Kat Fonacier celebrates five years at Boma
Boma's employee number one has seen it all.
By Mike Aquino, Boma LLC
The nice thing about being Employee Number One is, you get to celebrate your milestones on almost the same day as the company you’re working for. As Boma celebrates its fifth year, Kat is celebrating with the rest of the employees, with the special circumstance of celebrating her own fifth anniversary as an employee.
“It's an accomplishment for me, personally,” Kat admits. “It's the longest I've stayed in a company. And being the pioneer, I was witness to all the movements in Boma, from having a very extremely skeletal team, to all the issues that Boma went through as a start up, to what we have now.”
When Kat walked into Boma’s first office on Annapolis Street in Greenhills, she hardly suspected that she was walking into what would become a five-year relationship with the company. “[I had my interview in] was a small room with junk all over the place. It was a messy room, but I think that was what challenged me,” she remembers. “Not to mention that Ted Fong was a great marketer, so I got pulled in.”
From the start, Boma’s bosses Ted Fong and Marielle Valdez put Kat through the meat grinder, assigning her to the most challenging clients and putting her on night shift to be more in sync with her clients. Kat wasn’t exactly a greenhorn – she had a few years’ prior experience handling marketing projects for other U.S. companies.
But Boma’s unique challenges and rewards helped Kat learn a few more things. “Being here helped me make quick decisions. And more importantly, to handle the financial side of client management. That was a first for me here,” Kat admits. “I really had no choice but to learn, because there was no one else who would do it.”
Kat looks back on those days, wondering how she ever made them through. “Boma has been through tough times. There was a time when there was no activity going on, so the days went by so slow. But surprisingly, I stuck through it; I'm resilient that way.”
As Employee Number One, she’s seen employees come and go, and she’s seen how every personality makes an impact on the company’s culture. “There have been a lot of complex personalities that came, left a mark, and left the company,” Kat remembers. “We learned a lot from these people: both things that we should do and shouldn't do to make life in the office harmonious. I also witnessed how our employees evolved as leaders, or failed at their jobs.”
Kat isn’t the type to put on airs; “Employee Number One”, to Kat, is just a label. (That hasn’t stopped us from advertising that fact on her Employee Profile on the website!). She’d prefer that we pay more attention to her work in Boma – she helped develop the company’s Marketing Valet program that sustained Boma’s remarkable growth in its first five years, and is currently focused on employee training and building Boma’s knowledge base.
Kat is loath to take credit for Boma’s success, but how else can we view Kat’s heavy involvement in all of Boma’s major projects? How else do we look at the fact that she’s earned the Number One monicker through her hard work, and not just by default?
Kat, her usual sweet taciturn self, will only say, “It’s been a wild ride.”