Cape man living in Philippines returns home because of COVID-19 concerns

For Andrew Bard, "working from home" meant flying more than 8,000 miles from Manila, Philippines, to Cape Girardeau, his home since 1998.

When Bard moved to the Philippines in late 2018, he never expected he soon would be running a successful electric scooter company. He also didn't expect to be on a return flight to the United States until June.

As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified over the last week, however, Bard found himself making earlier plans to travel back to Missouri with his business partner and significant other, Michelle Antallan.

The couple had little notice to leave the country before international travel would be prohibited. Bard clarified some international travel is still allowed, but as a U.S. citizen, he will not be able to return right away. His return trip to the Philippines is slated for September.

Bard now plans to work from home and do maintenance work on his 150-year-old home in downtown Cape Girardeau, which he said is listed as an Airbnb rental.

"We'll be focusing on the house, cleaning it, fixing things," he said. "We'll be putting chickens in the back yard ... putting a garden in, working on the fruit trees. So the goal right now is to get the property as productive as possible while still working on the Philippines company."

A customer poses with a scooter before a driving demonstration led by EcoRide co-owner Michelle Antallan, right, in BGC Manila, Philippines.Photo submitted by Andrew Bard

Bard's company, EcoRide, works with a Chinese factory, which he said has temporarily switched its focus to producing respirator face masks to help with the shortage facing hospitals and health care professionals all over the world.

"That's a charity thing," he said. "We're getting [materials] at my cost ... and I'm doing logistics and coordination just as a service."

Bard moved to the Philippines in search of a more relaxed lifestyle. Before leaving Cape Girardeau, he was the president and owner of the electronics repair company, Computer 21, and said he was working about 60 or 70 hours each week.

Of course, starting a company in a foreign place was no walk in the park. Even so, Bard said he loved the process of figuring it all out.

"It was hectic," he remembered. "I was trying to figure out the legal system, figuring out how their taxes worked, trying to find employees, accountants [and] set up connections with retailers on top of being worried about production times, money transfers, warranty issues. I mean, it was a lot of work. But I ... loved it."

There are two main issues facing the densely populated Philippines capital city of Manila, Bard said: long commute times and pollution. That's why he started EcoRide, which provides personal electric vehicles (PEV) to folks who Bard said would otherwise spend a sizable part of their income on transportation costs.

"The average person was spending about 4,300 pesos a month on transport costs," Bard said. "When they got a scooter, even if you included repairs and times they couldn't ride because it was raining and they had to go back to their old commutes, they were still only spending 1,100 [pesos] a month. So it's a significant gamechanger. ... It's a good solution."

For residents whose commute time had previously been an hour and 38 minutes, Bard said the scooters cut that time down to just 24 minutes.

The initial idea for EcoRide was born during an outing to one of his favorite Indian restaurants, a destination whose commute took an hour and 15 minutes, but which Bard said was only a mile from his home. That morning, Bard was having breakfast with a friend and watched an electric kick scooter go by.

"I thought ... 'We could do that, I mean, we can make that,'" he recalled saying. "'That's not that difficult, mechanically ... it's a very simple machine. It's got simple mechanics. I know I could do that.'"

Tapping into what he calls the "American superpower" -- the ability to complain about anything and everything -- Bard bought two scooters and set out to discover everything that wasn't perfect about them. He wanted to design a scooter without the flaws he found in existing models.

He then spent three months in online chat rooms and on subreddit threads trying to get a full picture of what people thought about scooters and their designs. He outlined nine improvements to work on and began looking for manufacturers.

After a trip to Hong Kong, in which he had meetings with 13 manufacturers in three days, Bard found an engineer he could work with, and, six months later, the company is in its fourth round of production.

"Our process was, [during] every production run, I [would] take all the information from customers, all the complaints, all the warranty issues, everything, and compile them into the top 10 things that need to be fixed," Bard said. "And then I fixed them on the next production run."

EcoRide made $140,000 in its first six months, an outcome Bard noted was "pretty decent for a company that literally no one even knew existed" six months earlier.

Word travels fast in the Philippines, he said.

"They are the tightest knit community of 122 million people I've ever seen in my life," Bard said. "People talk and talk and talk ... so anything you do that's good gets around really, really quick. So for a company that's as young as we are, we've got an enormous amount of interest."

Bard said his retailers had been averaging 30 to 40 customer inquiries each day.

His company has achieved its "good name" because of the care he puts into the product, Bard said, noting decent customer service in the Philippines is "just not that common."

For every person EcoRide has made happy, Bard said about three to five more tend to follow.

"We're growing quickly," he said.

While much of the process to set up his company was new, working remotely is not. As he talked by phone Tuesday, Bard said he and Antallan were sitting with their laptops open and working on EcoRide business.

And as for the company's early success, Bard pointed to his partner.

"I credit Michelle's ability to advertise on Facebook. She's ridiculously good at that. ... She got the word out, people were involved, they were engaged," he said. "She's good at sales, and I'm good at design and fixing things. So with the two of us, it works really well."

For more information about EcoRide, visit ecoride.ph.