Giant leap from fast food to health care sector

ROBERT F. Kuan. Photo by JOSEPH AGCAOILI

Robert Kuan, 65, is having the time of his life navigating a second career after a highly successful foray into fast food, Chinese-style. After cashing in his 50 percent equity in ChowKing for a reported half a billion pesos, Robert is now chair of St. Luke’s Medical Center.

He works for free, but the psychic rewards are plentiful, because he’s doing it for his church.

Tea for two

I was fascinated by this veritable leap of faith, so I called him up for coffee. He invited me for tea instead.

Robert welcomed me to his high-rise residence overlooking the great enclaves of the rich and their meticulously manicured golf courses and polo grounds. The view would have been breathtaking had it been a sunny day. But the rainy season had come early—it wasn’t even the middle of May—and a grey pallor hung over the city like lead weights. Still, through the mist, you could see where development was heading—and a rosy future beckoned Robert Kuan.

To the north you could barely discern the old suburb of Quezon City, where St. Luke’s Medical Center stood, of which Robert Kuan, founder of ChowKing, was now chair of the board of trustees.

To the east stood a new St. Luke’s at the Fort in Taguig, all 150,000 square meters of it, ready to minister to the health needs of an expanding metropolis.

To the south lay the communities of the future, and this early St. Luke’s has staked out a property for a third medical center: “landbanking,” Robert Kuan calls it.

But first, St. Luke’s in Taguig.

As planned, the building would have cost P6.5 billion to construct. It will eventually house P2.7 billion worth of state-of-the-art medical equipment powered by technology that will boggle the minds of most everyone except the medical technologists and cyber physicians that will operate them.

Robert’s vision

Robert began to verbalize his vision for St. Luke’s:

“You know a vision can be achieved in 10, 20, or 30 years. But to reach it, you have to do a lot of preparatory things.  To accurately predict where the health care market will be, you have to look at the trend of development—where the movement of commercial, industrial, and residential development is headed.”

The way Robert looked out into the future you’d think things were just beginning for him. After earning his Master of Business Management degree at the Asian Institute of Management in 1975 (his bachelor’s degree in business administration came from the University of the Philippines), Robert put up Ling Nam with his siblings in 1976:

“After eight and a half years running it I left Ling Nam, on October 16, 1984. I talked to Tony (Tan Caktiong) of Jollibee, who by this time was on his sixth year after founding Jollibee, and I invited him to partner with me in my concept of a Chinese fast-food restaurant.

“We agreed exactly one month later, on November 16th.  On March 18, 1985, we opened the first ChowKing store.”

And then came the moment that would truly change his life:

“After five years, in 1989, we had ten stores.  (The dates punctuate his story like the day he was baptized, or the day he was married. Similarly defining moments.)  My little success came to the notice of the members of the St. Luke’s board. One of them was the president of Cosmos, William Padua, who was a very active member of the Episcopal Church, which owned St. Luke’s.

“William had served in the St. Luke’s board since 1975, but in 1989 he decided to migrate to the US to be with his children. We knew each other well since we were both active in the Church.  He recommended me to Bill Quasha, the lawyer, chair of the St. Luke’s board of trustees, who welcomed me to help them run the nonstock, nonprofit hospital.

Call to serve

“From 1989-1996 (he remembers the dates without hesitation), I was just an unassuming member of the board, supporting the vision of Bill Quasha to transform St. Luke’s from a church-run charity hospital to a world-class medical center.

“But this would require a complete change of structure, a lot of new people, and a reorientation of attitudes to care for the medical needs of people in a nonstock, nonprofit organization.

“The board had set the example for servant-leadership starting with Bill Quasha, who had dedicated his life to transforming a hospital dependent on annual subsidies and a budget set aside by the Church, to a self-supporting, revenue-generating institution that could set aside an annual surplus for building centers of excellence within the hospital and making it a world-class medical center.

“Involvement in a hospital is a calling. This calling became more evident with the passing of Bill Quasha in 1996.  The board invited me to fill his shoes. I said that I did not make a good figurehead and that there were many others better qualified than me.

“But if the board wanted me to provide a visionary leadership towards lifting St. Luke’s to a higher level, it would have to be a vision shared by all members of the board. The board agreed, and I accepted the challenge of becoming their chairman.”

Tough job

“In 1996, it seemed like a very difficult vision to achieve.  We needed a lot of capital.  At that time it cost only between five to seven million pesos to put up a ChowKing store.  We needed more than one BILLION pesos to modernize St. Luke’s to world-class standards.

“Now as we look back, we are happy to provide for the needs of the Church that started St. Luke’s some 100 years ago.  We have an outreach ministry that identifies the needs of the Church.  Some of the old churches the American missionaries built are now in need of repair, and we are happy to provide funds for them.

“We have a mission in Sagada that also operates a hospital to serve the communities there.  It is now called the Church of the Igorots, for many of our priests come from there.

“When the Episcopal missionaries came, they made it a point to minister to the minorities because they did not want to compete head on with the Catholic Church.  That is why we have two churches in Chinatown—St. Peter’s for the Cantonese and St. Stephen’s for the Fookienese.”

The Episcopal priests knew market segmentation 100 years ago, I mused.

One lucky guy

“You know, Henry Sy once told me,  ‘Robert, you are very lucky.  Most people your age (he was 59) still continue to make money.  But here you are giving back to society.’

“I am very thankful God called me to serve.  I get a lot of fulfillment in what I am doing today—and the example I am allowed to share with an organization like this—the concept of servant-leadership.  I never asked what’s in it for me. As trustees we do not receive compensation.”

Rewards do come in many forms, I said to myself. But I did not pursue the point. I had stayed long enough for tea.

(The author is president of a management consulting think tank; comments are welcome at e-mail: [email protected].)