Agility at scale: Why the entrepreneurial mindset is our greatest asset

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March 11, 2026 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines —  The sari-sari store, that humble neighborhood hub for everyday essentials, is one of the best snapshots of the Philippine economy.

It represents resilience, resourcefulness and the entrepreneurial spirit of Filipinos.

Across the country, there are an estimated 1.3 million sari-sari stores, with most Filipino households relying on them for daily necessities. The well-known “tingi” economy – selling goods in small quantities to keep them affordable – reflects an instinctive understanding of customers and community.

Behind every sari-sari store is an entrepreneur making decisions every day: what to stock, how to price, how to serve the neighborhood better.

That mindset is the foundation of the Philippine economy.

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for 99.6 percent of businesses in the country and employ the majority of the workforce. Increasingly, that entrepreneurial energy is also visible in the digital economy, where hundreds of thousands of online sellers are building businesses of their own.

At SM, this entrepreneurial mindset is deeply familiar to us.

Our story began not as a conglomerate, but as a small family business. Before the first SM shoe store opened on Rizal Avenue in 1958, our founder Henry Sy Sr. ran a small neighborhood store near Quiapo. He understood something fundamental about entrepreneurship: it is not about the size of the business, but about the mindset behind it.

That principle still shapes how we operate today.

While SM has grown significantly over the decades, we continue to believe that agility is one of our most important assets. The challenge for any large organization is how to grow without losing the entrepreneurial spirit that made it successful in the first place.

Our approach has been to empower our businesses to think and act like entrepreneurs.

Across retail, banking and property, our teams operate with a strong sense of ownership. They are encouraged to move quickly, understand their customers, and innovate responsibly within their markets.

In many ways, our role as a parent company is not to control every decision, but to create the conditions where entrepreneurship can thrive.

This is particularly important as the Philippine economy evolves.

Growth is increasingly happening outside Metro Manila, in cities and provinces where rising incomes and expanding communities are creating new opportunities. Serving these markets well requires businesses that understand local needs and can adapt quickly.

An entrepreneurial culture makes that possible.

It also allows organizations to respond to change. Over the past few years, businesses everywhere have faced unprecedented uncertainty. What has proven most valuable in those moments is not size alone, but the ability to adapt.

Entrepreneurs do this instinctively. They adjust, rethink, and move forward.  Large organizations must learn to do the same.

For us, maintaining that mindset means remembering where we came from. Even as SM has grown into one of the country’s largest conglomerates, we continue to think about our business the way our founder did: by focusing on customers, empowering people, and building opportunities for others to grow.

In the end, the strength of an organization is not measured only by its scale, it is measured by how many entrepreneurs it helps create.

At SM, we believe that when businesses think like entrepreneurs and empower others to do the same, they become catalysts for growth that extends far beyond themselves.

In many ways, we are still that small neighborhood store at heart.

We just happen to operate at a much larger scale.

(The author is the president and CEO of SM Investments Corp., the parent company of the SM group.)