BUSINESS BITS

Kendrick Go
Birth of a passion

A website is now a must for any enterprise that intends to grow and expand its market and graphic and Web designer Errole Gutierrez believes that every Filipino entrepreneur will get a competitive edge by putting up one.

The seed for this idea came to Gutierrez while he was working in the United States as an advertising graphic designer. One day, his boss asked him to update the company’s website, but although proficient in graphic design, he still had no experience in Web design at the time. He therefore took it as a challenge to quickly learn Web design on his own. The website turned out great and the interest he had in Web design became a passion.

In 2002, Gutierrez came back to the Philippines to help in the family’s construction business. Since the construction industry was becoming more and more competitive, he suggested to his father that they put up a website to help market the business. Initially skeptical, his father agreed. Gutierrez then built the website and it proved to be very helpful to the business.

After that, designing websites became Gutierrez’s sideline. With more and more job orders coming in, however, he decided to make it a full-time business in 2006. To get his Web design venture started in earnest, he bought a laptop with P50,000 that he borrowed from his father.

His very first project earned him P150,000, so he was able to pay his father back and had enough funds left over to reinvest in his fledgling business. He initially called it Media Creative, but he later renamed it as 168 Media Creative on the suggestion of friends. They had told him that the phrase with those numbers tucked in means “abundance” in Chinese, and he says that he did get even more clients when he used the new name.

Today, Gutierrez still designs most of the creative requirements of his company’s clients, but he now subcontracts some of the technical aspects to a pool of programmers. Most of the company’s clients are in the United States and Australia, where he has people marketing his Web design services.

What sets his company apart from other Web design companies, Gutierrez explains, is the code he uses. Instead of using the traditional and laborious Hyper Text Mark Up Language (HTML), he uses the easier and more user-friendly Joomla Content Management System (CMS). For this reason, his company can do websites at least at half the time and at half the price compared to other web designers. He says this makes putting up websites much more affordable to Filipino entrepreneurs who intend to serve the global market.

An advocate of Filipino empowerment, Gutierrez says he is concentrating on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in his efforts to spread the website gospel. He believes that despite all the noise about how the economy is going bad, there is still a lot of room for entrepreneurs. “Now is the best time to get into business,” he says.

But the problem, he says, is that most Filipino entrepreneurs are intimidated by technology or are unaware of how it could work for them. Thus, being content to do business with no website at all or with poorly designed ones, they simply could not compete internationally.

Gutierrez relies solely on word-of-mouth and Internet forums to promote his services; indeed, he says that he makes his attractive Web designs and service “the motor of his marketing.” He used to put up ads in newspapers, but realized later on that “you have to practice what you preach.” Since then, he has principally relied on Internet marketing.

In addition to Web design and website maintenance, 168 Media Creative offers graphic design services for brochures, calling cards, letterheads, and other visual requirements. Gutierrez also assists clients in producing multimedia presentations.

He consistently maintains rates lower than those of other designers, relying more on the bigger business volumes that this strategy generates for his company. Even with the success he enjoys, Gutierrez says he considers his business to be a “freelance gig company in the making.”