How to earn twice from a deal

Did you know 1: The Rotary Club will be co-branding a credit card for its Philippine members. The financial partner is a local bank.

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Did you know 2: Many truck drivers working for haulers of petroleum products own pretty nice cars. That’s because the trucks they drive have false bottoms.

As a result, the bulk of the gasoline is delivered to the different gasoline stations carrying the brand of the petroleum company that contracted the services of the hauler. That small portion that has been, uhm, lost in transit is sold directly by the driver and/or hauler as unbranded gas to other parties.

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Did you know 3: Letran is putting up a full-service campus in Bataan on land donated by the local government unit. That means students based in northern Luzon don’t have to come to Manila to get a good education.

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Did you know 4: Figaro Coffee Co. is formally opening its Shanghai branch this weekend.

Naturally, founder Pacita Juan is thrilled, in part because a cup of coffee (and proudly Philippine coffee at that) is being sold at three times the price in the Philippines and in part because, well, the challenging China market is so huge (read: every fifth human being in the world is a Chinese).

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Did you know 5: There are currently only two exporters of mango leather, which is mango puree that is baked and then rolled like a jelly roll. The technology was developed by the Department of Science and Technology, which has also been helping the exporters by giving them access to machines that they can rent by the day.

Right now, these exporters are said to be unable to meet the demand in the United States alone.

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Even hotels and fast food chains have turned to manpower services companies, which are better known as providers of janitorial services for office buildings.

The setup is pretty simple. A company hands over its training manual to the manpower services company. Based on the manual, the manpower services company then trains people to meet the specific requirements of the client, whether this is to repair watches or fix hotel beds in a particular sequence.

By replacing regular companies with subcontracted workers, such companies which make use of these manpower services companies are said to save as much as 30 percent (read: these workers are, of course, paid less and do not get the benefits of regular employees) and do not have labor union problems.

In exchange, these companies pay the manpower services companies 10 percent of whatever is saved, which means they are still ahead by 20 percent.