BUSINESS BITS

Busineses under 25K
Lisette Malabanan

Ovic Etruiste formulated her own shampoo to save on expenses. She bought chemicals and mixed them on plastic containers, and last year she decided to act on a nine-year-old dream: to formulate a dishwashing detergent that she could sell to friends and neighbors. “For as a little as P5,000, I was able to buy all the ingredients including the bottles,” says Etruiste, chemical engineer and mother of five.

Her husband was in charge of washing the dishes at home, so the job of testing the formulations fell on him. “When he tested my first formulation, he said it needed some more foaming but the grease-cutting was great,” says Etruiste, who came up with 40 200-milliliter bottles the she sold initially at P39 each. The response to her detergent was so good that her friends urged her to go into business full time. “I decided to call my product Hands On because it got the dishes clean but was tender on the hands,” she says. “I hope to sell the detergent by the gallon later so it comes out cheaper for costumers and more profitable for me.”

Today, Etruiste makes about P15,000 a month from her detergent, but her small budget limits her production. “Whatever I make goes back to the business,” she says. “It will take time for the business to take off with my limited capital, but it’s all worth it.”
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Instead of working for the family business, Benedict Qua decided to start his own last year, spending P20,000 initially to sell 500 pieces of pre-paid Internet cars with a face value of P100 at P55 each. He managed to consign 150 cards, but the shops that bought them demanded a refund later when the Internet service provider closed shop. “I learned my lesson the hard way, and that is to always check the background of the company selling the cards,” he says.

Undeterred, Qua withdrew P15,000 from his savings account and bought pre-paid cards from ISPs with good track record: ISP Bonanza, Surf Maxx, E-volve, and Ragnarok and other game cards. He chose Internet cards because of the high margins they offered: P30 to P45 compared with the P5 to P10 he would make from each pre-paid cell phone cards. Plus, “You would only buy a limited number of cell phone pre-paid cards if you were going to start with a budget of P20,000,” he says.

Qua sold his cards to friends, and later gained a network of stalls and stores in Sta. Mesa where he lived. He saved on transport costs when the pre-paid card dealers started delivering his order on account of his prompt payments. “I now make P25,000 to P30,000 a month from his business,” he says. “I hope to have my own stall soon where I can sell the cards and probably go into e-loading as well.”
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Carry Go craved melon juice or sago and gulaman after each round of badminton or soccer with friends. That got him thinking about bottling fruit juices, so in 2003 he started experimenting with melon juice, and eventually he came up with a formulation that kept the juice fresh for up to 10 days after spending about P20,000. “My friends were my taste testers, and they really liked what I came up with,” he says. “It was also around that time when I asked my friend GM Hernandez to help me out with marketing.”

Next, Go formulated three other flavors – sago at gulaman, water melon and coconut lychee – before adding mango, dalandan, pineapple, and kalamansi. He called his products Tropical, with suggested retail prices of P35 to P45 a bottle. “When I got into this business, I looked into my network of friends and saw which among them I could tap,” he says. “I found out that I knew someone who did bottles and I was able to get them on terms.” He also needed ice-filled Styrofoam boxes to transport his juices, and again, he found someone among his friends to supply him with Styrofoam on terms.

Still, Go had difficulty looking for someone who could supply him with fruits year-round, and when he found one, he found it hard landing his first customer – Trellis restaurant in Quezon City. Later, he added Westin Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.’s casinos, VIP lounges, and badminton courts to his list of clients, allowing him to post P100,000 in monthly sales.

“We’re now looking into supplying supermarkets, but what will depend on a lot of things because of our products’ short shelf life,” he says.