GM De Leon: Baguio Country Club’s visionary -1

BAGUIO CITY – Baguio Country Club’s (BCC) general manager Anthony de Leon does scale-modeling of ships during his pastime. “I already have the complete US fleet...I love working on details,” he said. And like the ships that he built, after nearly 5 years as the Club’s captain, he became successful in steering BCC to its best years yet...

“It’s really not just me,” said De Leon. “It’s more of a team effort to do this. I could not do this on my own.”

From his humble beginnings as a foodserver in Dunkin’ Donuts to becoming a shop supervisor, then putting up his own piano bar and restaurant called “The Other Office” in Mabini...It was indeed a long journey for Anthony de Leon who first stepped in the BCC 15 years ago. BCC, one of the oldest golf resorts in the Philippines and Asia, will be celebrating its centennial next year. It has maintained its status as a high-end membership club with more than 2,500 members.

De Leon was invited by the Club’s late president and chairman Potenciano Ilusorio to come up to Baguio and join BCC way back in June 1989.

“I was interviewed in my own bar by the former GM Donald Nye. The board of directors then were mostly my clients. He said, ‘Anthony, why don’t you visit us. We have some problems in services at the Club. They’re all kamag-anaks, pinsans, brothers and kumpadres. So nothing gets done...So why don’t you fix it’. I said I’ll see what I can do...Since then I’ve been fixing the Club for close to 15 years now.”

He came in as a Maitre D’ Hotel, then was promoted as the Food and Beverage director in 1993. He also worked as resident manager and acting/deputy general manager before occupying the post as general manager.

He just finished his training at Cornell University when he entered the scene and he admits that it was a lot of work. He professionalized and standardized everything, changed the whole organization, job titles and descriptions, and operations manuals. “At that time it was more like, what they’re doing was a matter of practice, not a matter of procedure.”

“EVERYDAY IS A DIFFERENT DAY IN A HOTEL,” he said. “I wake up at 6 a.m. and start the day at 7 a.m. doing my rounds. At 5 p.m. we have our meeting. Before I go home, I do one last round and if everything is ok, then I go home.” Sometimes he takes a room and experience how it is in the Club.

BCC has 345 regular employes and around 160 casuals which they hire during the peak season.

De Leon believes in MBWA or ‘management by walking around’. “Something we all learned in the hospitality industry.”

“Our business is service. And if service is your business, you cannot live around the four corners of your office...I want them all out there.” He holds regular meetings, morning briefings and another briefing in the afternoon, and if it’s peak season, they even hold a meeting on a Sunday.

“We check our guest history to find out which they don’t want and which do they prefer. So all of these are disseminated in the morning. I talk to them again at 5 p.m. and ask them what have they done.”

With “chismis” or gossiping as one of the “biggest” problems in the Club among employes, he successfully formulated a solution for this... “Always keep them busy. Instead of focusing on service, they’re focusing on how intense their chismis is...So I make sure they’re doing something.”

“We also have an open-door policy. So anybody from the janitor to the caddies can go straight to my office and talk to me. I know what it’s like to be below the ranks and work, people will also have gripes so you want to hear them.”

He can actually tell if a department head is lying or not. “So it keeps them on their toes to be honest,” he added.

IN 1997, BAGUIO COUNTRY CLUB’S GROSS REVENUE was R111 million from operations alone, which includes rooms, food and beverage, and recreations, excluding membership dues and fees. In 1998, it went down to R108 million. When DSe Leon took over in 1999, it jumped to R125 million and was steadily on the rise since then. “We are running at R155 million with a growth of 15 percent every year,” he said. Though the economy wasn’t doing very good, he attributes this to the confidence of the business community.

Although it suffered some decline because they have lesser rooms to sell due to the renovation, it is expected to have an upward trend when the renovation for the main building is completed by December.

“Members are very happy about the renovations because we are proud to say that we are the only membership club in the Philippines that whenever we do improvements for the club, we have never assessed the members for these. Improvements here at BCC are derived from the results of our whole operations.” - to be continued.