Blast from the past: Entrepreneur Philippines April 2001
MO' MONEY?
It's not about how much money you have at hand, but how you make do with the limited hoard. Here's first-hand advice from six entrepreneurs. By Kato P. Sarmiento
You've got the business of your dreams all planned and ironed out. But now that you're ready, you can't seem to raise enough money to jumptstart your venture. The logical step is to try to get more money, right?
Not if you know how to plan your expenses. Starting with more money doesn't necessarily assure you of better chances at a successful business. The true mark of smart entrepreneurs lies not much in the amount of capital they start their business with, but on how they can make do with limited resources at the least possible cost.
While there are no foolproof, universal ways to plan your spending, there are three major expenses that you should focus on: the monthly overhead, your business equipment and furniture, and your inventory. Most of your capital will go to these three. As they say, there is never enough money to start a business with, so if you can't cut your cost on these expenses, the least you can do is to make smart decisions and investments, like what the following entrepreneurs did.
Find inexpensive ways to market your business. Marketing is a vital investment to make when starting or growing a business. After all, if you can't land clients or accounts that will introduce money to your company, you can spend as much or as little of your capital as you want, and your business will still fail.
Mike Maske, 37, owner, manager, and programmer at Dataline Philippines Enterprises, a software development company based in Pasig, knows first hand the value of investing in marketing -- even of the homespun kind.
In 1991, Maske started his software development company without an office or his own phone line. "My office was my house. My friend's office received my calls for me. His secretary would take my messages. I had a PC, but it didn't have a hard disk," Maske recalls. "I started the company with the last P2,000 that my wife and I had. What little was left from the money, my wife used to buy that week's groceries."
"When I started Dataline Philippines, I already had a product in mind. I sent out 500 brochures," relates Maske. "I spent what money I had on marketing. P1,200 for the brochures, P500 for the stamps. The stamps were on the papers mismo because envelopes were expensive. The brochures were folded thrice and stapled. Within the week after sending them out, somebody called my friend's secretary, asking for a demonstration. And in that demonstration, I managed to sell my software agad. Within the year, I sold 20 pieces of software."
"Nine months after I first used that P2,000 for my brochures, I had enough money to buy a car worth P45,000 and a cellular phone. I also bagged a big company, the number one garments firm at the time, as client."
As Maske sees it, "Money is an important thing, but what matters most in business is the person who drives it. It's like a drag race. It helps that you have a fancy car, but with or without the fancy car, in the end, it's the driver who determines how fast or how far you'll reach, if you'll outrun the competition, or avoid the tricky turns down the road."
NOTE: This article was written in April of 2001. Some parts of the artcile were edited out. Dataline Philippines was later on incorporated to Datapacific Corporation.