Francisco M. Bernardo III

After completing his B.S. in Industrial Management Engineering at De La Salle University, Francisco “Jay” Bernardo III entered the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in 1991 for his MBA and graduated with distinction. Soon after, he started his own business called JAD, which initially manufactured plastic sticks for cotton buds. Today he sits as the chairman of the JAD Group of Companies (JADGC), a conglomerate of several strategically aligned outsourcing businesses in manufacturing, logistics, distribution, research and development, information technology, and human resource.

He has continued to impress and inspire the world with his passion for excellence and his personal and company achievements. In the years 2002 to 2003 alone, Jay and JADGC were conferred the following:

• The 2004 Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) of the World (Junior Chamber International)
• The 2003 Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Philippines (TOYM) in the Field of Entrepreneurship (Philippine Jaycees)
• The 2002 Agora Award for Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship (Philippine Marketing Association)
• The Honor and Prestige Award (Asian Institute of Management)
• The 2002 Personnel Program of the Year -“Employee to Entrepreneur” Program (Personnel Management Association of the Philippines)
• Outstanding Healthy Workplaces in the Philippines for 2002 (Department of Health)
• The Pinnacle Quality Award (Procter and Gamble)
• The 2002 Business Excellence Award (Sara Lee Direct Selling)
• The 2002 Logistics Contractor of the Year (Johnson and Johnson)

These were added to the numerous recognitions and awards throughout JADGC’s ten years of operation. His success story has created a big impact that it merited the writing of 11 cases in the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), and features on several business magazines and newspapers. The January/February 2001 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine Philippines labeled him as “The Rainmaker”.

Today, perhaps no one can be as passionate as him about pushing Entrepreneurship in the Philippines to uplift our economy as he founded LET’S GO (Leading Entrepreneurs Towards Sensing Global Opportunities), a non-profit, non stock organization aimed to support small and medium scale entrepreneurs. LET’S GO recently won the Worldbank’s 1st Philippine Development Innovation Marketplace competition held last January 2004 for its project of producing instructional video modules to aid in the teaching of entrepreneurship primarily in public schools. He has dedicated most of his time teaching, encouraging and inspiring people to start their own businesses. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Business and the Asian Center for Entrepreneurship at AIM and has been the Philippine representative and speaker in Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) Symposiums on Entrepreneurship held in Manila in 2001 and in Moscow, Russia in 2002. In 2003, he was a speaker at the ASEAN-EC conference on Entrepreneurship in the Knowledge Economy held in Brunei and a judge at the Global Start-up Business Plan Competition held in Singapore. He is continually being invited to keynote several events on entrepreneurship by the business and academe sectors. He also engaged himself in the co-management of a television show entitled “EntrePinoy”, geared to inspire and educate more people in the field of entrepreneurship.

Asked whether he has achieved success, Jay Bernardo replies, “It is not how much you accumulate but it is how much you contribute, thus I will continue to find bigger and bolder ways to be a blessing to other people’s lives”.