Abstract
Animal agri-products trading companies occupy a critical but under-examined position in the Philippine livestock value chain, connecting farmers, veterinarians, and feed mills to veterinary, breeding, nutritional, and biosecurity inputs. Despite the sector's importance to food security and rural livelihoods, limited research examines how such companies recognize market opportunities and build viable, trusted enterprises. This study, conducted on a start-up Philippine animal agri-products trading company (pseudonym "AgriVet Co."), determined the extent to which the company practices opportunity recognition, creativity and ideation, design thinking application, trust-building and relationship management, and feasibility validation; examined the relationships among these five domains; explored, through the founder's and staff's experiences, how the company's market opportunity was recognized, creatively explored, and validated; and proposed evidence-informed strategies to strengthen these areas. A mixed-method case study combined a five-point Likert-scale survey of 14 respondents with key informant interviews of the founder and three senior staff, covering all 18 direct-hire personnel. Weighted means assessed each practice's extent, and thematic analysis examined the qualitative data; reliability was excellent (Cronbach's alpha = 0.89). The company practiced the examined behaviors overall, with trust-building and relationship management the strongest area, supported by farm visits and technical consultations, while feasibility validation was less formally practiced, particularly in financial and organizational assessment. The five domains proved interrelated, with trust-building linking opportunity recognition to validation and substituting for the more formal creativity and feasibility practices that scored lowest. The founder's technical and distribution experience strongly shaped opportunity recognition, while trust-building proved central to serving a technically demanding client base. The study recommends formalizing the company's informal opportunity-scanning and feasibility practices, introducing lightweight structured ideation techniques, and developing a repeatable feasibility checklist to sustain founder-driven strengths as the company scales.