MIGUEL “Mike” BOLOS Guagua, Pampanga Former Assistant Comptroller, Saudi Arabia, 1982-2005 Owner, One Crowne Plaza Building and Bay Spa From Scholar to Social Entrepreneur By J. Dela Torre I first met Mike in Saudi Arabia in 2001 when he and a small group of socially-conscious OFWs spearheaded the worldwide campaign to have the Overseas Absentee Voting Law passed. My first impression of them was that they were the cocky, quixotic types who had too much time in their hands, and were anxious to use their resources to tilt with the demons of Philippine society, so to speak. While I thought initially that the campaign was more a symbolic gesture than anything, I was eventually convinced that it was worth the effort. OFWs represent the cream of our labor force—this is the reason why they’re working abroad. Foreign employers wouldn’t have hired them if they weren’t the best among the lot. Therefore, what was happening before the law was passed was that a significant number of our population who were educated, skilled and have been exposed to international work and living standards—the very people who might be expected to vote intelligently—were denied the right to vote. Further, beyond their actual numbers, OFWs being the breadwinner of most families, they would be expected to influence the voting intentions of family members. It might well be the case that they have actually greatly influenced the voting patterns of huge numbers of voters without our knowing it. When I saw how this group, the International Coalition on Overseas Filipinos’ Voting Rights, particularly Mike, and the late Bert Barriga and Alfred Ganapin, gave up their time, energy and money into the campaign, I was won over. I attended one of this group’s meetings in Riyadh and I was awed by their dynamism and focus: Alfred providing overall leadership, Bert the operational details and IT savvy, and Mike the business and logistical needs. When I was re-assigned to Israel, I kept in touch with the group, and when I learned that Mike had decided to come back to the Philippines for good, I was as surprised as the large number of Filipinos in Riyadh who knew him. He was one of the highest-earning Filipino workers in the Kingdom along with a few Filipino bankers. The decision just didn’t make sense, but then, they didn’t figure on Mike Bolos being an extraordinary OFW, who thought he could change the world, and as far as those whose lives he had transformed, I believe he very well had. To understand the kind of person Mike Bolos is, perchance to understand his decision, we must come back to Guagua, Pampanga, where it all began. “I came from a poor family. I had four brothers and five sisters. My father was a carpenter, and my mother was into the fish trading business. There was just not enough money to put food on the table and to provide for our education. They tried their best to make both ends meet, but it was very difficult for us. I put myself through college. I was a working student,” Mike began his narrative with a visible effort. “My parents separated when I was still young. I ended up with my mother who made a living on and off. There were instances in the past when we barely managed to eat three meals a day. Some of my siblings were sent to live with relatives in order to survive and to be educated,” his voice began to trail off and his eyes unfocused. Mike turned out to be an exceptional student. He graduated Valedictorian in high school, and was an academic scholar on his first year at the University of Sto. Tomas for his BS Business Administration. But because he had to work full-time, he lost his scholarship and transferred to the University of the East on his second year. In 1979, he eventually graduated. He took the accountancy board exams on the same year without the benefit of review class, not by choice but because he didn’t have the money for the review. Before the results could be known, he had already flown to Saudi Arabia. “My getting hired for Saudi Arabia was serendipitous. It was actually my brother who was applying. It looked like he was being shafted by the recruitment agency so I went up to the recruiter to complain, and the rest is history. The agency had another principal looking for an accountant, and before I knew it, I was already being interviewed. I must’ve made a good impression on the employer that I ended up being the one hired, instead of my brother. In a week’s time, I was in Saudi Arabia without any documentation or without having passed through any medical examination. I was an undocumented worker,” Mike recalled with merriment at probably the fastest deployment in the history of the Philippine modern-day diaspora. “I was already married then, and obviously as a young struggling couple, we had no choice but to consider overseas employment as a way out. I was an ambitious person and wouldn’t settle for less. I wanted to do things, earn as much money as I could, in the shortest time possible, in order to escape from the poverty that I grew up in,” he explained. But the first two years in Saudi Arabia with the first employer turned out to be his most miserable. “I was new in Saudi Arabia. On top of the sudden culture shock and the language barrier, I had a hard time adjusting with the locals and the other foreign nationals in the company. I had no idea what to expect. Being new and ambitious, I probably came on a little bit too strong. So, they ganged up on me and they criticized me and my work to the boss, who took their side. It was ugly. The employer and I had bitter verbal tussles, but in the end, when my contract was about to end, he asked me to renew my contract, but I said no: I needed to move on,” Mike smiled breathed a sigh of relief as if he had just gotten over an unpleasant chapter of his life in the Middle East. He quickly found a job with another company for which he would work for the next 23 years. “It was a good company, manned by good people. And I knew better this time. Having learned from my sad experience with the first company, I knew how to adjust and how to deal with the boss and the other foreign nationals this time. