Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Congratulations on the Launch of Buchichi Accessories

Like I said in my previous blog post, I greatly admire people who go into business on their own.

So I would like to congratulate my friend Gigi Hermojeno for launching her new business - Buchichi Accessories!


Good luck and more success on your new venture!

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Entrepreneur Philippines' 67 Success Stories: A Review

Yesterday, I bought a copy of the latest edition of 67 Success Stories: How You Too Can Make It Big!, a bookazine (book + magazine) containing a compilation of interviews with 67 successful entrepreneurs previously published in Entrepreneur Philippines magazine. I actually bought it to benchmark on how to write business-oriented feature stories for a project I'm eyeing but I found myself still perusing the book in the wee hours of the morning.

I sometimes dream of having my own business: to build something from scratch and watch it grow, and then leave it to my kids as a legacy. I admire friends who established their own businesses; I admit I often let fear of the unknown or just plain inertia prevent me from going into entrepreneurship myself. I collected issue after issue of the magazine, sometimes imagining myself as the featured success story. So far, though, I'm still not there.

Anyway, the bookazine does provide a lot of interesting reading: it features stories of individuals or groups who got their businesses off the ground, the challenges they faced and how they dealt with them, and even a snippet of wisdom or two to guide a soon-to-be entrepreneur.

The widely varied profiles of featured successful business owners communicate that - true to the bookazine's subtitle - anybody can be an entrepreneur and make it big: a band leader decides to put up a pop music school, a group of college kids turn their thesis into a highly successful T-shirt business, sisters partnered up to open a one-stop shopping area for hip fashionistas. We are taken into the scenario that created both the entrereneur and his enterprise: from the workday stresses that drove a couple into going into business as writers, to the lack of quality print suppliers urging the scion of a popular retailing to set up his own printing company to cater to his family business' equirements.

The articles are short and sweet. While these two- to three-page profiles provide us with just a glimpse into the goings-on of going into business on one's own, this glimpse is enough to entice us to want to try the experience for ourselves.