BUSINESS BITS

Debbie Pepito
Fast food,fast sales

Breaking into a saturated market may be too daunting for a lot of startup entrepreneurs, but this didn’t stop the sisters Nicole and Valerie Jane Go from putting up RICE, a hip fast-food restaurant along Taft Avenue in Manila.

“We always knew we wanted to be in the food business, we just didn’t know what kind to go into,” says Nicole, 29. She and Valerie had both studied in Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, where they got introduced to a lot of different food places. They were particularly inspired by the sushi takeout establishments they used to frequent in Vancouver, so when they got back to the Philippines in early 2004, they thought of opening one themselves.

But it was only three years later that the sisters were able to finally get their dream restaurant off the ground. In the meantime, they had helped out in running their family’s large-format printing business, Big Media Imaging Inc. And to get a feel of how the local business community worked, they had also dabbled in importing items from China, which they then sold locally.

The profits they had generated from this initial venture and a loan from their parents provided them with the initial capital for their projected restaurant.
While looking for an ideal location for the restaurant, Nicole took a short course on kitchen management and basic cooking ideas at the International School for the Culinary Arts and Hotel Management (ISCAHM) on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City.

A month into the program, while attending to a client of the family’s printing business, she came across an available space at Sherwood Place on Taft Avenue. Nicole thought that the 89 square meter location had potential for a restaurant, so she asked her father and Valerie to check it out. They agreed with her assessment. Thus, a week later, Valerie started negotiations with the lease manager of the place. “Sunod-sunod na after that [Everything just fell into place after that],” Valerie recalls.

Both having no prior experience in running a restaurant, the sisters literally took a leap of faith in putting up RICE: Taft avenue. Valerie handled the construction and fiscal negotiations for it, while Nicole experimented with the types of food the restaurant was going to offer. They eventually scrapped their original idea of offering sushi in favor of more Filipino-friendly fare—rice meals. Then, after four months of negotiating and planning, they opened their restaurant in late February of 2007.

To promote the restaurant, the sisters sent out fliers, made Internet ad postings in their Friendster and Multiply accounts, and sponsored events in the nearby campuses. RICE currently offers flavored rice in five different flavors—adobo, beef, garlic, bagoong and vegetable rice—that customers can order with their meals.

Since the restaurant primarily targets the students from the nearby universities, the staff makes it a point to serve orders within 5 to 10 minutes. Explains Nicole: “Students usually need to be back in class after only a short break, so we need to serve them fast enough to give them time to enjoy their meals.”

A typical day at RICE starts around 9:30 a.m. when one of the sisters opens the restaurant. Both of them are very hands-on in running the business. Says Valerie: “We don’t want to be just taga-utos. Kung mapilay ’yung isang staff, kaya naming gawin ang gawain niya [We don’t want to be just ordering people around. If one of the staff can’t do the job for some reason, one of us can easily take over].”

Indeed, when the lunch crowd starts coming in, the sisters themselves sometimes get to wash the dishes, tend to the counter, and even clear up the tables. All eight of RICE’s current staff have been with the restaurant for some time. This is because unlike other restaurants, the sisters did not go for contractual hiring. “We found that if the members of your staff are secure in their jobs, they would be more likely to give it their all,” says Nicole.

Today, after over a year of operations, the Go sisters have developed well-established routines for themselves. They now expect to recover their initial investment in the business within the year. As to the idea of opening another branch of their restaurant, the sisters say they’ll eventually go into that. In the meantime, they say, they intend to take the whole restaurant business gradually, one step at a time.