Hi, I’m John Luis Guado. I’m 24 years old and I’m the owner of Over Easy Chews & Brews here in Marikina. So Over Easy is a brunch and comfort food place here in Marikina City. We offer breakfast staples from pizza and pasta to cocktails, craft beers to cakes and coffee.
Over Easy is located here in Marikina City along Gil Fernando Avenue, which is near the city center. We support local farmers through our local company partner which sources coffee beans around the Philippines. So for our brewed coffee, our beans are from Mount Shilan in Benguet and for our espresso-based drinks is from Mount Apo. So we also offer local craft beers. So we partner with a micro brewery Wicked Elias. So for our local craft beers, they have specific taste notes for different types of drinkers. So there are craft beers that suit those who like the citrusy type of beers. They also have seltzers and ciders. They also have hard beers for those beer lovers or like who loves the malt flavor or like the IPA, they also have IPAs. And for our partner brewery, they focus on local fruits such as guyabano, mangoes, strawberries, and pineapple. So it’s not the usual type of beer that you could taste from those big companies.
Here in Marikina, we are proud to say that we are one of the pioneers who offer local craft beers for the Marikina market. When we opened, it was a few months before I graduated from college. I was 19 years old back then and it was a struggle to hire employees who are older than me.
So I had to emphasize that I know what I’m doing and I’m knowledgeable with my industry. So currently we have 30 staff members in total. So throughout the years, especially after the pandemic, we’ve been building our team and I’ve been hands-on with the hiring of staff and developing our talent, especially our team.
So back in high school, I was really not sure about what course to take in college. So I was thinking of taking an aeronautics course, a culinary course, and a business course. But luckily, my brother, who is also an alumni of University of Asia in the Pacific, told me about the EM program. So he told me that the EM program requires students to have their own businesses before they finish college. Although I did not pursue a culinary course, I made sure that my passion would still be there with me because I really love the culinary world. I really love cooking, but I made sure that I turned it into my own business after a while.
So during my years in college, I made sure that I balanced my time for my academics, my business, and personal life. I travel from Antipolo to school, so it’s a two-hour drive. So I wake up early in the morning, leave our house at 5 a.m., and arrive at school at around 7 a.m., start my class, and go straight to meetings for my business. And then afterwards, if I still have time, I still join orgs, or I go out with my friends and hang out. So you still can’t decide on what course to take, but you’re really interested in the business world. I suggest that you take the EM program of the University of Asia and the Pacific. I could say that my experiences in the EM program really helped me as an individual and also as an entrepreneur. So the EM program really puts students in a business environment with like-minded individuals, business people, not just in students, but also with our business mentors. The EM program really taught us on how to establish our own business, how to register, how to do our own taxes, how to manage our people through our different courses and subjects such as family business, how to scale your business.
And I could proudly say that those subjects really help us, especially for me personally, because right now we are already planning on scaling my business on how we could branch out in different cities. And hopefully in the next coming years, I could open another concept which is different from Over Easy and hopefully I could scale it up in Metro Manila. Hi guys, please follow us on our social media accounts, @overeasyph on Facebook and TikTok and overeasy.ph on Instagram.