Victor Consunji tweaks a legacy

Executive profile:

MANILA, Philippines — Victor Consunji, at 43, is slowly and steadily carving out his own construction and real estate company.

He is the founder and chief executive of Victor Consunji Development Corp. (VCDC), which is completely independent from the family owned DMCI Homes.

While he is growing his own company, he is doing so with the wealth of knowledge and experience of the Consunji legacy left by his grandfather, David Consunji, and whose company is now ably headed by Victor’s father – Isidro Consunji, and ably supported by the rest of his uncles and aunts.

An entrepreneur

Victor warns that he might not be an ideal example of what a good entrepreneur should be.

At the start of this interview he warned, “you want entrepreneurs to follow in my footsteps? Delikado yan!”

Victor is the eldest son of Isidro “Sid” Consunji, who is also the eldest son of the late David Consunji, founder of the DMCI Group.

Born in Zamboanga, Victor spent his childhood there and in Manila. However, his developmental years were also spent moving to the United States — from California to Washington D.C., to Maryland, and to Virginia.

“We did not stay in one place for longer than two years…almost every year we moved from house to house…different schools, different locations,” he divulges.

It wasn’t until he was 18 years old that he came back to the Philippines to study at the University of the Philippines, where he took up civil engineering…” more or less to follow in my family’s footsteps.”

His father and grandfather were both civil engineering graduates and belonged to the same Beta Epsilon fraternity.

Up to that point, Victor says, he was following a pre-determined path…”a cookie cutter expectation of what I was supposed to be…nothing remarkable, except I did not have the stability like other people who have grown up in one place all their life.”

However, Victor now appreciates the advantage of his constant movement, which is that “I got to see a lot of the world… how different cultures live…how different people interact.”

He also dispels misperceptions about his upbringing…”contrary to what people may perceive, I grew up in a middle class environment.”

He clarifies that in the United States, “you don’t have a lot of help, you do things on your own… and you are expected to be self-sufficient…independent to a certain degree.”

He also points out that in the US, “if you have ambition or drive…you take those matters in your own hands.” As such, he knew even then that he did not expect to be in a salaried position.

He reveals that “even as a child, I always wanted to build something, I always wanted to create something, and I always want to do what I wanted to do…maybe I am stubborn in that way.”

His insistence to do things his way, Victor reveals, has “gotten me into trouble… and in other cases, it has been very rewarding.”

Victor was, he readily admits, not a good student. He frankly describes himself as a terrible student. “I was the guy that never attended class, my professors bear witness to that…many of them have been pissed off with me.”

His cavalier attitude about education, it turns out, is similar to his father’s educational path…”the apple does not fall far from the tree,” Victor wryly notes.

Education is not a guarantee

“My view on education is strange. I agree that a good education is ideal, but not necessarily a guarantee to do well.” He quotes a saying that “an education is everything that is left after everything that has been taught to you has been forgotten.”

He points out that what he applies is “not so much what I learned in the classroom,” but more “what I learned from the people around me, interacting with the culture, interacting with my classmates… my professors…like understanding how society works, being able to have empathy with people around you…what their problems are…what they want, what they don’t want…being able to see that is the education…you can be a fantastic straight A student, but if all you do is live your life inside that box of education, then I wouldn’t say you are suited for the entrepreneurial life … entrepreneurial life means you always have to think outside of the box…an entrepreneur solves problems that no one has bothered to tackle or wants to tackle… that in itself is a leap of faith.”

Additionally, Victor believes that what separates those who want to have their own business from those who want to take a safe path is the courage “to sacrifice to get there.”

Victor is an avid sportsman who likes adrenaline pumping sports like skydiving and motor racing. But he also enjoys the more hardcore sport of ironman triathlon that includes a grueling long-distance marathon, which has instilled in him a discipline and motivation that he applies in pursuing his construction and real estate business.

For Victor, an ironman race is a very bonding challenge that involves what he describes as a “ridiculous amount of distance you have to put yourself through…over a matter of hours” and in which you have to train for over a significant amount of time.

The training, Victor explains, is a long process that involves setting goals that you build up day by day, and pretty much like the race itself, set and cross until you reach the finish line.

“That’s how I look at business as well, nobody goes through and says I am going to start a real estate company and make it successful…that’s absurd…that’s a goal that’s almost impossible to do…what you do is solve small problems, everyday problems first, then all these little problems build up to something bigger…all these problems, solve them and you have a company that works,” Victor points out.

Luck, Victor agrees, is also an important component that contributed to the success of VCDC’s Mahogany Place 3 project that is part of DMCI Homes’ master planned Acacia Estates real estate development in Taguig.

He recalls that while DMCI Homes in the early 2000s was offering condominium units at an affordable P2 million to P2.5 million, his fledgling company opted to build houses “basically in marshland on the wrong side of BGC.”

Even the then price tag of P12 million, Victor admits, was, to most skeptics, not exactly a great idea. However, the development has been a wild success, with property prices more than doubling, allowing VCDC to develop its adjacent M Residences to cater to a thriving community of like-minded executives, managers and entrepreneurs who, Victors says, “are driving their own path, own businesses, are successful in climbing the corporate ladder.” It is a market that Victor believes is not adequately served.

Quality product

Victor explains that he has designed his products so that they cater “to me and to people who look at life the same way I do… and they don’t sit on their laurels…they really want to move forward. What happens there… is you have a community of people that tends to be passionate and very engaged in how the development will end up because they value the development that they are in, so that long after the developers leave, the community is engaged.”

That formula, Victor further elaborates, involves “curating who gets to come into the development… managing expectation of what a quality product is supposed to be,” adding that “if we come out with a quality product, people want to take care of it…not just the individual house, not just bought a house, but that house adds value to that block, to that development, adds value to the community… ever expanding the atmosphere of influence and affects everybody around you. That’s the formula we’re striving to achieve…lasting value.”

His success, Victor rightfully credits, is because “I stood on the shoulder of giants…the values they taught me, the exposure I received as a child, the stories, the lessons I have learned.”

He advises other entrepreneurs “to listen to those that have the knowledge to share, especially in this industry…they are willing to share the good and the bad…listen as much as you can, absorb as much as you can.”

He warns though, “to make some to mistakes is very costly… believe me, I am very stubborn… very costly.”

For his own son, Connor, Victor believes that his son does not necessarily have to be in the same industry. He wants his son to have the choice to pick his own path, because “in the end, his success is in his hands.”

Unfortunately for Connor, Victor points out, he is living in the construction site as it is happening and is getting exposed, listening to meetings, and experiencing the construction and real estate business.

At this point in time, Victor continues to expand his real estate development, building a new gated community in Laguna that will cater “to motivated people who want their family to have the best they can provide and live life to the fullest and don’t want to settle for a shoebox.”

However, he has no immediate plans to make his firm a publicly listed company and for the time being will keep VCDC private to meet a gap in the market “that most people don’t even realize there is.”