Business lessons Samie Lim taught his son Chris
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. —Robert Byrne
How can achievers or even ordinary people raise and train their children and grandkids, as well as non-relative successors, to have a Lance Gokongwei, a Tessie Sy Coson or a Jaime Zobel de Ayala? How do we pass on work ethic, humility, obedience to elders and values to succeeding generations? How do we break the age-old curse of “great fortunes have no third generations”?
One measure of true success is whether an entrepreneur, professional, craftsman or leader has raised and trained good successors — children, other kin, even non-relatives — as corporate executives or professionals who will continue an enterprise or vocation with the same or even better success and similar values. Some achievers sadly fail with wayward or disobedient kids.
In the Philippines, among the business leaders admired for having exemplary and obedient children as good successors include Henry Sy of SM/BDO, John Gokongwei Jr. of JG Summit, George S.K. Ty of Metrobank, Jaime Zobel de Ayala of Ayala/BPI, the Aboitizes, Manny Villar of Vista Land, Joey Antonio of Century Properties, the Tambuntings of the oldest pawnshop chain and Planters Development Bank, Oscar Lopez and the 89-year-old “Appliance King” Benito Lim.
The heirs of Benito Lim include Samie Lim of Automatic Appliances/ Blims Furniture/ the Canadian Tourism and Hospitality Institute and Wilson Lim of Abenson Appliances and Waltermart malls. While Samie is a cum laude graduate of the Ateneo, his wife Carrie T. Lim is a magna cum laude graduate of Assumption College and a cousin of Philippine Airlines chairman Lucio Tan.
Samie Lim is known as the “Father of Philippine franchising” who also helped popularize Mother’s Day celebrations here. He is chairman of the World Franchise Council, chairman emeritus and founding president of the Philippine Franchise Association, chairman emeritus of the Philippine Retailers Association and director of Metrobank Group’s PSBank.
On January 5, 2012 in Shangri-la Hotel Bangkok, Benito Lim’s grandson and Samie Lim’s fourth son Sam Christopher “Chris” Lim will marry fellow Unilever executive Gift Ruttanaphon (who has ancestral roots in the Teochew dialect region of Guangdong province in south China). Chris is Unilever’s senior global brand manager for Sunsilk shampoo, which has one billion euros or P50 billion in yearly sales worldwide. Chris studied management engineering (with an award as top graduate of the elite M.E. program) from the Ateneo de Manila University and he also studied in 2003 at the National University of Singapore.
Work hard, save, think long-term, listen to parents
STAR recently had an exclusive interview with Samie Lim and his London-based son Chris Lim over lunch at Edsa Shangri-La Hotel’s Summer Palace Chinese resto. Excerpts:
THE PHILIPPINE STAR: What are some success tips of your family patriarch Benito Lim?
CHRIS LIM: Our kongkong’s advice is this: With hard work, you can achieve anything. And if you’re lucky enough to start from a good background, hard work will make the rewards exponential. That’s why in our whole family — my siblings and cousins in the third generation — we were all trained to study well, to work hard and to obey our elders.
SAMIE LIM: My dad Benito Lim always says: “Most people only work eight to nine hours a day, and they usually work five days a week. If you work 12 to 14 hours a day and for six or even seven days a week, there’s no question you will be ahead of all the rest.” My dad tells you his ideas but lets you compute the details yourselves.
Did he also teach you the Confucian virtue of frugality?
SAMIE: When I was in Grade 2 or 3, my dad gave me an allowance of 10 centavos per day. At that time Pepsi and Coke were already selling for 10 centavos per bottle. All of us kids also each had our daily baon (snack) like a sandwich. My father taught us frugality by saying that Cosmos’ soft drink then was only five centavos a bottle and he taught us that we could save 50 percent of our daily allowance every day if we bought it instead of others. He lets you figure out for yourselves, but he doesn’t tell you what to do.
CHRIS: My parents brought us up with the value of money; they instilled that in us. It’s not so much about money, but we learned the discipline of saving.
Any other teachings that guided you?
CHRIS: My dad brought us up by always teaching us four principles, and every few years he’d really talk to us and we’d really take these four ideas to heart: No. 1, for you to succeed, you need to have the heart to honor the past; No. 2, the skill to excel today; No. 3, the mind to visualize the future; and No. 4, the will to serve always. So it’s about the heart, the skill, the mind, and the will for the past, today, the future and every day.
That’s interesting. Any other success tips from your dad you can share?
CHRIS: Another thing my dad always asks us six siblings to do is to think long-term. It’s not only for the next five years, but also for the next 10, 20, 30 years into the future. Even as kids, he’d sit the family down to ask us what each of us wanted to be 10, 20, 30 or 40 years later. So it really taught us to think of the long-term future. It helps us when we plan our studies, the choices for our college course, our careers, marriage, or even when investing in the stock market. Wise choice of spouse is important, because I believe 80 to 90 percent of one’s future happiness will come from the correct and right choice of life partner as wife or husband. Our parents advise, guide and let us think carefully before having any girlfriend; that’s why I chose my future wife, Gift.
Where did this idea come from, teaching your kids to think long-term?
SAMIE: What changed my life was when I was in first-year college in 1969. I had this yoga teacher, a Chinese lady from Singapore who was then also yoga teacher to Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce & Industry, Inc. leader, the late Yao Shiong Shio. I attended her yoga class and she asked: “The first thing I want you to do is to meditate for 30 minutes and ask the question, what do you want placed on your tombstone?”
And I still remember that what came to my mind for my own tombstone is this: “Here lies a man who did the greatest number of good for the greatest number of people.” That’s it for me.
To be fulfilled, you start with the end in mind, you think long-term, so you’d think and do everything in your life to fulfill that. That’s why I’m more an industry builder, like pioneering the franchising industry before and now my championing the growth of the Philippine tourism industry. I am guided by two goals: creating thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.
Aside from Chris, I heard your five other kids are also outstanding and working overseas?
SAMIE: Our eldest son Benedict works for an American multinational, Solta Medical, formerly with Johnson & Johnson Medical. He’s regional head for Asia Pacific in charge of 17 countries. He’s based in Asia. My second son Dexter is based in Vancouver in North America; he works for HSBC and oversees the architectural IT for HSBC worldwide. My third son Frederick works with me, he used to work for the world’s largest appliance retail company Future Shop and Best Buy. My fourth son Chris is based in London, in Europe with the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever; he has a global perspective.
My fifth son Gregory is an Ateneo graduate, too; my wife and I sent him to Beijing to further improve his Chinese-language fluency because we all know China is the world’s future. One thing he learned from China is very simple: scale. Every time we say “big” here, that’s really only small compared to what he has seen there. He helps scale up our businesses. I have to credit the Ateneo for the training to “think big,” but here you don’t really see what big is. In China you can see it. My son, with his own two eyes, saw how big things are made to happen there and in such a short time. Our sixth child is a girl, Katrina; she just graduated and is now working for a management consultant firm in Canada.
My dream is for ASEAN to someday build up our own ASEAN multinationals, the same way Europe and the US did it before, and the way China and Japan have done it now. We in the Philippines and Southeast Asia should dream to create future world-class ASEAN multinationals.
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