Tapping deep into new opportunities
The Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2017 has concluded its search for the country’s most inspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines is a program of the SGV Foundation, Inc., with the participation of copresenters Department of Trade and Industry, the Philippine Business for Social Progress, and the Philippine Stock Exchange. In the next few weeks,
BusinessWorld will feature each finalist for the Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2017.
MOST ENTREPRENEURS are motivated by the potential to earn profit when building their business.
But some entrepreneurs like Cristino L. Panlilio, 66, president of Balibago Waterworks System, Inc. (BWSI), take one step further by nurturing a vision and turning imaginative ideas into reality.
Mr. Panlilio graduated with an AB Economics degree from the Ateneo de Manila University where he also earned his Masters in Business Administration.
He started his career as a banker for 20 years and later went into mining and chocolate manufacturing.
His first big step towards entrepreneurship was when he invested in a ketchup company and served as its president. Under his watch, the company saw promising growth, which soon attracted companies leading to its acquisition by a major conglomerate.
In mid-1997, he received an offer to buy out BWSI. After studying the proposal, Mr. Panlilio, together with a group of investors, officially took over BWSI.
At the time, BWSI only had a franchise for the main BWSI branch in Angeles, Pampanga and a few nearby barangays.
However, Mr. Panlilio realized that there was an untapped opportunity under the revised Local Government Code of 1991, which allowed municipalities and barangays to establish their own waterworks systems. This leeway allowed Mr. Panlilio to expand his franchise by approaching local governments directly with an offer to service provincial residents, most of whom did not have access to potable water. He was able to expand BWSI to 58 branches, serving 16 provinces and an estimated 200,000 households in 19 years.
BWSI offers various services: sourcing underground water reservoirs, filtering surface water sources, installing pumps and motors, treating water sources, connecting households and businesses to the mainlines, as well as meter reading and billing for consumed water and payment collection. It also provides after sales services like repairing broken meters and leaks.
“The niche of BWSI, which no other competitor has been able to overcome, is the ability to serve the smallest and medium-sized municipalities that big players in the water industry will not service as they are too small,” Mr. Panlilio said.
Through Mr. Panlilio’s efforts, BWSI has been recognized by the National Water Resource Board as the biggest provincial privately owned waterworks system in the country. BWSI has also enhanced the efficiency of its water delivery systems, such as in the area of non-revenue
water ( NRW). BWSI’s group of companies operates with a 10% NRW level, compared to the international standard of 15%.
Although he started BWSI as a family business, Mr. Panlilio has always believed in professional management. As a member of the board of trustees of the Ateneo Center for Family Business Development, his advocacy is to train family businesses to be professional so that they can develop and expand.
Striving to continuously innovate and leverage BWSI’s technology, Mr. Panlilio has piloted new strategies to grow the company, including pioneering bulk water supply arrangements with other water utility companies.
Seeking to supply potable water to the island of Panglao in Bohol, he also innovated a 40-kilometer pipeline, the longest of its kind. In addition to using new Spanish and Israeli technologies to streamline operations, he has also been testing new tools to purify water, eventually reaping a patent for successful designs. He has also been developing surface water supply sources such as dams, rivers and lakes, as well as harvesting and filtering rain water from logged basin areas in order to address the looming worldwide water crisis.
Moreover, Mr. Panlilio has devoted his time to developing their own filtration system. They are in the course of adapting hydraulic simulation, a computer program that analyzes pressure drops and flow rates in hydraulic networks.
They also use data loggers and thermal scanners to monitor electric utilities, as well as ultrasonic flow meters to calibrate water flow.
A former president of the Rotary Club of Makati, Mr. Panlilio established the Makati Rotary 3H Corp. to help provide solutions to the water crisis in the Philippines. In 1999, he won a $200,000 grant from the Rotary International and was able to build integrated water systems in barangays in San Fernando, Pampanga. The success of this project led to the building of another water district system in impoverished barangays in Tarlac and two towns in Ilocos Sur.
Because of his innovative ideas in the water sector, Mr. Panlilio has been invited by the United Nations as well as the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore to be a resource speaker on his innovations and company growth strategies. He is also an Agora Marketing Executive Awardee in 1991.
Asked what he would advise young entrepreneurs, Mr. Panlilio replied: “First, do business with integrity. Second, handle your people well. Third, embed values in your business.”
“And lastly, remember that you are always a work in progress. Learning should never stop.”
The official airline of the Entrepreneur of the Year Philippines 2017 is Philippine Airlines. Media sponsors are BusinessWorld and the ABS- CBN News Channel. Banquet sponsors are Bench; Bounty Fresh Food, Inc.; CDO Foodsphere; Fiori Di Marghi; First Metro Investment Corp.; Global Ferronickel Holdings, Inc.; Hyundai Asia Resources, Inc.; Intermed Marketing Phils., Inc.; Jollibee Foods Corp.; LBC; SteelAsia and Universal Harvester, Inc.
The winners of the Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2017 will be announced in an Oct. 18 awards banquet at the Makati Shangri-La hotel. The Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines will represent the country in the World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 in Monte Carlo, Monaco in June 2018.
The Entrepreneur Of The Year program is produced globally by Ernst & Young.