This Aling Maria Never Knew
Strategic Planning
by Salvador I. Sibayan
There’s a lot of Aling Marias out there. But this one was different. True, she never went past high school, but she knew what she wanted to be -- a successful tindera like her mother. She had defined her mission like strategic planners do. But unlike her mother, she wanted to do it better and bigger. She wanted to offer more items than a sari-sari store. She wanted to run a mini-grocery.
So she expanded the frontage of their house and stocked the same items as the other sari-sari stores in the neighborhood – and much more, including school supplies. Going by current prices, she started out with P1.5 million. But at the time it was easily less than a third of this.
She priced these items similar to the others. But unlike them, she was the first to open and the last to close. By doing so, she served the needs of the customers of stores that still had to open or had closed for the day. With each working day, she managed to increase her sales and had the opportunity of repeat customers. She was aware of making a small profit in every transaction. At the same time, she unknowingly provided convenience to her customers, not only in terms of location, but also of time. She had gone through a process of setting objectives. She knew how to beat the competition by formulating strategy.
To get the job done right, she asked her growing brood of four daughters to pitch in during their free time. She advised them never to be suplada, extend credit to, or shortchange their customers. By setting some sort of ground rules, she determined policies.
Aling Maria realized that her bestsellers were cigarettes. To bring down her cost, she started getting these in bulk, not by the carton but by the box. Pretty soon, she was supplying the needs of other stores nearby. She followed this by becoming a wholesaler of soft drinks. All these while maintaining her mini-grocery. In effect, she established several programs. The first was procurement – buying products as cheaply as possible without going for lower quality brands. The second was inventory control, for scheduling purchases at a proper time to minimize stock-outs and lost sales. And lastly, a program of managing her cash so that she had enough to pay for her purchases.
This practice went on for several years with Aling Maria building up her capital by living within -- or even below her means. When I told her that one should only consume the profit realized and never the capital, she corrected me by saying, “One should only eat one-third of the profit!” So when the opportunity of having a stall in a public market came up, she had the money for the rights and the goods she had to buy. Knowing how much she needed to stock her mini-grocery and how much she made in a day, she knew how much the stall could make. Mentally, she had prepared cost and expense estimates and sales forecasts.
Since she still had to mind her grocery, she asked one daughter to forget going to college and take charge of the market stall. So that her daughter knew what to do, she said that the way they conducted business in the sari-sari store would be the same in the stall. Aling Maria had specified procedures.
They kept receipts, but never maintained records. To know how much they made in a day, they simply added the day’s sales and applied an average mark-up on what they sold to arrive at their net profit. With this, the mother-daughter tandem determined their measure of performance.
Aling Maria no longer operates her grocery. By using the same time-tested formula, she now operates her own private market, renting out stalls – including one to her daughter.
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