School of hard knocks

FERNANDO Julian contended with several false starts before he found the right mix to build a school.

The story behind the establishment of Subic Bay Colleges Inc. (SBCI) mirrors its founder's persistence, which rode the normal ups and downs in his career.

Work was always constant. As a child, Julian witnessed how his father, a driver in Olongapo City, had plied several trades.

«He was a jack of all trades,» he said proudly. His father hung out with his friends who were mechanics, refrigerator and air-conditioner repairmen, carpenters and masons. He would eventually pick up certain skills from his friends from them.

Hence, Julian the son never ran out of tasks that cobbled the nuts and bolts of his dreams.

His D-I-Y chops were modeled after those of his father, who put up his own shop where Julian and his siblings would help.

«Bossy sya, eh,» he said. «Ayaw niya nang may boss. Lumaki kami sa ganun (He is a bossy fellow. He didn't want to have a boss, and we grew up that way).

Advertisement

»So I have no fear," Julian concluded.

And one gets the impression he had poured the cement and smoothened out the pillars of the proud SBCI that stands today.

The school's story, inextricable from Julian's other entrepreneurial ventures, is one of scratchy beginnings. Julian indeed had to do some of the heavy lifting on his own.

«Kasi I could manage everything,» he said with the modulated confidence of a hardened worker. «Maintenance, planning, ako lahat. So I could make a peso, a thousand, even a million, kung meron kang multiple skills.»

Advertisement

He would repeatedly tell this story before students of SBCI.

The multiple-skills world beckons in a job market that favors specialization. Julian was sure about this, because he had lived it.

Prior to being a school founder, he was a seafarer, docking at first world ports. And that was where he saw the independence of workers who used their own skills to labor on projects, without having to hire somebody to do the task for them.

In 1979, Julian had finished a maritime course and had sought a year and a half of shipboard apprenticeship. He was about to set out to sea again when his wife pleaded with him to seek other employment on