Sebastian A. Tamayo
President
Far East Hotel and Management Consultancy, Inc.
There are many stories of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) who leave the country with high hopes only to return years later with nothing but the clothes on their back. This is exactly what happened to Sebastian A. Tamayo but his seemingly tragic tale had a twist. From this disappointment, he gradually built Tamayo’s Catering and its affiliate, Far East Hotel and Management Consultancy, Inc.
Growing up in a large family struggling to make ends meet, Mr. Tamayo had no other option but to be a working student. He moved to Manila for college and found work as a janitor. “My first day in Manila was my first day in college,” he shares. “I was at the PAL building, then along Ayala. The manager of Hong Kong Shanghai Bank took me in as a janitor. I was working on the night shift. I would study in the afternoon, and then I would work in the evening.” Later on, he also found work as a waiter at the Silahis Hotel. He waited on tables from early morning to lunch, went to school in the afternoon, and worked as a janitor in the evening. He worked his way up the ranks at the hotel from waiter until he was promoted to manager.
After graduating with an Accounting degree, Mr. Tamayo grabbed an opportunity to work in hotels in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. While working at the Hilton Hotel in Kuwait, he met and befriended the president of Swiss Air. The executive introduced him to a Kuwaiti who, in turn, helped him open a shop in the city center.
He resigned from his hotel job and concentrated on setting up his business. On July 25, 1991, he opened FM Fashion Wear — an all-in-one store made up of garment, catering booking, and dessert selections. The opening was a big success and made the front page of two leading Kuwaiti newspapers. Mr. Tamayo was on cloud nine as sales quickly picked up. His success was cut short when Iraq invaded Kuwait. “My wife told me that there was already a war going on in Kuwait. I just laughed because everything seemed normal then,” recalls Mr. Tamayo. “I woke up at dawn because it was noisy outside. When I looked out the window, Kuwait was being invaded. I went down, called my wife, and told her she was right. After that the phone lines were cut.”
Mr. Tamayo said he made a deal with God to let him live in exchange for all his investments in Kuwait. He found himself hiding in a trash bin until the shooting stopped, made his way to the Philippine embassy and managed to get a flight back to the Philippines.
Safely back in Manila but without a cent to his name, Mr. Tamayo started selling garments and fruits in front of his wife’s small beauty salon. When the Gulf War ended, he briefly worked again at The Hilton in Kuwait — where he successfully opened the hotel’s four restaurants — before he was hired as assistant manager at the Hyatt Hotel in Manila.
While working at the Hyatt, he started dabbling in catering. He cooked and delivered packed lunch to Centro Escolar University teachers and, later on, Department of Health employees. It was not until he volunteered to cook for a co-worker’s wedding reception that he seriously considered a catering business.
He tied up with another catering company with the arrangement that he cooks the food while the other company provides the amenities. Mr. Tamayo’s clientele grew and he eventually resigned from Hyatt. He opened a fast food restaurant, and then applied as concessionaire for Landbank of the Philippines, a bid that he won.
He put up Tamayo’s Catering in 1995, which grew rapidly within a couple of years. In 2001, Mr. Tamayo founded the Food Caterers Association of the Philippines with the intention of “educating other caterers and sharing with them what I learned in the hotel industry. They told me that Tamayo’s jump-started the catering industry. The catering business’ custom became at par with five-star hotels,” he proudly says.
A few years later, he was invited to bid for the Mirant Sual Power Plant. Recognizing the quality Tamayo’s can offer, Mirant awarded the project to Mr. Tamayo. The project involved managing a hotel in the power plant’s base in Pangasinan. To accommodate the plant’s catering, laundry, and housekeeping needs, Mr. Tamayo put up Far East Hotel Management Consultancy, Inc. Far East manages the hotel’s 165 rooms, clubhouse, and food and beverage outlets.
Today, Far East also manages Quezon Power Village in Mauban, Quezon with 155 residential homes, Sual Power Plant (Team Energy) with 175 residential rooms, and CAL Energy Accommodation in Pantabangan, Nueva Ecija. For these three projects, Far East offers full hotel services — food and beverage, housekeeping, laundry, landscaping, and building maintenance. The company renders catering services on the side.
Mr. Tamayo takes pride in the company’s quality of food, presentation, and service. To maintain their leadership, he counts on his hotel experience and his pursuit of new ideas. “I am called Mr. Suggestion. I want to think of more and more ideas,” he shares. “In our industry, your ideas have to be nonstop. You need gimmicks, lots of ideas.”
A high-rise, five-star hotel is also in his drawing board, but for now, he intends to continue building up the Tamayo name. In the next five years, Mr. Tamayo plans to put up more outlets and branches “so I can help more people by giving them jobs,” he says.
An OFW whose tragedy became his triumph. Some sad stories do have happy outcomes.
This year’s sponsors are SAP Philippines, Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp., CATS Motors, Inc., FastTrack Solutions, Inc., Globe Business, and Procter & Gamble Distributing (Phils.), Inc. The official airline is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Media sponsors are BusinessWorld and the ABS-CBN News Channel.
A program of the SGV Foundation, Inc., The Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines has for its strategic partners the Department of Trade and Industry, Ateneo Graduate School of Business, Development Bank of the Philippines, Philippine Business for Social Progress, Philippine Stock Exchange, and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. BusinessWorld is featuring each of the finalists for Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2007.
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