneurs eat them up.

Filipinos have a lot of brilliant ideas to produce better products, but there's always the fear of big companies eating up their concepts. Because of this fear, a lot of Filipino entrepreneurs, to protect themselves, are relegated to handling small-scale, service-related businesses that can't be easily duplicated or franchised.

Carson also sees the need for the Filipino entrepreneurs to be more serious about controlling the quality of their products and their way of doing business. He has tried oftentimes to be a supplier or distributor for foreign corporations but is often disqualified due to the bad image the country has when it comes to product standards and how business is done in the country. As a result, the Philippines loses out on many opportunities to bring its business to the global market. He knows it is a problem that cannot be solved overnight but he feels that something must be done now, even if it starts at the local level.

(To be continued...)