So you want to be a Filipino billionaire?

Life Principles

By Injap Sia

Summit Books, 135 pages

People love to read success stories. The bestseller lists are crowded with stories of how people became super-rich or achieved other life goals.

Injap Sia’s book, Life Principles, takes a more Zen approach. You can absorb the lessons of this self-made billionaire by age 30 in about an hour. But mastering them will take longer.

One of my favorite stories comes early in his life. Injap had already worked at his parents’ grocery store in Roxas City, Capiz, helping them improve its efficiency. He began eyeing other opportunities, and heard about a nationwide texting contest to win a new car as a prize. The texting would go on for a week. He decided to strategize, calculating that he’d double his chances of emerging among the top texters if he paid a friend to also send texts all night long. (This was in the early days of cellphone service, when texting was free.) His idea worked: checking the top rankers each day of the contest, he found he was pulling ahead of the pack. Sia still keeps the newspaper clipping, announcing that he’d won the car.

The main lesson Sia learned was: “Look at things one notch deeper.” Analyze the situation, study the details and approach it from a new angle. Again, this sounds quite easy. But very few Filipino entrepreneurs rise to the level that Sia did. We’re tempted to conclude that it takes a kind of sixth sense to spot these opportunities. But it really involves a different way of seeing.

(By the way, he drew four other important lessons from that one texting contest. Buy the book to find out what they are.)

The young man who started Mang Inasal, building it up to 300 stores before Jollibee’s Tony Tan Caktiong purchased it for a remarkable P3 billion, realizes many Filipinos share his dream: they want to start a business that takes off. A big drag on their dreams is fear of failure, Sia says. So he advises entrepreneurs to start small, but think forward. He compares it to the Olympics, training yourself to eventually compete with the big-league competition.

Family is another big lesson for Sia. He learned the value of hard work from his own parents, learned to be fair to his family members and siblings (offering them shares in his startup Mang Inasal enterprise so they could all grow together), and looks at his work-life balance as a 50/50 proposition. He wants to provide materially for his own kids, but 50 percent of that should be time, as well as nurturing life values.

This kind of wisdom is perhaps needed among successful businessmen and entrepreneurs in the Philippines: not just giving your kids everything they want because you can, but allowing them to see the value of sacrifice early on in life. (It’s something Jollibee founder Caktiong must have seen in this young businessman, and why he pens the introduction.)

By age 26, Sia’s ambition was clear: he wanted to start a countrywide business: “My only self-imposed criteria was that it had to be something I could take nationwide.” For him the product or service was secondary. He knew there were plenty of chicken inasal places, and plenty of fast-food chains. His insight was to combine the two, and do it on a national level. 

Interestingly, he injects a few notes of caution to entrepreneurs before making the final leap into business: “You have to shelve your excitement and be realistic about your internal and external strengths and weaknesses.” This means doing your homework, but also double-checking it. I’m willing to bet a lot of failed businesses go forward without taking this step: the enthusiasm of knowing you have a good idea, money and a plan are not enough, Sia writes. You have to see if there are any holes in your business model, and decide whether you have the stamina, the passion, to devote all of your free time to making it a success.

The second cautionary note is: Can the market bear more growth? Sia throws a bit of cold water on those hoping to replicate his fast-food success. “I think fast food is full and there is no opportunity there,” he writes, though he adds, “this could change in 10 or 20 years.” Better think of another area to grow in.

One thing the book lacks is specifics about how Sia’s model went national so fast, with few hitches. Did he spend time getting each and every branch up and running? Were there specific lessons he learned about franchising? Such details — illustrated with anecdotes, like the text contest story — are pretty thin.

After Mang Inasal, Sia shifted his ambitions to other industries, starting CityMalls (small provincial malls nationwide) and Double Dragon Properties. By applying the same principles, he’s grown both to reach solid business targets (Double Dragon went IPO in 2014).

The last part of the book encapsulates Sia’s principles in short, punchy chapters (“On Being Fair,” “On Risk-Taking,” “On Time Management,” etc.), and he concludes with something akin to the Buddhist concept of dharma: “Figuring out your unique mission in life takes time, but it is really something you have to search for and understand.”

Life Principles, written with Esquire Philippines editor-in-chief Kristine Fonacier, is a compact pep talk that seems almost like a haiku approach to business success. But, like a haiku, each word is carefully chosen and essential to the final success of the project.