Getting ready for Go Negosyo’s 20th year

2025 will be an exciting year. It is the year the non-profit I founded, Go Negosyo, turns 20 years old. How time flies, indeed. I can still remember when former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo asked me to be her adviser on entrepreneurship and started me off on this journey. I have met many remarkable people who shared my advocacy to uplift Filipinos through entrepreneurship. We believed then, as we do now, that empowering Filipinos with access to the necessary tools for successful entrepreneurship – money, markets and mentorship – will help millions escape poverty and live comfortable, prosperous lives.

2024 itself was a year that will be hard to top. Most companies did well last year. Our family companies, Concepcion Industrial Corp. and RFM, did extremely well, experiencing good cash flow and ending the year with no debt. I would like to think our companies are the bellwether for consumer confidence, since we deal with products in and adjunct to the consumer goods segment.

It turns out we’re not just indulging in wishful thinking or confirmation bias: the rise in consumer confidence is reflected in numbers from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Their fourth quarter surveys reflect an improvement in both consumer sentiment and business optimism, citing “higher and additional sources of income, more working family members and more available jobs and permanent employment” among consumers, and the “anticipation of an increase in demand for certain goods and services and the related seasonal uptick in business activities” on the business side.

So it is quite fortuitous that Go Negosyo will celebrate its landmark year in 2025, which I firmly believe will be a better year for the Philippine economy.

The brisk activity in the MSME sector is not just anecdotal. While the Covid-19 pandemic saw some businesses close shop in 2020, this was followed by a rebound in 2021, which has been sustained with a steady increase in the number of MSMEs through 2022 and 2023. I expect 2024 to report no less impressive numbers. Judging by the number of attendees we’ve had in the almost-weekly public entrepreneurship events we’ve organized and participated in last year, there were more