Woman at the helm

'I AM the son my father never had,” explains Angela Figueroa Paulin, as she recounts how her late father, Guillermo M. Figueroa, slowly immersed her in the furniture business. She is now the president and chairman of the board of Casa Cebuana Inc., as well as president of Cebu Furniture Industries Foundation Inc.

Angela finished grade school and high school at St. Theresa’s College. For college, she wanted to take up something in the field of languages or the arts, but her father convinced her to take up business administration instead.

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When she finished her college studies at the University of the Philippines-Cebu, her father gave her a room in his furniture factory for her office. Her only job back then was to walk through the factory each day, with no reports to make—just to see and observe.

Angela’s father had begun the factory in the 1950s with a single planer and handsaw to make furniture from the materials available. Then it grew to become Rattan Originals Inc., which supplied furniture to a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, for the 1981 Summit Meeting; and to a hotel in Athens, Greece, where the Miss Universe beauty pageant was held. Rattan Originals was the first recipient of the Golden Shell Award for excellence in exports, given by the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1982.

In 1986, Guillermo, foreseeing the impending rattan shortage, reinvented his company and made it Casa Cebuana Incorporada, specializing in wood furniture. Angela joined the company around this time. To keep her in the company, her father made her travel and slowly, she became involved in its operations especially in the marketing side. To this day, Angela remarks, the wisdom of her father’s words—to see the workplace, to be in it—holds true: “To be always on the floor, always seeing, so you learn the business.” Some days before her father passed away on Nov. 28, 1977, he asked her to run the company for him, telling her: “Never forget to ask (God) for guidance.”

In her turn at the watch, she has not only upgraded the working machines from “manual to semi-automated state,” she has also seen fit to upgrade the status of the employees by making them attend seminars, not only to upgrade their skills but also their values.

Today, she has about 700 workers, down from the thousand over a year ago, in the sprawling factory that sits on eight hectares of land in Tangke, Talisay. The company exports high-end furniture to the United States, Europe, the Middle East, South America and South Africa. The company also has the Guillermo Martin Figueroa

Foundation Inc., with sending children to school as its main thrust.

It has 70 scholars in the elementary and high school levels, plus a soup feeding program, an alternative learning system facilitated by the Department of Education in Sitio San Rafael, Talisay, as well as a mother’s literacy program, also based there. The foundation is in keeping with her father’s soft heart, which Angela has institutionalized.

From a reluctant employee in her father’s furniture factory, Angela, Casa Cebuana Inc. president and CEO, is a worthy “son” of an industrious, and forward-thinking father.