ProFiles

Coming full circle
By Kenneth V. Quintanilla
 

Michael A. Hernandez Vice president of retail sales and marketing South Pacific Petroleum Corp. Age: 43 Wife: Rebecca Children: Alexandria, 15; Adrianna, 13; and Gabriel, 10 Education: Bachelor’s in business administration, finance major and economics minor from Central Michigan University On business: “My philosophy on business is to simply ‘do the right thing.’ This would include every aspect of business and personal life. Do the right thing for the customer, your employees, the company, for your business partners — vendors, suppliers and sister departments within the organization. Ultimately, it’s just doing the right thing by what’s correct and the most ethical thing to do.”

While most people stop by a Circle K convenience store on their way to work to buy coffee, fountain drinks, candy or snacks, Michael A. Hernandez visits at least three Circle K locations every morning to check on the staff and operations of his business. “I’m a firm believer of being in my stores right before I get into work,” Hernandez says. “I typically don’t buy while I’m there at the stores, but I’m there to watch and interact with the staff and customers.”
Working with his team is what Hernandez enjoys most about his job. “I enjoy watching the team accomplish the goals we set and watching them professionally grow and develop,” he says. “I like taking what I’ve learned from my team [and using it] to become a better manager myself.”
Hernandez joined the Circle K organization in Arizona 15 years ago by chance. “I needed a job and saw an ad in the paper for a Circle K manager position,” he says. “I took the job ‘until I could find something better.’” After a decade with Circle K, Hernandez was offered the opportunity, by the vice president of Circle K International, to work for South Pacific Petroleum Corp., a franchisee of the Circle K brand on Guam. Hernandez resigned from his post at Circle K and moved to Guam in 2005.
In his position, Hernandez is responsible for anything involving the retail side of the business from the 76 brand of fuel to the Circle K brand convenience-store items. Other duties include overseeing the category teams, the products that the stores carry, pricing and promotional decisions. However, Hernandez says he manages all his tasks through a collaborative effort. “I like to give my team the latitude to make decisions and be willing and encouraging for them to make mistakes,” Hernandez says. “We have those failures and we learn from them, we have those successes and we learn from them as well. It’s a very encouraging atmosphere that we have.”
Since joining the SPPC team, Hernandez has helped in the opening of three Circle K locations — one in Piti and two in Tumon. There are currently eleven 76 gas stations and 13 Circle K convenience stores on Guam. “The market is very good for Circle K and we have been able to bring a whole new level of competition to the island,” Hernandez says.
Over the past four years, Hernandez says he has learned how to motivate his team that has resulted in mutual respect. “They’ve accepted me and respect my opinions and those decisions that I’ve made,” he says.
The biggest challenge that Hernandez faces in his position is always maintaining a sense of direction. “There are so many variables that can go wrong, from competitor to market challenges to the economic downturn and rising oil costs,” he says. “So it’s just managing priorities, having focus and keeping everyone on the right track of what the ultimate goals of the company are.”
Hernandez says that he never enjoys the rising gas prices. In the real world, there are different cost increases that every business is faced with. “If you look at oil pricing on the free market, it has stayed relatively high which then forces shipping companies to charge higher rates which means suppliers have to charge us higher rates as well” he says. “And any business, to stay viable, has few choices but to either cut expenses or to, unfortunately, raise retail [prices.]”
Although he has worked in his line of business many years, moving to Guam has changed Hernandez. “I probably to some degree have been more absorbed by Guam than Guam has been absorbed by me,” Hernandez says.
Before, Hernandez was more hard-charging in the way he did things. “I definitely feel that I’ve probably slowed down in my charging ability,” he says. “I’m more patient now.”
Born and raised in Michigan, Hernandez has traveled to the Caribbean, South America, Canada and eventually Guam. “I enjoyed Guam from pretty much day one when I arrived,” he says. “From my experience, all us humans have basic needs, so I never saw any real differences between Guam people or other parts that I’ve lived in and visited.” The minor differences he noticed were the close proximity of places and the presence of so many concrete buildings on the island.
Being on Guam has also allowed Hernandez to enjoy the different food selections from around the world. “That’s one of the nice things about Guam, you have different foods available from Vietnamese to Korean to American and Chamorro,” he says. “In fact, it’s put a lot of weight on me.” One of Hernandez’s favorite activities is cooking. He says he enjoys cooking a range of food from Mexican, his native heritage, to Italian, having worked as a cook for an Olive Garden restaurant for some years.
Other hobbies include reading — typically motivational and business books. “I’m a big believer that you constantly have to continue to learn,” he says. “I’ll read biographies of CEOs and businessmen and [businesswomen] hoping to see what their philosophies are and ask myself, ‘How can I learn from these people?’”
In his free time, Hernandez stays active by exercising and playing golf. Typically on a Saturday night, Hernandez says he relaxes by sitting around with friends and family and having a good conversation. “I think people view me by my physical appearance as very intimidating and not approachable,” Hernandez says. “People find it surprising that I’m a very nice guy.”

