John Robinson Leonardo knows what it means to count every peso before counting company ledgers. The 37-year-old Regional AP Manager based in Dubai — a Cum Laude graduate and Certified Public Accountant — built his career not from privilege, but from a childhood spent selling candies, bread, and tetra-packed juices to classmates just to afford his own allowance. He did it through elementary. Through high school. Through college, where he graduated with honors anyway.
“My life has always been a battlefield,” he shares with TGFM — and he means it without drama.
When the lights go out, you learn to navigate in the dark
Before Dubai, before the regional finance role, before the multiple-entry visas stamped across three continents, there was a family with no electricity for a year and no running water for months. There were 35 ejectment cases from unpaid rent. There was the kind of financial precarity that doesn’t appear on a résumé but shapes everything about how a person moves through the world.
Leonardo grew up as the family’s designated hope — a title that sounds noble and weighs considerably more than it sounds. His father, a man who spoke in the language of quiet encouragement, had a line he returned to often: The longest journey starts with a single step. One day you’re gonna look up from your feet and you will be at your destination.
It’s the kind of advice that sounds simple until you’re the one walking it.
He earned his accounting degree from the University of the East Manila, passed the CPA board, and started in external audit — the unglamorous, exacting entry point for most finance professionals in the Philippines. He worked his way up to Audit Manager at Leonardo Vicente and Associates, CPAs, then moved into corporate accounting at Sanford Marketing Corporation, the company behind SM Savemore. By the time he left for the Middle East nearly twelve years ago, he had a foundation — technically and personally.
The reason for leaving, he says simply, was family. “Not just to earn — but to give them a better life.”
The year everything hit at once
If Leonardo’s story had a single breaking point, 2020 would be a strong candidate. In March of that year, he was among the early COVID-19 cases recorded in the UAE. He was still recovering when, on May 1st, he lost his job. The timing was not coincidental — it was the labor market collapsing in real time — but knowing the cause doesn’t soften the landing. Sick, unemployed, and abroad, he held on.
The following year, his entire family in the Philippines contracted COVID-19. His mother’s condition became critical. “It was one of the most painful moments of my life — feeling helpless, holding on only to faith,” he recalls.
These weren’t isolated events dropped into an otherwise stable life. In 2017, his father suffered a brain aneurysm and stroke. In 2019, Leonardo himself underwent kidney stone surgery. In 2023, a gallbladder operation. The medical emergencies arrived with a kind of grim regularity that would exhaust most people’s reserves — financial, emotional, physical.
But breadwinners, as he points out with a matter-of-factness that lands harder than any dramatic declaration, don’t have the luxury to stop. “You just learn how to rise — again and again.”
What sacrifice looks like when it’s going well
Today, Leonardo oversees accounts payable operations and financial controls across regional processes for a company he keeps confidential. The work suits him — finance, he argues, is not just numbers but responsibility, and he approaches it that way.
Outside the office, his life has had its improbable moments of public recognition. A 2018 imitation of Catriona Gray’s iconic Miss Universe walk went viral in the Philippines and landed on Jessica Soho’s State of the Nation. In a detail that belongs in a film treatment, he met Gray herself in person in February 2026 at the Museum of the Future in Dubai. His 2022 homecoming surprise for his parents — arriving home hidden inside a giant teddy bear during their wedding anniversary and house blessing — was featured on Rated Korina, aired on radio, and covered by multiple Philippine publications. In 2025, a family tribute honoring him as a breadwinner was retweeted by Vice Ganda and picked up by the Philippine Star.
These moments, he says, reminded him “that even silent sacrifices can be seen — and celebrated.”
The travel that working abroad has afforded him reads like a well-stamped passport: the US, the UK, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, a sweep of Schengen countries, Japan, the Maldives, Central Asian republics most Filipinos haven’t thought to visit. He brought his entire family to Hong Kong in 2017 and to Japan in 2025. “Travel is not luxury,” he says. “It is love made visible.”
His advice to fellow Filipinos abroad is direct and earned: “Be wise with your finances, protect your heart, and choose your circle carefully. Don’t lose yourself while building a life for others. Even the strongest people get tired.”
He plans to pursue further certifications, keep building, and eventually give back — to family first, and then to others carrying the same weight he once carried alone.
For now, the Regional AP Manager from a family that once lived without electricity is managing finances across a region, collecting visa stamps, and still moving — one step at a time, the way his father taught him.