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say,” Mike tone was now upbeat. “I quickly rose through the ranks. I was the first Filipino in the head office, and after a few years, most of the Asian employees in the head office were already Filipinos. I’m not saying one is the cause of the other, but it’s probably a recognition of the quality of work I’ve done for the company,” he said with all humility. What kind of work did he do for the company? “I did almost everything. We bought and sold companies. We turned over companies. We bought and operated companies. Aside from being an accountant, and eventually assistant comptroller—which was the highest I could go because my immediate superior, the Comptroller, who is a very good person, was there before me—I did stock, precious metals, foreign currency, arbitrage. I had to learn these disciplines by myself because I wanted to earn money not only for the company but for myself too. I needed to save up as much money as I could, as quickly as I could, to do the things I wanted to do for when I come back to the Philippines. Luck was with me, too. When housing prices were still low in the US in 1996, I was able to acquire a house there for $200k on loan, which I was able to refinance for triple the amount in 2005 and used the proceeds for my planned investments in the Philippines. It was a good 23 years, personally, professionally and financially. We all knew our stay in the Kingdom would not last forever, so we had to maximize our earnings within the short time available to us. This was the very same thing on my mind when I decided to call it quits after 25 years in the Kingdom. I thought that life was passing me by and that I needed a fresh start,” Mike became thoughtful this time, trying to recall exactly why he said goodbye to a job to-die for. “I’ve already done enough for myself and for my family. It was time to do something for my community and for my country. I thought I could make a difference.” The cynics among us might be skeptical at this pithy expression of patriotism, but in the case of Mike, who has already proven his social orientation when he practically bankrolled his group’s Overseas Absentee Voting campaign in the Kingdom, I couldn’t find any reason to doubt his sincerity. In 2005, Mike landed at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, with high hopes, a heightened sense of confidence in himself and enough money in his wallet—if you could fit one million dollars in a wallet—and began looking around for business opportunities. His first business was the Bay Spa at the Blue Wave complex, close to the Mall of Asia. This is the business which gives him a lot of satisfaction just thinking about. He ran the business like a social entrepreneur, insisting that wage, ethical and quality of service standards be followed to the letter. For him, profit is secondary. “The foremost aim of a business is to serve a greater good,” Mike summed up his business philosophy, which is deeply rooted in his Christian faith and from a sense of satisfaction at the way he’s gone a long way from where he came from. The depravity he has experienced in his early years has not embittered him, but has in fact become the foundation for his conviction that he can make things better for people whose livelihood depended on him. In his own words, he wanted to multiply “my one life with the number of lives I can touch for the better have perhaps made me think and do things the way I do. I want to do as much good as I can do to the greatest number of people with the time and resources I was given in this world.” “I hired 20 not highly educated therapists, and gave them every opportunity to earn as much as they could, so they could lead decent lives, send their children through school and have a house of their own. For example, I had a therapist who was a single mom with four kids. By working with me, she was able to send 2 of her children through college, and both are now gainfully employed. One is in Saudi Arabia, and the other is working for a chain of companies in the Philippines. The other two are still in college. She was able to build a house, maybe just a modest one, but it’s a house of their own. I affected not just the life of the mother, but her children’s as well, and probably their children. That’s three generations whose lives will have changed for the better. How much value can you put into that? It’s priceless,” his eyes beamed with obvious pride. With characteristic sense of urgency, he then began the construction of a building right at the heart of Guagua, his hometown. Raising a 3-storey commercial building in Guagua at a time when the town’s economy was not exactly known for its robustness, was an act of faith. The business community raised its eyebrows, and wondered whether Mike knew something they didn’t. Actually, he had learned from his Saudi days the science of demographics and from his market research found there was old money in town, stashed away in banks, earning tiny interest for the owners, and just making the banks richer every day. Guagua was in the old days the preferred embarkation point for people from Central Luzon going to Manila by boat, as well as for people