Go Negosyo fever hits Baguio

BAGUIO CITY – Over a thousand greenhorn entrepreneurs and aspiring teen businessmen from all over the country gathered at Teachers Camp here for the north leg of the Go Negosyo caravan.

Benitez Hall, venue for “Teen Negosyo,” was jampacked with at least 1,500 young traders, which delighted and inspired the audience, especially the man behind the project, Presidential Assistant on Entrepreneurship Jose “Joey” Concepcion III.

The launch of the book “50 Entrepreneurial Stories” was also hugely successful, with supplies lasting for just over an hour.

Concepcion inspired even more would-be entrepreneurs by relating his own experiences as a young businessman who did not see his lack of a diploma as a hindrance to success.

Admitting that he still has to finish his college course at De La Salle University, Concepcion encouraged today’s youth to go into business.

What matters is positive thinking, he said.  

Concepcion’s family owns several successful companies that also started small, such as Selecta and Pop Cola. He related how these two brands fought the giant soda companies and eventually made it big.

Concepcion exhorted the Filipino youth to think out of the box. A budding businessman, he claimed, needs determination to succeed.

This lesson still applies today, affirmed Donna Rufino, owner-proprietor of the renowned Star Café, which has been serving customers in Baguio and its environs and even Manila for 67 years now.

Rufino shared that her father-in-law, a Chinese immigrant who fled the revolution in China, succeeded in business through sheer determination.

Star Café along Session Road, the main business thoroughfare in the city, is already an institution, so that it is said that you have not really been to Baguio if you haven’t been to Star Café.

“The same principles work,” said Rufino, who, together with other Cordillera and Baguio entrepreneurs like the renowned hand loom weaving designer Narda Capuyan, made their mark in the competitive world of business as entrepreneurs.

They were given awards by Concepcion and Education Secretary Jesli Lapus yesterday.