Spotlight on Brian Lim – CEO Pyroworks Philippines

Listening to Brian Lim talk, fireworks seem to go up sky high, filling the world with magical sights and sounds. That’s because pyrotechnics is Brian’s passion, though he is a lot of other things besides, making him such a vibrant and colorful personality.

He’s a sportsman, into extreme sports, like air soft gun (of which he is the external vice president of ASG Philippines, based in Cebu), karting, flag football and wakeboarding.

Brian is also into organizing sports events. As a member of the Cebu City Sports Commission, he organized last year’s Summer Sports Fest (among the sports: flag football, boxing, baseball, soccer, mixed martial arts, chess), which he hopes to be an annual event to become bigger yearly and make Cebu a sports destination and trigger sports tourism for the city.

If Brian is serious about ”play,” he’s also serious as a businessman: a director of Rose Pharmacy; and the CEO of Salon de Rose nationwide (it has 14 branches, with three more coming up).

He is also the owner/manager of Pyroworks, a business he set up at age 18, as a requirement for graduation in college (BA in entrepreneurship from CIE), for which he was given the ”Entrepreneur of the Year” award. If all that is not enough to keep him busy, he is also into other businesses (one of them, online gaming).

But Brian’s love has always been fireworks. Born in New York City, he finished high school in San Diego, California, but moved to Cebu for his college studies. He said he was always fascinated by fireworks and had “an intense curiosity about how to make those kinds of colors, those kinds of effects.”

At age nine or 10, he would visit factories in Mactan to have custom-made fireworks for him.

He had a special piggy bank just for these purchases so he could make his own fantastic show in December. Fireworks, he explains, is not firecrackers.

The latter is more for explosive, with a higher explosive content and is ground based; whereas pyrotechnics are more for light and color-emitting devices with a low explosive content.

For Pyroworks, he says, “I choreograph and design the shows like a painter painting beautiful pictures and the night sky is my canvas to tell a fantastic story.”

To have one of these shows, he makes an ocular inspection of the site, uses safe and reliable professional equipment launchers, with an in depth knowledge of the effects he wants to use.

The entire crew, he adds, must be well-trained and follow a set of safety practices: No shortcuts because “at the end of the day fireworks are still explosives, beautiful type of explosives.”

Aside from fireworks, Brian loves music, which serves him in pyromusicals. “Fireworks have been done for centuries, but pyromusicals is a new type of art form in which you synchronize the music with the fireworks,” he explains.

He listens to classical as well as rock music and incorporates the type of music to the theme of the fireworks display he creates. Pyroworks, he discloses, does close to 200 shows a year in and out of Cebu. He organized the SM Pyrofest, which had its third annual event early this year.

Brian’s passion for fireworks is such that he has landed in the Guiness World Book of Records for launching 125,801 rockets in under 30 seconds on May 8, 2010, during the Cebu Summer Sporsfest. The precious record, done by Dr. Roy Lawry in Plymouth, UK, was 57,999 rockets in under 30 seconds. Brian is very active in the international symposium of fireworks which happens every two years.

In 2010 in Portugal, he gave a speech and a presentation of the record of his Guiness feat. (Incidentally, he also goes abroad for beauty salon symposiums.)

He was very much in the news last December when his fireworks were confiscated by the city government. Of that, Brian says, “It was quite a challenge. You are faced with this type of challenges but I just try to move on with a positive attitude. I want to be in business and Pyroworks is only a stepping stone to other ventures.”

At age 29, Brian has been too busy to think of settling down and raising a family. A very nice, very eligible young man, the lucky girl will probably need to catch him up in the sky, when he fills the world with wondrous sights and sounds.