He does windows (and doors and solar panels)

Lyndon Kim Managing director ES Technics Inc. Wife: Gaya Children: son, Howard, 2 years old Education: bachelor’s in economics from University of California, Los Angeles. On customer service: “[Some companies] make it seem like the customers need them more than they need the customers. But, we’re a small company and we’re still growing. We got to where we are because of all the people who supported us.” In 2005, Lyndon Kim had recently returned to Guam from two years in Africa and was working with his father and brother— Joon Kim, a contractor and owner of K Development and Tony D. Kim, an architect, currently with RNK Architecture, respectively — to develop three houses on Nimitz Hill. To take advantage of the view, Tony Kim had designed the homes with 18-foot-high living room windows, and it was up to Lyndon Kim to source a window system that would be aesthetically pleasing, meet Guam’s severe-wind requirements and be affordable. That search led to his ongoing, and expanding, affiliation with ES Technics Inc. of Korea.

Kim moved to Guam with his family when he was 11 years old in 1983 after Joon Kim had immigrated as, initially, a nonresident construction worker. After attending Untalan Middle School and two years at Father Duenas Memorial School he and his brother moved to Los Angeles — Tony Kim, who is two years older, to attend the University of Southern California, and Lyndon to finish high school and then attend the across-town rival school.
After graduation, Kim worked in the sales department of a division of Samsung Corp. for five years in California and another year in New York City. He left Samsung and moved to Korea for three years where he taught English — the first year in a girls high school and the next two in his own after-school tutoring program.
He had about 300 “primarily precocious” students in a program for students seeking entrance into highly competitive specialized high schools. “[Tutoring is] a billion-dollar business in Korea,” he says.
Then the brothers received an offer from a cousin with a development company in Equatorial Guinea. “He knew one of the sons of the president, so he thought he had a good connection,” Kim says. “We went there to do developing. … They have a huge reserve of oil, so there are all these big companies there.” The political situation and the bureaucracy, however, were such that the venture did not work out and the brothers returned to Guam.
“We thought that we were never coming back,” Kim says. “But this is where our parents stay; they’ve been here for so many years, and this is our second home.” Kim hoped to start an education program for students from Korea similar to the tutoring venture that had been so successful a few years earlier. “But we just don’t have the right infrastructure,” he says. “We don’t have the right kind of teachers and no student housing. That [would be] a long-term investment and I just didn’t have the capital to work on that dream. So I got into something that was expedient and it was right there — construction and development.”
It was somewhat natural for Kim to turn to construction, given his family’s background. “All of our cousins were in [construction] at one time,” he says. “We had a lot of cousins and uncles, a big family presence out here, but when the economy went south on Guam, [most of them] left.”
And so, five years ago, Kim was faced with the problem of six-yard-high windows overlooking the Philippine Sea. “We couldn’t put up a shutter [because of the size of the windows],” he says. Nothing affordable was available locally, “so I had to go overseas.” Searching markets in Asia and North America, Kim found systems that he says were “ugly,” of poor quality or too expensive.
Finally, in Korea, he connected with Eunsung Technics Inc. a manufacturer of window and door systems. “[The ES Technics product] was a good system and the price was affordable,” he says. “I brought it out here and … I did the engineering testing and it was no problem. Everybody was impressed — all the architects and the engineers — and it made the house look great. I realized the potential for the market because this is engineered for 200 mile-per-hour winds, and the insurance accepted it. Pretty much it eliminates the need for shutters.”
The connection met the needs of Kim as well as the company. “They were interested in Guam and I was interested in their products,” he says. “They offered me a partnership and I was kind of dumbfounded. … But, they were very serious.”
In 2006, the company began to sell its products out of an office in the Star Building in Upper Tumon. A customer base was built by word of mouth and by a fortunate coincidence. “Thankfully, 5M [Construction Corp.] was right next to us,” Kim says. “I was able to do several products with them. They do executive housing, which fit our agenda.”
On March 19, ES Technics opened its showroom and warehouse in Harmon Industrial Park. The company now also carries metal construction supplies and solar-energy products. “When customers come in, we see that they’re excited about their homes and we want to share that enthusiasm,” he says. “We want to make their house, through their eyes, the best possible house.”