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Joel
Banal’s life has always revolved around basketball, from
playing collegiate ball for Mapua and amateur basketball
in the MICAA and the national team to his pro stint in
the PBA, and finally moving on to coaching, where he
also made his mark both at the professional and
collegiate level.
Presently, he is one of the assistant coaches of Tim
Cone in Alaska and was cited by Cone as playing an
important role in the recent victory of the team in the
PBA. Prior to that, Banal had stints with Talk ’N’ Text,
where he delivered a championship to Manny Pangilinan’s
ballclub, while at the collegiate level, he won the NCAA
senior crown for Ateneo in the UAAP.
But this
49-year-old isn’t just a standout on the basketball
court.
Not many
are aware that Banal and wife Jenny has nurtured a
preschool located beside Brent School in Pasig called
Second Mom, which the couple expanded into a grade
school, DomuSchola Internationalis, which now accepts up
to Grade 3 level.
Banal
actually plays a hands-on role in the running of the
school as president and business manager, while his wife
is the school administrator.
His
business skills shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.
After all, Banal finished his Management and Industrial
Engineering degree from Mapua and when he retired from
the PBA due to injury in 1988, he worked as circulation
director for The Philippine Star up to 1992—strictly a
nonbasketball-related job.
Church
calling
Looking
back at the start of Second Mom, which now has over 120
students—a far cry from the 23 students it had when it
opened—Banal says the school is more of a mission than a
business.
“It’s a
calling for me and my wife in the early ’90s,” he
explains.
His wife
was asked by a church official to help with the parish
school in Magallanes. But not only did she lend a hand,
she was encouraged to take up a postgraduate degree in
School Administration at the Ateneo, and she eventually
became the parish school’s administrator.
In 2000
the Banals finally decided to open their own school,
which became Second Mom.
“We both
felt the burden of being working parents and the need to
have a good partner in raising our kids,” explains
Banal, who invested a substantial amount in the venture.
“In fact, even for our kids, we were very selective with
the schools for them, and knowing what we wanted to have
as parents from our kids’ school, coupled with actual
experience, we opened our own school.”
As
business manager, Banal, who took but has yet to
finish his Masters in Entrepreneurship from the Asian
Institute of Management, is responsible for the school’s
finances, ensuring the sustainability of the business
and marketing.
“Competition is tight and we needed exposure, visibility
being an integral part of our marketing strategy. I
worked on getting featured in newspapers and magazines,
even on educational television programs,” explains
Banal, who comes from a family of journalists—sister
Chelo is an editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer,
while brother Conrad writes a column for The Philippine
Star. “Though I knew the bottom line was the quality of
our product, the school itself should be the one to sell
itself.”
Banal
boasts that it was the parents who pushed them
to expand to the grade-school level. “The plan now is to
add another year level every year until we reach Grade
7. After that, we’ll see how it looks,” reveals Banal,
who admits that it was only in the school’s third
year that the school nearly broke even before making “a
little profit” the following year.
His
pricing strategy is to use medium to high rates at the
preschool level and low to medium rates for grade
school, maintaining the objective of making quality
education affordable to Filipino families.
‘Real’
business
Despite
the school’s success, Banal doesn’t consider it a “real
business,” although he says he and wife Jenny are very
happy with their decision. (In fact, their eldest son is
already working with them as a teacher.)
That
“real business,” Banal says, is his recently opened
cargo-forwarding franchise from U-MAC, a locally
developed business that allows entrepreneurs to open and
develop their own territories where there are big
Filipino communities.
“Ben
Cariño, the owner of U-MAC, has been a friend since
2000.” Banal narrates. “He is a basketball fan and for a
long time, he has been asking me to put up a franchise
for myself. But because of my commitments as a head
coach, I really could not find time for it. Now that I
am an assistant coach, the workload is much less and I
can devote some time to this business,” he continues.
Last
year, after he resigned from Talk ’N’ Text as head
coach, he went on two overseas trips, one to
Europe with his family, and the other to the
United
States, where he traveled coast to coast with some
prospective business partners, covering 7,000 miles in 10 days, to study the forwarding business.
Eventually, he settled initially for franchises in Spain
and France, starting operations early this year. So far
he has already shipped several containers of goods to
the Philippines, but he says the real test to the
business would be this coming Christmas season.
“It will
determine how much market share we can get,” says Banal,
who does not have full-time employees but works mostly
on his own with his agents through e-mail and phone. “My
future plans for expansion include Germany, the
Scandinavian countries and even
Australia,” he
reveals.
Perhaps
in the near future, Banal will need to spend more time
on his businesses and less on basketball.
But do
not tell him that: Banal still loves basketball and
looks at it as his No. 1 passion. |
