West Lake journey

Richard Tansiongkun was working with a multinational company in 1995 when he put up a take-out dimsum counter called West Lake, after a popular tourist destination in Hangzhou, China.

Today, there are five West Lake dimsum kiosks, two of which are franchisees, and one West Lake casual dine-in restaurant.

"Gross daily sales do not fall below P10,000 for the three company-owned kiosks," said Tansiongkun, who owns the kiosks through Authentic Foods Asia. The kiosks started out selling basic dimsum products such as siomai and siopao plus noodles and fried rice. Since then, two of the kiosks, including the top grosser in Alabang, have widened their food offerings to rice toppings.

Franchising

Authentic Foods has a two-tiered kiosk franchising program. The franchise fee for a basic kiosk is P100,000; for kiosk B, which is commonly found in Hong Kong style food courts and offers rice topping, it is P400,000. A franchisee would need to invest P800,000 for the basic kiosk and P1 million. Authentic Foods is currently upgrading two of its kiosks to the kiosk B model.

"We continue to be open to kiosks franchising but we are concentrating on opening more casual dining restaurants," said Tansiongkun. Authentic Foods will open another restaurant at Global City and is eyeing two more Metro Manila locations. Being studied is a restaurant located inside a first-class hospital, where the customer base will be visitors and relatives of patients.

Because the investment required is between P2 million and P3 million for each restaurant, Authentic Foods is looking at joint venture partnerships.

"We want to deal with partners/franchisee who are entrepreneurial. They must be hands-on managers and they must love to eat what we sell," he said. In short, Tansiongkun is looking for people just like him.