TURNING ICE INTO GOLD
‘ICE KING’ PUSHES COOL IDEAS TO SELL HOT COMMODITY
GERRY SANTOS, ALSO KNOWN as “Mr. Freeze,” is by no measure a cold dude. He warmly greets everyone – from employees to distributors and partners – with his signature smile and charm.
Santos is a dynamic 51-year-old, who has the energy of a person half his age, and he credits this to being in a job that keeps his entrepreneurial juices flowing.
Ice baby
“I’ve been working with ice ever since I was five years old,” recalls Santos, narrating a childhood filled with memories of days with his dad, Manuel Santos, an engineer, whose main business was selling the commodity to restaurants.
The business was then a simple operation, which entailed buying blocks of ice from an ice plant, and then lugging these huge frozen pieces back home where the fam- ily would spend the entire morning breaking down the gargantuan “glacier.”
“Hindi pa uso yung tube ice [Tube ice wasn’t commonly used yet], so we would break it apart using ice picks,” chuckles Santos. Even through fever and chills, the young Santos would be there by his father’s side, helping chip away the ice into sellable sizes.
After graduating from San Beda College with a degree in Management, Santos continued to work for his dad. “When there was no driver, I would deliver the ice, or if we were one man down that day, I’d be the bagger as well,” he says.
But after 13 years, Santos decided to take a break in order to explore other opportunities. “I resigned because I wanted to establish my own business and learn to stand on my own two feet,” he explains. “I wanted to see what was outside of my comfort zone.”
Santos took out a loan from the bank to jump-start his buy-and-sell business dealing in used cars. The “speed” of that enterprise and the routine, however, eventually led to boredom. “And so I decided to go back to my roots, back to the basics, which was ice.”
Ice on the prize
But returning to the familiar didn’t mean Santos simply slipped back into the old ways. “I wanted to change it. I wanted to innovate,” he reveals. The opportunity lay in improving sales and productivity.
“Dati pipila kami sa plants, [We used to queue up for ice at the plants] which ate up time, of course.”
Instead of remaining as an ice reseller, Santos established Mr. Freeze in 2005, building his first 15-ton ice facility in Quezon City, which allowed them to manufacture the product themselves.
“I got the name Mr. Freeze from the movie, Batman & Robin. Ang kala
ban ni Batman doon [Batman’s nemesis there] was Mr. Freeze (played by Arnold Schwarzenneger). Kapag binaril ka (niya) nagiging yelo ka, [When he shoots you, you turn into ice]” he
I knew the weaknesses of my competitors, and so I improved the quality and service to my customers and dealers