Last month, I sat among Filipino American leaders at a San Francisco Bay Area dinner called Passing the Torch. One line on the screen stayed with me:

I keep thinking about what it actually takes to pass a torch in light of stories I hear so often. A Filipino CPA whose 30-year firm retires the day he does. A Filipino restaurant owner who fed the community for decades, then closed the doors because no one could take over.

Torches only pass when someone plans for it. That’s this issue’s question.

Let’s keep dreaming bigger, together.
Christeen

Filipinos are madiskarte (resourceful). We start small businesses out of necessity, passion, or both. Far fewer of those businesses grow beyond the person who started them.

MSMEs carry two-thirds (67%) of Philippine jobs. Yet the last census-based estimate found they produce only about 36% of the value (2006 data). The Census hasn’t counted Filipino owners in the U.S. since 2012. And McKinsey warns many viable small businesses may simply close as owners retire.

A business that lives in one person’s head can’t grow, because the owner is the ceiling. It can’t be sold or passed down, because there’s nothing to hand over.

A job pays you while you work. An asset keeps creating value, and blessing people, after you step away.

How might we help Filipino owners, wherever they are, build businesses that can bless others long after they’re gone?

In Puebla, Mexico, economists offered 150 of 432 small businesses a year of subsidized management consulting. No cash, just help with how the business was run.

The biggest gains came from marketing, financial accounting, and long-term planning: the same skills that make a business transferable.

The twist: even heavily subsidized, few eligible owners signed up. Pride, privacy, and hiya (fear of losing face) are real. The barrier isn’t only access to help. It’s trusting it enough to say yes.

Every business that can’t outlive its owner has the same hidden problem: its most valuable knowledge is written down nowhere.

Javi Ko built Coretex around that problem. Coretex builds custom data pipelines and AI products around how a company actually works, instead of forcing its process into someone else’s software. Its clients span manufacturing, real estate, logistics, food and beverage, and more.

The order matters. Coretex first maps a client’s real process and data, then builds a working prototype wired to that data (not a mockup), so the client tests something real before committing to a full build. Only after the data foundation is set does it layer in AI. AI on top of chaos just gives you faster chaos.

The goal is a system that runs without Coretex in the room. It’s the same test this issue asks of every business: can it run without its founder?

Learn more: https://www.coretexai.com/