The one & only Eisa

This slim and seemingly fragile woman can drive a six-by-six truck loaded with construction filling materials — if need be. And she once did, when her company was starting out in the ‘80s. Now the chairman and CEO, Isabelita Paredes Mercado is the woman behind the wheel of a company that employs 6,500 people. In 2014, the company had a reported net income of P61 million.

As head of IPM Holdings, which includes waste management, construction and real estate, Isabelita or “Eisa” isn’t in a man’s world by accident. She chose to be part of it. She didn’t balk at the idea of having construction sites as her work place. And then she turned panambak and basura into gold.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. While studying at the University of Santo Tomas pursuing a degree in  Commerce, major in Accounting, Eisa was encouraged by an uncle to go into insurance. She got a license but found selling insurance not her cup of tea. After graduation, she borrowed capital from her mother and went into a trading business.

In the beginning, Eisa only had herself and one truck.

She sold construction filling materials to big companies like PNCC, which she found connections to because of friends who owned trucks that brought filling materials to these firms. She found this more fulfilling than selling insurance because “I could easily pinpoint my clients and they can easily check how good I am by looking at my rendered service.

“It was a challenge on my end because I was entering a man’s world, so to speak,” she recalls.

Starting with only with a staff of three that grew to five, Eisa did everything, “from accounting to operations to HR.”

 “Actually, I started as a single proprietor. It was not easy to start, so what I really put in was hard work. But it did not take long for me to pinpoint some companies that needed the materials, filling materials, not construction materials. I started buying my own trucks when I saw that my sub contractors were already starting to buy new trucks to accommodate the demands of my business!”

Having her own fleet gave her the “truck” record. That put her on the right track to attract even more purchase orders from the country’s biggest constructions companies like DMCI and AG&P. Her fleet of trucks grew to 50, and eventually to over 100.

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After supplying the panambak to big construction sites and building up a fleet of 100 trucks to ferry these filling materials to them, Eisa thought she’d go all the way. She decided to go into construction in the ‘90s.

She also liked it that her deliverables were concrete, no pun intended.

“In construction, you have to deliver something visible. You’re not just marketing, you have to perform, you have to do it. It’s so easy to deliver on your services because the end product is very visible. What you do is being monitored, that’s the difference.” In the end, what you deliver is either a building or a bridge. Definitely hard to miss.

“Because my trading company’s purpose was construction materials, I included construction to my business. I started amending my SEC registration to include construction,” recalls Eisa, a mother of four.

With no background in the construction business prior to her trading of filling materials, Eisa started asking her engineers how they arrived at things.

“You don’t need to become an engineer yourself, it only takes an interest in it and malalaman mo rin.”

Eisa’s IPM Construction did the excavation for the Asian Development Bank Building in the Ortigas area. Eisa says she also did construction, excavation and landscaping work for Shangri-La EDSA; the Shangri-La Mall, Megamall, Tektite Towers, to name a few.

The hard hat was her crown.

Eisa’s IPM Holdings built a Refuse-Derived Fuel facility that converts trash into fuel for cement plants.

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But Eisa did not stop there. Having gone from filling materials to full blown construction, Eisa found another niche to fill. She went into the waste management business.

“When we were excavating for the construction of a high-rise in a one-hectare property, the mayor of Pasig saw that IPM had a lot of trucks. I did not know him. He said the Metro Manila Council was not doing its job, so he wanted to solve the garbage problem in his city himself. He asked me if he could use 10 of my trucks and pay me. He told me ‘You just have to trust me, I will collect the garbage of Pasig through your trucks’.” She trusted him and that gave her both the “track” and the “truck” record to do more waste management projects. From then on, IPM handled Pasig’s trash and now handles trash management in other cities in the metropolis as well.

IPM brought the trash to sanitary landfills but Eisa realized the landfill should not be garbage’s final resting place.  Trash could be turned into gold.

The trash dumped in the landfill was weighed by tons. Eventually, IPM Holdings, with BEST and Geocycle/Holcim Philippines, built a Refuse-Derived Fuel facility that converts trash into fuel for cement plants. The facility can process as much as 600 tons of garbage, which are packed in bales wrapped in strong plastic before they are delivered to the cement plants. This has received the nod of many environmentalists who believe garbage is better fuel than coal. The fuel is needed at the furnace for the processing of cement.

So Eisa not only does business with local government units that want to dispose of their garbage, she does business, too, with those who need garbage to fuel their businesses.

Now, doesn’t that garbage make a lot of sense?

* * *

At the end of the day, what fuels Eisa to go beyond her comfort zone — from dusty construction and excavation sites, to garbage treatment plants?

“It’s my drive to really succeed. Even from the start, I knew what my direction in my life would be. I didn’t want to have a boss. I got good people, built a track record, made my construction company Triple A.”

The lady also looks for a need to fill and having pinpointed it, makes sure her company delivers. Whether it’s a building or a ton of trash.