from Manila trading with the other provinces in Luzon. When the Chinese were persecuted in Manila in the 18th century, Guagua became a refuge for them, and eventually they settled in town. As their wealth accumulated, squirreled away in chests and under the mattresses, the younger generation decided they had other fish to fry, so the economic dynamism of the town stagnated. Rich people just decided to live off the interest of their money, and were no longer interested in creating new wealth and generating jobs. The town badly needed a catalyst, a spark to ignite an economic turnaround. Here comes Mike with his grand plans and his fat wallet. With his building—One Crowne Plaza—done, things began to pick up in Guagua. Major banks put up their branches. The food chains began to take notice and staked their claim too. Other buildings began to take shape. In no time at all, Guagua was alive again with economic activity. Three other new businesses followed in quick succession: a convenience store franchise, an internet café franchise and a bistro. He applied the same business model in his other businesses: profit was secondary, and do everything by the book. Would you consider yourself a total success? “It wasn’t all perfect. Although I helped my mother financially to set up a business which eventually helped my other siblings, and though I gained a lot from my career in Saudi from the financial point of view, I forgot that I had a family. I was so engrossed with my work that I forgot I had to balance my family life with my career. So, the long years of separation eventually took its toll. My wife and I separated,” Mike answered, the pauses between the words and the deep breaths indicating that this was a sad episode of his life he would’ve preferred not to recall. We asked Mike what OFWs have to do to prepare for their eventual reintegration? “It does not start when you’re already here back home: it actually starts when you’re still working abroad. If you’re planning to start a business, better learn now. Is there something in your work now which you can turn into business when you go home? If so, learn everything there is to learn about that aspect of your work which you can leverage into a business. Save as much money as you can. Maximize your time. Don’t waste your time on some non-essential or unimportant task or activity. If you can have two or three jobs at the same time, do it so you can maximize the amount of your earnings and savings. Running a business is not a bed of roses. It requires a lot of dedication, patience and hard work. It requires your whole time—your whole self. You must come prepared, mentally, financially and physically. And even then, there’s no guarantee of success. But if you come prepared, and you put your heart and mind into it, the chances are that you will succeed. Did he fail in any of his ventures? “Yes. In the case of the internet café business, it was a sunset business when I went into it. The internet business was good when there were no smart phones yet because the previous cellphones didn’t have internet capability. Now you can get and read your email, watch a movie, talk to somebody overseas over video, play online games, control appliances in your house, monitor what’s happening in your business and home from thousands of miles away, do business processing, and do just about anything else—with a device that’s no bigger than the palm of your hand. The business was rendered obsolete by technological advance. The convenience store franchise also needed my full-time presence and attention, which I was not prepared to give because my focus was in the spa and the administration of the building. And of course, the bistro. Because of my business principles, the playing field was not even for me. I followed the rules, paid my workers right and more, secured my business permits without doing any under the table deals, and paid my taxes on time. The businessman in the Philippines who does all these is at a disadvantage because many competitors are not doing it. I couldn’t compete with them because I had a higher overhead than they had: my business ethics put me at a price disadvantage. There was no point in keeping these three businesses when I could focus my time and energy in the two other businesses which I was happy with. Overall, I may not have profited financially from my business endeavors, but from a different perspective, I think I have succeeded. For example, looking at the building project, I think I have served as a catalyst that awakened the town so that its potential can be unleashed. That is something. I may not have gained financially, but I have gained something for the community. I was also able to change people’s lives. Again, there’s no money in it, but there’s a lot of gratification. With my one life, I was able to multiply it by the number of lives which I was able to touch and change for the better.” Who was the greatest influence in your life? “The greatest influence in my life is my mother. She was just a primary school graduate but I learned from her effective business practices and strategies, and how to deal with people, which they do not teach in business school. Three of the most remarkable principles that she instilled in all of us that have significantly helped us are as follows: (1) When you do something, do it well; (2) Maximize time: if there is more than one thing you can do at the same time, do it (multi-tasking even before the term became widely known); and (3) There is always a better way of doing things.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 00:46:38 +0000
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