CECILIA M. Ordoñez grew up seeing her parents meet American buyers, procure materials for orders, and package gift baskets and other products for shipping abroad. Amo Philippines Inc. was established in 1973 by Cecilia’s parents as a typical cottage industry doing gift baskets. The business grew and the company would join trade exhibits here and abroad. Cecilia and her siblings helped out in the company in finance, production and sales.

While working for the company, though, Cecilia observed that management could have been stricter in running the company. The high level of inventory could have been controlled more. Controls could have been put in place to prevent pilferage. To make cash management more effective, cash advances to employees could have been given less freely.
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THERE COMES a time in every home-based business’ life when the entrepreneur is faced with a dilemma: To open a store or not? To have a real office outside the home or not? To grow big or stay small?

Such is the dilemma currently faced by partners Analyn Arce and Joan Runes of The Peach Box, a home-based specialty food shop. Since the partners started the business in February 2006, majority of their clients would phone them and order party food trays like baked macaroni, fettucine carbonara, and chicken pastel and kesong puti spread.

Starting with only P60,000 in capital, The Peach Box steadily gained clients, which only started among family and friends and bazaar/tiangge regulars. Now, people they don’t know who have sampled their food at parties or have heard of them through word of mouth call them for orders. To make it easier for people to get the food items, The Peach Box opened take out kiosks in tandem with the family-owned Arce Dairy (which sells ice cream and milk at the same kiosks) at Greenhills Theater Mall in 2006 and at Landmark Trinoma in 2008.
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SCHOOL will be out soon and that means lots of free time for students. This is peak season for those in the summer workshop business, be it in the field of academics (tutorial and review centers), athletics (sports centers), or arts (cooking, art, dance, and creative writing classes, among others).

Among those companies offering summer workshops is Zero Gravity, which offers basic and intermediate streetdance theater workshops for preteens, teens, and adults.

Located along busy Katipunan Avenue in Loyola Heights, Quezon City, Zero Gravity is right smack in student territory with schools like UP, Ateneo, Miriam, Kostka, and Multiple Intelligence International School, among others, just a stone’s throw away. This is good for the company since its target market is the student population.
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NEW downloadable applications are available at the iTunes store every day, but February 14, 2009 was extra special for Filipino techies. It was the day that a Filipino-developed application for the iPhone was made available for free to anyone interested around the world: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a free news application developed by Vinta Solutions Inc. for the global organization CFR.

To date, more than 4,000 downloads have been recorded in just two weeks’ time so much so that the CFR application made it to top 12 downloads list on the iTunes AppStore. Majority of the downloads were made in the United States, with others made in Europe and Asia.

Leonides De Ocampo, chairman and CEO of Vinta LLC (the US arm of Vinta Solutions, Inc.), says Vinta is just a small three-year-old family business that’s into consulting and outsourcing. He is a mechanical engineer, while his brother, Leon Francis De Ocampo, is an industrial engineer. Both of them are graduates of the University of the Philippines. Leon heads Vinta Solutions, Inc. Leonides also pursued higher studies and finished MS in Mechanical Engineering at Duke University in the US.

How Vinta bagged the CFR project is quite interesting. Since Leonides is very much interested in foreign relations and policy and would read the CFR website regularly, he thought of contacting the CFR offices in September 2008 (just when the global financial crisis unraveled and Lehman Brothers collapsed) to offer Vinta’s services. Leonides noticed that a lot of news organizations are coming on board the iPhone and thought that CFR would be interested to do the same. “I just contacted them and they were very pleased,” he says. “We provide very competitive rates.”
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WITH THE expected slowdown in the Philippine economy this year as confirmed by the International Monetary Fund, entrepreneurs are finding ways to deal with the global financial crisis.

“When the economy is down, nobody spends,” says Karat World top man Felix Gorriceta III. The times thus call for streamlining of inventory. “Stock up on what sells. We don’t experiment much on new merchandise, which we had the luxury of doing so before,” he says.

At publishing company Adarna House, Emelina Almario, president, shares these strategies:
1. Streamline business processes. “We are auditing current business processes and looking at ways to improve them in terms of cutting costs.”
2. Manage risks. “Our various sales channels present different levels and types of risks and we are also looking into these.”
3. Practice prudence with resources. This goes for “electricity, paper and gas (even the small things count!).”
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