Inside an entrepreneur’s mind

As Francis Kong climbed up the second floor of Dôme in Podium, I knew immediately I was face to face with a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. First, he was comfortable in jeans on a weekday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Second, he spoke no jargon. These two things, and his Chinese surname immediately gave me a sense of what I was going to hear for the next hour or so. Or so I thought.

The first revelation was that he was not born a wealthy Chinese. “I started from scratch,” Francis says. But he tells of how his father drilled into his mind not to become an employee, even as a kid.

“Kahit manager ka diyan, di ka yayaman. Kahit konti kita mo, basta sariling negosyo okay,” he recalls his father telling him.

Francis sums up the situation very nicely. If you are dependent on employment, you are dependent on pay and perks. If you are an entrepreneur, you are dependent on earnings, which can be a much more attractive option.

It’s a nice thing to preach. Very inspirational, too. It’s not hard to imagine Francis working up a crowd during his seminars very quickly with his well-modulated voice and street smarts kind of smarts, if you know what I mean. But I just had to know, after all the preaching, if he believes that everyone in that crowd has the genetic makeup to be an entrepreneur.

“Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There’s the intelligence quotient and the emotional quotient. There’s also what you call the adversity quotient,” he says.

AQ is shorthand for “tibay ng loob and kapal ng mukha”. It refers to a person’s ability to face failure and start again. If your business fails or let’s say you can’t collect from your clients, are you going to quit? Francis says this is the stuff that entrepreneurs are made of – the ability to work hard, eat your pride and fight the odds.

“Around 70% of all startups fail. That doesn’t mean you should stop trying. That’s your tuition,” Fancis says.

Fortunately, AQ is not something you have to be born with. Francis says it can be developed in a person. An entrepreneur’s mind is really made up of a deep desire to succeed even if it means taking risks and an inner meter that values time and opportunity.

“The biggest loss is when you sit down and do nothing,” Francis says. When that happens, the invisible meter of inflation and opportunity loss takes its toll. He explains this concept through the true-to-life story of a young lady who asked him for a job when he was still running a business selling jeans.

(I just love little anecdotes.)

When this young lady applied for a job, Francis recalled that he didn’t have a position for her. After which, the young lady said she would work for free while she was waiting for other companies to call her. “Baka kalawangin ako, eh wala pa namang tawag,” she says.

How do you say no to that? Long story short, Francis took her in and pretty soon noticed that this young lady was working longer hours than regular staff. Not surprisingly, after some time, the store manager was depending on this young lady for strategies in the store.
What do you think happened?

After eight months, they created a position for her.

“There’s one thing we have in common with Bill Gates and John Gokongwei. We both have 24 hours in a day,” says Francis.

Time and opportunity. They go together. Inside an entrepreneur’s mind, these two can be the magic combination.

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