UNDOUBTEDLY, the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has shaken up businesses of all shapes and sizes, regardless of their strength and type of industry. But for small business owner Hayreen Rodil-Puno, what’s more difficult in these trying times than managing all their family businesses on her own now.
In an interview with the BusinessMirror, Hayreen said that she did not dare imagine herself running their entities single-handedly when her other half, Aldrine, succumbed to heart attack on October 24, 2020. He was 51 years old.
According to Hayreen, Aldrine was not just a husband but indeed a business partner. Together, they put up a small vegetable retailing business that paved the way for their auto supply, diesel refilling station, and hollow blocks manufacturing enterprises.
“It was heartbreaking, of course,” Hayreen said of her husband’s passing in Filipino. “But I have to stand up and move on for my children. I am the only one now whom they can depend on. They are my inspiration to continue our businesses. I will do my best even without him anymore.”
Aldrine is also survived by his sons Archie Jan, who has autism, 26 years old, special education graduate; Patrick, 25, multimedia arts graduate, who currently helps manage their businesses in Pampanga; and Maria Joannes, 23, industrial engineering graduate.
Starting from ground up
IN 1992, soon after Aldrine and Hayreen graduated in college with Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Bachelor of Science with a Major in Mathematics degrees, respectively, they decided to heed her mother’s advice to sell carrots in one of her stalls in Divisoria since they did not have jobs yet during that time.
“She lent us one or two sacks of carrots that we retailed. After we sold them, we paid her back. That’s how we started,” Hayreen recalled on how her mom, who was also a vendor, helped them establish their business without investing any capital.
Hands on of their start-up business, she was in charge of selling the carrots sourced by Aldrine from Benguet and Baguio. It was hard at first, she admitted. They had to work from three o’clock in the afternoon up to 9 am the next day and, most of the time, were apart from each other given their responsibilities.
Thanks to their hard work and sacrifices, they managed to grow the business in a span of six years. Using their generated income, they acquired the stalls of some of their co-vendors and a truck unit in 1998 that they used for their expansion into wholesaling not only of carrots, but also cabbage, sayote, potatoes, and pechay.
Their customers also have grown from household buyers to restaurateurs, hoteliers, and other vegetable retailers. From merely a husband-and-wife in tandem, they now employ 15 workers.
Like some of their counterparts, Hayreen said that they also have their own share of “misfortunes” in the business like customers not paying their bills, inflation, lack of supply, and now the health crisis. Good thing that vegetables have become more in-demand amid the pandemic as more people are now health-conscious, she cited.
“We also sell online that’s why our business has continued even during lockdowns,” Hayreen said. “We also keep on supplying vegetables everyday in Mindoro, Palawan, Batangas, Parañaque, and other parts of Metro Manila.”
Diversified enterprises
BUSINESS opportunities not only knocked once, but multiple times for the Puno family.
Eight years after their successful foray in the vegetable retail sector, they needed to keep up with the times so as to improve further their daily operations. Upgrading their delivery system is one way to do so. This, eventually, led to their entry into the trucking business in 2010.
“When we changed our delivery trucks, the old units usually ended up in the garage of our property in Floridablanca, Pampanga. So why not convert them into delivery trucks for gravel and sand,?” she shared, while revealing their measly initial capital of just P10,000.
Maintaining the vehicles have become more costly as the years passed by, hence, the couple decided to invest around half-a-million pesos to put up their own auto supply shop in 2015, mainly to serve their own needs. Named after her husband, it has shortly become the “go-to” store also for her siblings with trucking businesses and other customers passing by the shop strategically located along the road.
Since 2017, the Aldrine Autosupply and General Merchandise also has carried their diesel refilling business for their trucking and customers’ consumption. Due to demands from their patrons, they then offered hollow blocks they sourced from local producers. In 2019, they put up their own P2 million manufacturing facility located at a nearby barangay,
Starting with just four workers, this site directly supplies to hardware stores and contractors in Pampanga, Bulacan, and Mandaluyong.
Following the diversification of their businesses, however, Mr. and Mrs. Puno had to come up with the hardest business decision yet during the time. Since it cost a lot to maintain the four “hand-me-down” vehicles for their trucking business—between 10 to 15 years old—they had them retired and sold last year.
For Hayreen, it’s just right to finally “give up” such venture as it already served well for almost a decade of hauling gravel and sand for their customers and providing jobs for 17 of their employees.
Unfazed by the pandemic
CONCEDING that 2020 was one of the difficult years of her life given the impact of such unprecedented health crisis on their businesses plus the untimely demise of her husband, Hayreen remains bullish that they will overcome and bounce back from this pandemic.
Due to the imposition of community quarantines in Metro Manila and other areas with rising cases of Covid-19, she bared that the income generated by their vegetable trading business decreased by 70 percent last year compared to 2019. The downtrend also followed after they temporarily closed from March to May their auto supply shop, whose profit declined to 70 percent; diesel retailing, which decreased by 50 percent; and hollow blocks manufacturing and trading, down by 40 percent for the two periods in review.
“This 2021, of course, we expect to recover. But it still depends on the development of our situation, wherein the government’s vaccination program will be implemented nationwide and that we go back to the ‘old normal’ by end of this year,” Heyreen stressed.
1 comment
Very inspiring <3