Money-making ‘Gising’

Did you know 1: Lipa City is being eyed for business process outsourcing, not so much for call centers but for backroom activities such as accounting.

As everybody knows, the Batangas city hosts a couple of good schools, including La Salle-Lipa.

To help close the deal, Philippine Economic Zone Authority Lilia de Lima is willing to give some tax incentives to BPO investors in Lipa.

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Did you know 2: There’s this place along Juan Luna St. in Divisoria called 168, which offers goods at an average discount of 50 percent compared to those found in department stores. A bottle of branded perfume, for example, is priced at a little over P1,000 compared to its P3,000 price tag in Makati stores.

And hey, the place has air-conditioning.

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Did you know 3: Aveno Trading proprietress Leng Aveno has come up with a three-toned herbal soap using pili oil, which sloughs off dead skin and leaves the skin younger-looking.

Why, the soap even makes hair softer, if the user is not too finicky about using soap instead of shampoo.

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Did you know 4: Inner Mind Development Institute president Jaime Licauco still occasionally holds two-week seminars as part of the entrepreneurship curriculum of the Asian Institute of Management.

This is not surprising, considering that Jimmy Licauco helped then AIM dean Eduardo Morato put together the graduate program for entrepreneurship.

Both Messrs. Licauco and Morato believe that budding entrepreneurs should learn to intuit or listen to their subconscious. The idea here is to use both left (the rational) and right (creative) sides of the brain to become better managers and entrepreneurs.

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The private sector-led National Coffee Development Board is rolling out by the end of this year a business concept called Gising, which targets would-be entrepreneurs outside Metro Manila. Here’s how it works.

The entrepreneur invests in a brewed coffee business worth P500,000, which could be located in bus terminals and other areas with heavy foot traffic (except funeral parlors, largely because people don’t eat or drink a lot when they’re depressed).

The coffee will be sold at between P10 and P15 a cup. Entrepreneurs will be encouraged to sell coffee with snacks that the city or province is known for. For example, a Gising kiosk in Biñan, Laguna should be selling coffee with, say, buco pie or espasol.

The entrepreneur will operate like a franchisee of the coffee board, which includes members such as Figaro Coffee Co. co-founder Pacita Juan. This means he/she will not need to worry about where to get his/her roasted coffee beans (which are, of course, Philippine grown) or the coffee-making machine that will be imported from Italy.

Neither will he/she worry about how to operate the business because a manual of operation will be provided.