1. Write a book.
2. Start a career to help the country’s tourism efforts.
3. Play golf with the country’s movers and shakers.
4. Ride a bike from Manila to Baguio.
5. Start a charity.
6. Join a choir.
These look like things an energetic, idealistic twentysomething might want to do with his life. But actually, these are the things that one sixtysomething retiree did after he ended his 40-year career in advertising.
Virgilio "Gil" Yuzon, one of the founders of Hemisphere Advertising, which later partnered up with the multinational agency Leo Burnett, retired five years ago and started his second wind in life.
"It wasn’t a hard decision for me to retire because I wanted to do other things," he says. Yuzon has proven that there’s more to life than a career, and more to retirement than wearing plaid pants on a golf course.
It seems like a world away now when, at 30 years old, he founded Hemisphere in 1971 with several partners. When he graduated from Ateneo at 19, the school didn’t even offer a course in advertising. "I didn’t even know what advertising was all about," he says with a laugh. When he joined Procter and Gamble’s marketing department, he met people from advertising agencies and wondered if he had indeed made the right decision to put his need to make a living before satisfying his creative yearnings.
"I was thinking of being a full-time writer or a journalist but I had a family to support. So I said, how can I practice my creativity and still support my family?"
The answer came to him three years later, when he joined the Philippine Advertising Counselors (PAC), which was then the country’s biggest ad agency. At 25, he was made vice president, and at 30, he founded Hemisphere, a spin-off of PAC to service competing accounts. Back then, clients were just beginning to realize that they wanted exclusivity when it came to their agency. PAC had five banks, three airlines and two car companies on its list of clients and Yuzon was told that PAC would give some these accounts to the second agency, which was then co-owned by Banco Filipino.
"But when we established Hemisphere, we were told that the board had decided they wouldn’t let go of any account. I said, you know, you’re making a big mistake, you will still lose those accounts. In two years, they did. Meanwhile, Hemisphere started with only one client, a house account, which was Banco Filipino."
While PAC was losing its steam, Hemisphere was growing exponentially. It acquired Tide, McDonald’s, and then Procter & Gamble. In those days, once you had that company as your client, every other multi-national was going to follow. In 1983, Hemisphere went into partnership with Leo Burnett, a major US player.
By 1995, Yuzon knew he wanted to retire soon, and so he began his five-year plan to retire in 2000. "In Leo Burnett’s culture, when you reach 57 you retire because advertising is very taxing, you’d be spent at that age. We retired later than that because we were enjoying our work. I was still working all of 2000 because they took me as consultant."
Yuzon may have retired from the daily grind, but he’s still selling and having fun. "I enjoyed my advertising work immensely, but now I can choose what to do, I can be involved in more altruistic projects." He became a consultant for Asian Hospital and Medical Center, chairman of the Alabang Country Club, board member of St. Paul University QC, president of VAY Development Corporation, and a consultant for the Department of Tourism. In fact, he says he was offered the post of undersecretary by then DOT Secretary Dick Gordon, but he turned it down. "I had just retired and didn’t want to go back to a full-time job."
Instead, he wanted to spread out his free time doing the things he liked. Apart from enjoying his favorite sports (running, tennis, martial arts, shooting and golf), he took up a new one: motorcycling. And got a new love: a BMW F650 GS. You may think motorcycles are for young people, not retirees. Well, that kind of thinking was exactly what he wanted to avoid: the retiree syndrome, when the body feels too lethargic and consequently slows down.
"As you get older, you begin to feel sluggish. I didn’t even want to drive myself to Makati. I felt I had to do something to keep my reflexes up."
One day, while he was stuck in traffic with his driver behind the wheel, he saw a girl riding a bike. "I thought, if she can do it, I can."
Though Yuzon had experience with motorcycles when he was young, he never really got into the sport. "I thought riding would keep me sharp. Some of my friends in Alabang had bikes and I would borrow them. I wanted to buy one but my wife didn’t want me to. It took a year before she agreed."
Maybe she was afraid that her husband would go out and get tattoos of nymphets all over his back? Not exactly – at least not for BMW riders. "That would be for Harley Davidson riders," he says, then adds, "It’s different now. You see CEOS and yuppies enjoying the sport. The Hell’s Angels image of brawny riders in leather, riding with their mamas, doesn’t apply to all enthusiasts."
Yuzon started at level one: He rode a scooter around the village. After a few months, he told his wife, "I’m now pretty good with the bike. I should get a bigger one for myself." She still refused. So he took a short course at Honda, and after that there was no stopping his off-road and on-road adventures.
Yuzon rides off on the weekends at the crack of dawn with about 15 to 40 of his buddies. Their group, BOSS or BMW Owners’ Society of Saferiders, is aptly named since most members are CEOs, businessmen and other suits (people you wouldn’t normally think would ride big bikes just to follow the sunrise across the country). It has around 170 members around the country and 90 of them are based in Manila. They’d leave their coats and ties at home, hop on their bikes and hit the road to places like Tagaytay, Quezon, Ilocos and Caliraya. Just last weekend the group went up to Baguio, driving across central Luzon on their big bikes, and then down to La Union.
So what’s it about big bikes that attract them? "I love the feeling of exhilaration and freedom. You can go anywhere you want and see places like you haven’t seen them before. Riding gives you a lift. Motorcycle riders are a different breed. In the US, they call people who drive cars ‘cagers’ because they’re caged inside their cars. With a bike, you just hop on it and go anywhere you want."
And how fast do they ride? He says conspiratorially, "Some of my friends have gone up to 200 kms. per hour, my fastest is 170 on long stretches. But we usually go anywhere from 80 to 120 kms. per hour."
Their group isn’t just about enjoying themselves, they also do charity work. Some of their projects have included working with kids with cancer and taking them to Enchanted Kingdom.
This kind of freedom that Yuzon experienced after he retired isn’t confined to riding. He also found the time to publish his poetry collection, entitled Glimpses of Love, Life and Beyond. This collection was written over a period of 40 years and some of them have been published in the US and local magazines such as Philippine Graphic and Philippines Free Press. His poems are accompanied by black and white images by Pancho Escaler while proceeds of the book went to VA Foundation, which focuses on educational scholarships for underprivileged students.
"I think I’m more of a philosophical poet," he says of his writing.
Yuzon also went back to his love of singing with fellow Ateneans. Called the Ateneo Alumni Glee Club, under Fr. Reuter, it is composed of men in their sixties. Since Yuzon retired they’ve performed in two concerts with the second one for the 50th anniversary of their group, which has sung together continuously for the past 50 years.
"We sing love songs, Broadway tunes, and Latin songs. I think we’re the only choir that can still sing in Latin during a Mass," he says. "We’ve been together since we were teenagers. We sing at funerals and weddings."
So if he’s so busy now, is there anything he misses about being the top boss of a multi-national ad agency? Yuzon laughs and says, in not so many words: The expense account.