Go put up your own business!

It looks like the Go Negosyo bill is finally going to clear the Senate, which is excellent news for our SMEs.  The Go Negosyo Act of 2013 filed by neophyte Senator Bam Aquino is one of the better bills filed in recent history, and no less than the DTI (Dept. of Trade and Industry) Secretary Gregory Domingo is excited, bullish about how the spirit of entrepreneurship has really taken the country by storm in the last 10 years.

Our guest recently in our TV show Business & Leisure’s One-on-One segment, Sec. Domingo recalled how, in his time, he (along with many others in his generation) was pushed by his parents to excel in school in preparation for an executive career. That seemed to be the only option then for college students graduating from four-year general courses, aside of course from specific courses like law or medicine. Now, though, even graduates of nursing or law opt to go into micro entrepreneurial ventures rather than burn the candle on both sides to earn little more than minimum wage.

Take nursing for instance. During a protracted confinement at Makati Med several years ago (a first for me, and hopefully my last!!!), I got to chatting with the young nurses who kept me up just getting my vital signs over and over again. Apparently, just getting into prestigious hospitals like Makati Med was enough for these young ladies, never mind if they were getting less than minimum wage because they were still on training, but do you have any idea how much their parents spent to put them through nursing school? I took this for granted and didn’t give much thought to it until my wife Babes and I took in a friend’s daughter as a full scholar because her father had a serious medical condition and could no longer send his children to college. The tuition was stiff, and all the nursing paraphernalia didn’t come cheap either. I didn’t realize that our nursing schools in the south are surprisingly expensive, really not much cheaper than exclusive colleges.

And yet, the products of these expensive nursing schools end up earning minimum wage, and they have to elbow about a hundred others just to get into the big hospitals. No wonder then that our nursing graduates end up in the Middle East, Canada or New Zealand.

DTI is backing the passage of the Go Negosyo bill and is promoting entrepreneurship. In the bill, DTI holds the key responsibility to establish the Go Negosyo Centers as well as the Philippine Business Registry Databank (PBRD). Right now, there are less than a hundred such centers, but DTI is set on setting up these centers in 2,000 locations across the country.

With the Go Negosyo Centers, the intent is to provide a one-stop shop that would tackle everything a start-up business would need. One does not have to shuttle from one agency to another to incorporate, register a name, get the necessary licenses and permits, secure one’s Income Tax Number etc. Even agencies like the Social Security System and Philhealth are here, centralized in one place. Not only that, DTI has also incorporated information and training centers that can guide the entrepreneur in his new venture and will give away valuable training materials. The trained staff that DTI will field in these Go Negosyo Centers will even provide information on opportunities available for the budding entrepreneurs. That is indeed all-out support, centralized in one place that is aptly called a one-stop shop. You may not know it, but there are several out there who are daunted by the sheer prospect of registering a business, enough not to go into it. By making it easier to go into business, our budding entrepreneurs especially among the fresh graduates may not find it such a daunting task.

However, Secretary Domingo says that he envisions all these one-stop shops to be, at best, temporary, effective though they may be. In a few years, the good Secretary says that he hopes these one-stop shops will serve online, and if indeed this dream of the DTI Secretary will come to fruition, that would be infinitely be more effective and time-saving.

The Philippine Business Registry Databank on the other hand is a registry that aims to provide all the information on all of the country’s micro, small and medium entrepreneurs. Right now, if anyone wishes to get such information, one has to shuttle between different agencies including the Dept. of Trade & Industry, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Pag-ibig, Social Security System, even the provincial or municipal offices. With a centralized registry, the PBRD is a fountainhead of all the business information one would need.

As can be expected, both provisions in the Go Negosyo bill, the 2,000 centers scattered across the country and the PBRD, will take years to realize. The PBRD may not take that long – Sec. Domingo hopes to have this fully operational by late next year or at least by the first quarter of 2016. The centers are another matter altogether. With only about a hundred now in operation, DTI still has 1,900 centers to put up, so that should take more than two or even three years I think.

However long it takes, this is a good giant step towards the promotion of entrepreneurship in the country, which of course includes franchising where the Philippines is considered the hub in these parts. Remember that our micro, small and medium enterprises in the country account for 99 percent of the business establishments in the Philippines today. With such figures, one can imagine the impact on job generation from the proliferation of such businesses, and the widening of the value chains entailed in these businesses, so let’s go for it.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino.

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