₱870 and a Dream: Notes from Week One at Towncenter Café

Author: Achintya Bansal

"Isn't Indian food dirty? Don't you use your feet to knead the dough?"

LG asked me this on a quiet road in Jagna, four days into my time in the Philippines. I was walking Buddy the dog with Kara when it came out of nowhere. I knew exactly where it came from. Last Christmas, AI-generated reels claimed Indian factories were kneading dough with their feet, and that fiction had apparently crossed the Pacific. I explained what Indian food actually is, and then a few days later, my roommate and I (mostly done by him :))cooked chicken for the family. The plates were clean in minutes. Some arguments are best made at the dinner table.

(Photo of the Chicken we made)

Context

I am Achintya Bansal, a student at HKU on the Transformative Business Immersion (BUSI 2816). My partner Michele and I are consulting for Towncenter Café Internet & Coffee in Jagna, Bohol. It is a hybrid internet café, coffee shop, and document-services counter run by retired ship captain Villano and his wife Evelyn, a former nurse, beside the Jagna Public Market. Our job is to help them understand their finances and build toward growth.

My homestay family tells the other half of this story. The breadwinner works as an oil engineer in Saudi Arabia. Eldest daughter Ashley is studying nursing, hoping to practice in Australia so she can fund an international education for her youngest sister Kara. It is a household built on sacrifice and quiet ambition. Spending time here has changed how I see everything around me.

Connection to Course Material

Week One felt like a live reading of Chapter 9 in Poor Economics. Banerjee and Duflo describe owners who are not chasing growth. They just want to stay useful and keep enough coming in. On paper, Villano and Evelyn fit that picture. The café is a retirement project. They have a pension. Three adult children in Manila — an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor — provide a safety net most small business owners would envy.

But the "reluctant entrepreneur" label does not fully hold. They wake at 5 AM. They garden before opening. They run the shop until 10 or 11 at night, seven days a week, as two people approaching 70. When I learned their hours, I asked Villano to repeat himself. This is not the passivity of Ben Sedan, the Moroccan farmer who turned down a development loan because he had "enough." Campos et al. would recognise exactly what this is: personal initiative without the infrastructure to sustain it. The drive is there. The system around them is not keeping up.

That gap points directly to Rule 5 of the 25 Rules of Thumb for Small Businesses: Keep Good Records. You cannot beat yesterday's sales if you have not written them down. When Michele and I opened the logbook, recorded café revenue averaged ₱870 a day. Best single day: ₱2,245. The owners' confident estimate across multiple conversations: "₱5,000 on a good day." That is not a rounding error. It is a sixfold gap. And the gaming and printing lines are not recorded at all.

(A photo of our cafe from outside)

Actions and Impact

Week One was financial archaeology. No POS system. No records since their son left for Manila. Just a logbook covering six weeks of café sales from mid-2025. Michele and I rebuilt the baseline from scratch. Our item-level figures matched the owner's tallies within 1.3%. The bigger finding was structural. Food is carrying this café, not coffee. The chicken panini and pasta carbonara — recipes from Pords, a former cruise-ship chef who now drives a tricycle and drops by most days — are the top two earners. The ₱250,000 Nuova Simonelli espresso machine, recommissioned after four idle years, produces roughly 3.4 cups a day. Beautiful equipment. Not yet pulling its financial weight.

We also started on the menu redesign. The owners described it, with admirable restraint, as something that "looks like it was made in the 1990s." Presentation matters as much as price. On the homestay side, I taught the family Ludo, helped cook dinner, and walked Buddy every evening. Those quiet moments did more for trust-building than any formal introduction. A board game and a shared meal go a long way.

Challenges and Positionality

The hardest feeling of the week was not culture shock. It was being welcomed too completely. Everyone seemed to carry a quiet responsibility to make sure I was included at all times. The hospitality was extraordinary. It also made me ask an uncomfortable question: what is my authority here? I am a student from Hong Kong, arriving with spreadsheets, consulting for a business that has survived COVID, four rounds of staff turnover, and a competitor on the floor directly above it. I leaned into humour until the formality eased. It worked. But the question stayed.

The LG conversation added another layer. I arrived carrying a version of India already distorted by algorithms. Cooking chicken that evening was the simplest way to replace a caricature with something real. That is also what Michele and I are trying to do at the café. Replace a comfortable but inaccurate memory of ₱5,000 days with data the owners can actually act on. Without making them feel audited.

Learning Needs and Next Steps

Three things are slowing me down. First, the language barrier. Everyone speaks English generously, but the real conversations happen in Filipino and Visayan. I plan to spend more unstructured time with the family and at the café to close that gap. Second, I do not yet have a confident handle on the bundle-pricing strategy that could realistically move revenue toward ₱5,000. That is Week Two's task. Third, the heat is affecting my concentration more than I expected. Earlier starts and strict midday breaks are helping.

Conclusion

I came to Jagna to help a café fix its menu and find its numbers. I am leaving Week One with a much bigger problem on my mind.

Many small businesses here borrow at 3 to 4 percent interest compounded monthly. That is a 60 percent effective annual rate. For a café averaging ₱870 a day, that is not a growth tool. It is a ceiling. It sits behind every projection we write.

This is the thread connecting everything I have seen. Ashley studying so Kara can have better options. Villano and Evelyn working 16-hour days into their seventies. Pords, the chef turned tricycle driver, whose recipes are keeping a retirement café alive. These are not people lacking ambition. They are people working at full capacity inside systems not built to help them grow.

I want to spend my career changing that. Through daily revenue contracts tied to actual cash flow. Through dedicated funds that give businesses like Towncenter real access to capital. Social entrepreneurship used to be a career label for me. After one week in Jagna, it feels more like a direction.

Photos:

1) Chicken Panini with Iced Cold Caramel Coffee our cafe 

2) Our family

Me, Ashley, Cara, Marina, and Terish(HKU student, my roommate)