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Everyone knows Makati City as the home to the country's biggest companies and business establishments. But not everyone knows that Makati is also a place for small businesses.

Tucked in a quiet corner of the country's central business district is the Collective, which offers good location, access to a niche market and virtually no competition.  

One of the charms of a city as dynamic as Makati is its ability to surprise you. No matter how long you’ve lived or worked in the area, you are bound to discover a new nook offering food you’ve never tasted before, or a quiet corner selling knickknacks you won’t find anywhere else.

At The Collective, you get that experience of discovery several times over. Located along Malugay Street, a short distance from the PNR tracks, this relatively new kid on the block is a collection of small businesses—14 as of last count—that offers a little bit of everything to curious buyers and one sure thing to the business owners: no competition.

Frustrated over the dearth of hangout spots that don’t involve malls, friends Cheska Yupangco and Dustin Reyes conceptualized The Collective as an “anti-mall” space. They knew what they didn’t want: the polished sheen and impersonality that have come to characterize malls. They wanted a community where business owners help, instead of one-up, each other. Luckily, Yupangco’s family owned a building that was just waiting for a new idea.

“It’s really just a warehouse that we cleaned up a bit. But there’s more open space and the shops are all different from one another,” says Paolo Yupangco, Cheska’s older brother. The Yupangco siblings, for example, run a restaurant—Happy Palace—that is the only eatery in The Collective that serves rice. Each new business that wants to rent space in The Collective is screened to make sure none of its products compete directly with those being sold by the existing tenants.

The business owners also have the shared goal of being kinder to the environment, one sale at a time.

This article was first published in the November 2010 issue of Entrepreneur Philippines.