BUSINESS BITS

A karinderia’s success story
MISHELL M. MALABAGUIO

A popular eating place for tourists in Bacolod City for the past 11 years is Aboy's Restaurant, which is famous for its grilled blue marlin and such other specialties as squid fat, tuna sisig, pork sisig, and grilled mushrooms.

The 1,464 sq m restaurant, which has been designed to look like a mansion, has four function rooms that can accommodate as many as 120 to 150 customers at any one time. On a typical day, it serves an average of 500 diners and gets one or two bookings for its function rooms. It is a successful business in every way—a labor of love by a former pharmaceutical salesman who started it in 1992 as a small carinderia (eatery) with bare soil as flooring. Nestor Evaristo, now 49, had put up Aboy's Restaurant the hard way.

After being assigned in Bacolod for 10 years as a salesman for United Laboratories, he found life in the city to his liking and decided to stay there for good. Thus, when the company reassigned him to Manila in 1992, he decided to quit and go into business on his own in Bacolod. He thought that it would be easier to run a business in Bacolod considering that he and his family had already lived there for 10 years during his assignment.

Before he could put up a business, however, the Evaristos had already used up his P80,000 separation pay from Unilab. To make ends meet while still thinking up a suitable business, Evaristo peddled polvoron, fishball, and whatever sellable product he could lay his hands on, while his wife, Rodelia, sold insurance plans. Then one day, Evaristo chanced upon a vacant lot along Burgos St. near the public market. Since he was used to doing home cooking, he instinctively thought of putting up a carinderia on that spot.

The problem was that he did not have the capital for it. "I therefore pawned my Volkswagen for P28,000 to raise the money," he recalls. As it turned out, the amount he got was just enough for the construction of a kubo (nipa hut) made of coco lumber and for the other start-up expenses.

Through sheer determination, however, the Evaristos somehow managed to put up their carinderia. To get started in the business, the Evaristos served only typical carinderia fare like menudo and mechado. They thought that these dishes would be suitable for the drivers and sales agents who were their target customers. They were wrong; hardly any of their target customers liked or bought their food offerings.

It was then that the Evaristos decided to serve sinugba (grilled food), the native Ilonggo dish. It was to become their carinderia's specialty, but at that time, even with its introduction, all that the couple could attract was an average of 20 customers a day—hardly enough to make the business a going concern. Worse, they could not serve dinner because the place was so dark and the carinderia could remain open for business only from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

The Evaristos thus found themselves in a serious quandary. Their carinderia was not making any profit at all; out of its daily capital outlay of P1,000, it was grossing only P500 because half of the dishes were just going to waste. Thus, for three months, just to keep the business afloat and be able to pay their helpers, the Evaristos had to pawn their belongings one after another. Evaristo tried to get a loan from the banks but to no avail. "That's the sad reality of starting a business," he says. "No bank would want to help you because you don't have a credit history and a track record."

As a last resort, Evaristo decided to reinvent his menu and to come up with a market buzz for his restaurant. He did tests to determine what dishes would sell, then improved the taste of those dishes. He also did several sales gimmicks: one was to give out discount coupons through taxi drivers, and the other to ask for the business cards of his customers. "The taxi drivers didn't get anything from our 15 percent discount coupons but some of the passengers who received them would give the drivers a tip in appreciation," he says.

After a week of the coupon distribution effort, more customers came to eat at Aboy's. In fact, the word of mouth became so effective that even prominent people in Iloilo started coming to the place to eat. It was at this point that the Evaristos decided that Rodelia should take charge of the financials of the business, and that Nestor should devote his time to cooking and serving.