"Give me anything—anything—and I can sell it."

This is no vain statement to make for JJ Javier, who has been in the selling business since he was 8. Now 26 and the owner and chief executive officer of Webplus7 Solutions Inc., a fast-growing information technology solutions company, Javier still enjoys selling and even more so now—this time not to neighborhood customers doing their early morning shopping but to the global market.

Webplus7 Solutions, barely one-and-a-half years old, is engaged in web development, e-commerce solutions, system development solutions, and web hosting and maintenance, serving clients not only in the domestic market but also overseas, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

It was Javier's enterprising mother, Leonarda, or "Lenny," who had imbued him with a deep passion for selling. Every Sunday before 2:00 in the morning, the young Javier would accompany her to the public market in Laguna. There, she regularly made the wholesale purchases of fruits and vegetables that she would retail starting at 6:00 o'clock.

As soon as he learned the ropes of the business, he started selling fruits and vegetables on his own. His earnings become a source of extra income for the family, and he always made it a point to share those earnings with his siblings.

During his high school years, Javier earned extra income at the public market by fetching water for the fish vendors and the slaughterhouses, whose stalls he helped clean up afterwards. He also took to selling balut [boiled duck's eggs], monay [a type of bread], and other food items. In fact, because he spent most of his childhood in the market, he earned the monicker batang palengke [public market kid] in school.

By the time he was 13, with his earnings from selling, Javier had already made himself financially independent. Still, he did not neglect his studies, later applying for a Department of Tourism-sponsored scholarship in high school. He got it on the basis of his academic standing and on the income level of his parents.

His drive to achieve financial independence was, in part, due to a crisis that was then besetting the Javier family. That crisis came to a head when his parents broke their marriage and separated when he was 13, terribly frustrating him and shattering his will. He fell into depression and started experimenting with drugs and making friends with other users. "I had so much bitterness and anger towards the world then," he recalls.

But all this changed when Javier met a successful pastor-businessman, Eduardo Pilapil, Jr. It so happened that the sponsor of his college scholarship was that pastor-businessman's father, former Tourism Secretary Eduardo Pilapil Sr.

Javier recalls that encounter: "He shared the Word of God with me and I experienced a total transformation. I realized that out of nothing, I could become something." With his new mentor's guidance and encouragement, he vowed that he was going to succeed at business himself. With this new perspective, Javier studied at the University of the Philippines in 1996 while continuing to make a living selling cooked food, shining shoes, and giving haircuts, among others.

But again, he had to discontinue his college studies when he was hired to work in Qatar as part of the management staff of the private businesses of Sheikh Althani, who was at that time Qatar's president. With his overseas job, Javier became the family's primary earner, supporting his five siblings. "My father's buy-and-sell business wasn't doing very well so I had to support the family myself," he recalls.

Two years later, Javier quit his job in Qatar and went back to UP to continue his studies. Influenced by his job experience in Qatar, however, he shifted to a course on globalization and decided to go back to his old passion: selling. He worked as a call center agent for E-Pacific Global, particularly in a computer software account. In just three months, he became one of the company's top sellers and stayed with the company for another two months.

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