Like many Ateneans, Mark Ruiz landed a steady job in the cor­porate world after graduat­ing with a Management Engineering degree on 1999. However, despite the com­forts of great training, great people, and great pay as he worked his way up the lad­der for seven years, he knew something was amiss.

“I went up the ranks, but then I realized that that was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be another cog in the machine,” Mark says. “You don’t get to really pursue your passions in a deeper level. You do what your boss tells you to do, or what the company needs you to do.”

Mark left his corpo­rate job in 2006 with his heart set on becoming an entrepreneur—but not just any entrepreneur. “I really wanted to have businesses that made sense and could contribute—corny as it may sound—to the country,” he says.

His goals may seem too idealistic, but notable social businesses like Hapinoy, Rags2Riches, and Inovent shows just how far he could walk his talk.

From scratch

He began his entrepre­neurship career with Ateneo High School friend Bam Aquino, taking on business ventures that did not take off as well as they hoped. Though their first two attempts have failed, the duo met the right people and partners in 2007 and put up Hapinoy, a sari-sari store chain.

Rags2Riches, his other business enterprise, came about after seeing the un­just system of rug-making in the Payatas community. “We saw how unfair trade exploited the nanays (moth­ers) of Payatas,” says Mark. “They were making P1 to P2 per piece, but the total value of the rug was P40.”

For Mark and his busi­ness partners, the ratio of having these mothers earn P1 to P15 a day to feed a family of four while a middle man gets to earn P25 was not fair. So they came up with the idea of increasing the value of the rugs by coming up with a designer line.

“That really was the killer concept,” says Mark. “We approached Rajo Laurel and shared the story—the social injustice, the unfair trade that was going on—and thankfully, he said yes. Rags2Richesnow is one of the premier social business enterprises in the country.”

His latest business, which he joined into just a year and a half ago, was for his pursuit of industrial de­sign. Inovent, a small private company that aims to develop Filipino global consumer and global technology, was a business already managed by Ryan Capenco. “I shared with him a dream of having an industrial design firm,” says Mark. “Their business was just starting out and they invited me to be a partner.”

Outside lessons inside class

While his business career allows him to change the lives of poor Filipino families, his career in the Ateneo as a Business Innovation Man­agement professor allows him to change the lives of his students. “Mark Ruiz is not your traditional teacher,” says Management student Samantha Huang. “I didn’t know him ‘til I Googled him and saw all the cool things he’s involved with.”

He started teaching three and a half years ago, around the time he also began his career as an entrepreneur.

“I wanted to teach it for two things—selfishly, because I love the topic and when you teach something, you want to learn it, [and because] that is the subject that I feel was missing.”

Mark teaches by show­ing the power of leading by example: imagine giving an entire class P100 each, telling them to make it grow in just an hour of class activity, just to make a point.

He also applies his vi­sion of innovation as a way of life through a year-long project called ONTAW (One New Thing a Week). At the end of the day, he asks his students to blog about their experiences, keeping their minds fresh and open to new ideas for the future.

“He’s a teacher who already believes in us and what we can do even before starting,” says Management student Michiko Soriano. “He also believes that as we work towards innovating things, we have to start with innovat­ing ourselves.”

Think big, start small

As someone who started with just an idea and a dream, Mark doesn’t see why his students can’t do the same with their own business endeavors. “I want them to feel comfortable in breaking rules,” he says. “I really want them to de-program them­selves from a certain kind of thinking and to sometimes break the rules if needed, as long as it still is moral and legal.”

Even though his busi­ness dreams all started as small endeavors, he began by allowing himself to fall in love with the big idea of executing them. Rag­s2Riches, Hapinoy and Inovent all started so small that Mark had experienced starting out with a capital of just P10,000 and having no office as an industrial designer. “But we were starting somewhere,” he says.

Now, Rags2Riches has recycled over 150 tons of scrap cloth, Hapinoy has 10,000 stores, and Inovent has a prototype of Ilumina, an LCD interactive TV that has web browsing, video and music playback and recording capabilities, and an office.

But it doesn’t stop there—if anything, Mark doesn’t even see the end in sight yet. “If the end game is 100%, I’d say Hapinoy is at 10%, R2R at 9% and Inovent at 8%, in terms of scale. You can imagine how small we still see ourselves to be and how big we still imagine the future,” he says. “But we started at zero, at one. So don’t be afraid to start at zero or one, as long as you know 100 is your goal.”

RAGS2RICHES

While empowering women of poor communities and recycling discarded scrap cloths from factories, Rags2Riches also aims its business at creating fashion pieces and accessories that are both ethical and eco-friendly.

HAPINOY

Taking its cue on the all-Pinoy term “sari-sari store” (stores selling various items), Hapinoy focuses on convenience stores selling basic commodities. With almost 700,000 stores under its program, they make up 30 to 40% of the country’s total retail sales.

INOVENT

Founded in 2004, Inovent is a private company with Research, Design, and Development as its specializations. Three years after establishing its disciplines of Industrial Design, Ethnography, and Project Engineering, the passion for pursuing inven­tion and innovation continues.