The way of the Injap

By now, most people already know how Edgar Sia II built the revolutionary fast food chain “Mang Inasal,” starting with a single branch in Iloilo City in 2003 with P2.4 million in capital borrowed from his father.

And the same people are also awed by how Sia grew his business into a nationwide barbecued chicken phenomenon, to the point that its giant rival Jollibee responded to this growing market threat through the shortest route possible: Buying it for a total of P5 billion (first, a 70-percent stake in 2010 for P3 billion, and the balance in 2016 for P2 billion), making the young Ilonggo native one of the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs almost overnight.

But there are important and interesting tidbits about the Philippine business phenom that are known by fewer still.

There are trivial details like the fact that his nickname “Injap” is an amalgam of “Intsik” and “Japanese,” his father being part Chinese (or “intsik” in colloquial Filipino) and his mother being part Japanese.

However, the most important elements of Sia—is insights as an entrepreneurial leading light, his strategies for building a business empire, and his philosophy as a person—can only be gleaned from close one-on-one interactions with him. Unfortunately, he is a busy man who shuttles constantly from city to city to check on the many City Mall developments of Double Dragon Properties Inc., which he put up a few years ago with his mentor, partner and former business rival Tony Tan Caktiong of Jollibee Foods Corp.

This doesn’t mean that his secrets are exclusive to the lucky few who can bag a rare lunch or dinner appointment with Sia.

Quite the opposite, in fact, because there is the next best thing to sitting across a table in conversation with him, and it’s available to anyone who can beg, steal or borrow—but preferably set aside P295 to buy—a copy of his book “Life Principles,” written with author, writer and editor Kristine Fonacier.

In it, the reader gets to experience, with an intimate feeling that’s as close to “first hand” as possible, how the mind of one of the country’s youngest billionaires (a dollar billionaire, with a net worth of $1 billion as of March 2017, according to Forbes magazine) works.

Take, for example, one interesting story about Sia’s days before the fame and fortune that Mang Inasal brought.

In 2002, he came across the newspaper ad by food manufacturing giant Nestlé announcing a nationwide contest where a brand new Honda Civic sedan would be awarded to the participant who would submit the most number of replies via mobile phone text messages to survey questions.

According to Injap, he tore out the newspaper ad and put it up on a wall in his room, studying the contest mechanics carefully and doing the math of the cost-benefit analysis.

The page-turning account can only be described as “gripping,” especially when one imagines the future businessman—a year before launching his game changing inasal venture—sitting in his room, with the gears of his mind figuring out how to win a brand new car.

Not long after, he decided that he had found the formula, and went to work. Injap enlisted the help of Ernie, a college classmate, who agreed to help him win the contest in exchange for a P200 daily fee … and a bonus of an upscale Nokia phone, then worth around P10,000, if they ended up winning the top prize.

In the meantime, Injap gave Ernie a simple cellphone which the latter would use to text entries to the Nestlé contest as often as he could, but especially at night and all the way until daybreak. This was because the initial feedback of the contest leaderboard (made public regularly by the contest organizers) showed that almost all participants were texting their entries during the daytime—leaving almost half of the day’s 24-hour cycle as a void that Injap could exploit.

Book proceeds will go to a scholarship fund

“So I would visit Ernie every night at his nearby house, bringing him siopao and Red Bull energy drink so he could stay awake to text our entries to the contest,” Injap said over a dinner interview, and repeated faithfully in the published account. “I would also audit him by calling him up randomly around 3 a.m. to see if he was awake doing the job we agreed on.”

In Injap’s mind, the results of the contest were nothing less than a mathematical certainty in his favor. And not long after, the results of the contest confirmed this, with Nestlé announcing that the soon-to-be billionaire had indeed won the Honda Civic in a full page newspaper ad—the page of which he still keeps to this day.

Stories like this are aplenty in the easy-to-read book, written in concise chapters and subdivided into three main sections covering life lessons, business values and guiding principles.

It reads less like one is listening to the businessman speaking from a podium, and feels more like he is talking to the reader from across the table while sharing a meal.

Why did he write a book at the young age of 40, with billions more to be made in the years ahead and more businesses to grow?

“I want to share these insights with the public,” he said. “These are the lessons that helped me. Maybe it can inspire the next billionaire, too.”

‘Life Principles’ is published by Lisa Gokongwei’s Summit Publishing Company Inc.

It is co-authored by Summit Books’ editor in chief Kristine Fonacier, with a foreword by Sia’s mentor-business partner Tony Tan Caktiong.

Of course, there is also a quasi-commercial motive for pushing his autobiography.

Injap said that all the proceeds from the sale of the book, which is now on its second printing, goes to his family’s charitable foundation that gives scholarships to indigent but deserving students.

“This is for them,” he said.

As for the reader, who knows? An outlay of less than P300—or zero, if one manages to borrow a dog-eared copy from a friend—may be the cheapest investment one could make for insights and inspiration that could evolve into the country’s next billion-dollar enterprise.