Tuesday, October 17, 2006 Founder of Chowking says visioning a must By Antonio M. Ajero
"THE secret of happiness is knowing when to let go," was the statement of Robert F. Kuan, founder of Chowking, a phenomenal Filipino-Chinese food chain that has gone international.
Kuan shared his sentiment in a speech before more than a hundred members of Davao City's close to 20 Rotary clubs meeting jointly last Thursday.
Kuan, now chair of the board of trustees of St. Luke's Medical Center in Manila, also told Rotarians the importance of visioning in any organization and in an individual's life.
He likewise explained why he sold out Chowking at the time it was experiencing phenomenal growth to the owners of Jollibee.
Kuan was first involved in the family-run Ling Nam Noodle Specialty Restaurant in Binondo, Manila, after working with Makati Supermart. Upon completing a master's degree in business administration at the Asian Institute of Management, he proposed the expansion of Ling Nam, which was the subject of his MBA thesis.
After staying on top of Ling Nam for eight years and opening eight branches, family problems cropped up, he related.
"Usually in a family enterprise, if not everybody shares in the vision, it would be difficult for the leader to pursue his vision," he said.
"It's so difficult to let go when you're president and 25 percent owner of the company, all those people were developed and trained under you," Kuan said.
Nevertheless, he said his advisers who are very good business people -- one of them Henry Sy of SM -- counseled him not to waste his time since the other family members don't share his vision.
"Every day that you go to your office, you spend your time trying to fight them and thinking how they were going to fight you, you are just wasting your years, wasting your resources, you'll never get anywhere, they advised me," Kuan said.
So one day, Kuan just turned in his resignation letter and offered to sell his 25 percent share to the other members of the family.
Getting out with a clear mind and starting small all over again, he founded Chowking with a lead capital in 1984 with the vision that it would one day become an international fastfood chain.
By the time, Kuan sold Chowking to the Jollibee Group of Companies in 2000, the chain had 155 stores, including three in the United States and three in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Tony Yap-Caktiong, Jollibee's owner, was a partner in establishing Chowking, the 58-year-old Kuan bared.
He said he had to let go of Chowking and 15 years of successful operation when he decided to help in the development of St. Luke's into the country's best medical center. He said it was a dream he shared with his visionary predecessor, the late lawyer William Quasha, who turned around St. Luke's from a Church-run charitable hospital which the Episcopal bishop had given up for lack of budget to one of the world's centers of medical excellence that it is today.
He said the religious group agreed not to have anything to do with the the management of the hospital anhd allow it to be reconstituted into a non-profit corporation.
He said St. Luke's secret of success lies in its investments on outstanding medical practitioners and state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment.
For many years, it was only St. Luke's advertising in the newspapers, he said. Today, all medical institutions advertise the expertise and excellent medical services that they render, Kuan said.
He said the income of St. Luke's is plowed back into the recruitment of the best and the brightest medical experts and the acquisition of the modern medical diagnostic equipment, which are fully depreciated as quickly as three years old.
Kuan was with 15 other officers of Rotary clubs in Makati who stayed in Davao City for three days.
