“Real Voices”

I was brought up in a tough environment financially. I often felt frustrated as I watched people around me acquire goods like cars and home electrical appliances. This experience became a powerful driving force for me to seek financial wealth and rise up in the world.
I worked as a truck driver after graduating from high school, then secured a position at a job vacancy advertising agency. The internet was not widely used at the time, so my work involved selling space in job advertising leaflets inserted in newspapers. Most of my customers were small and medium enterprises: large corporations didn’t pay any attention at all to this advertising medium. But the job seemed to suit me well. I spent my time in serious conversation with small and medium business operators, and tried my utmost to address their problems. I began to achieve good results and was able to rise to the position of managing director. I was fortunate to have good customers, and many business owners encouraged me and said they were willing to support my efforts. I started to gain a sense that society was accepting me.
Unfortunately, the agency later became insolvent, and as the frontline supervisor, I was kept busy dealing with our creditors and helping employees find work elsewhere. After things had settled down, I founded a business called P&F as a sole proprietor.
Having learned from the experience of my previous job, I promised myself that when I founded my own business, I would take care to keep out of debt and maintain a healthy bottom line. As an aside, I also note that this kind of experience strengthened my resolve to support smaller businesses and the vulnerable in society, at the same time as retaining autonomy in my own business.

I founded P&F in 1998, and by around 2000 I had established a firm direction for the business. At this time, cellphones had just started to explode in popularity, and I predicted that they would soon become an essential piece of infrastructure that everybody owned. Deploying my own strengths, I started offering support to companies in promotions—in other words, advertising and store establishment, as cellphones became widely used. I set a goal of becoming number one in Japan in Teikoku Data Bank’s small and medium business category, and we grew into a company with a very healthy balance sheet.
As if in some kind of trade-off for this success, however, I became ill from overwork. I’d achieved my dream of rising up in the world, but didn’t feel any sense of joy or contentment in doing so. As I pondered what to do with the rest of my life, I resolved to focus solely on businesses that could genuinely contribute to society. I started to think about the most significant thing I could do to utilize my strengths. I decided that rather than business models, I should focus on human resources. The declining birthrate and aging population would usher in an era of labor shortages, biting hard for small and medium businesses, unlike major corporations. So, I decided to develop a kind of “human resources department” to support small and medium businesses. At the same time, I recruited human resource professionals in order to create a system capable of strengthening the human resource functions of my own company. I called this company JINJIB, from the Japanese word for “human resources department.”
I started out with a two-pronged business approach focusing on new university graduate employment and mid-career employment. But other companies were already well established in both these areas, and I found it difficult to establish a point of difference. I explored a number of other approaches on a trial-and-error basis, and one keyword that stood out was “senior high school graduates.” I myself graduated from senior high school straight into employment, so I had tried to recruit other high school graduates to work for my company. But found there were all sorts of rules and restrictions applying to their recruitment, and that nothing had changed since the days when I was at high school and searching for a job. Something simply had to change. At the time, people told me it would be a tough market, but I felt that this was something I had to do, no matter what risks were involved. So, I quit all the appointments I had with other profitable companies, including P&F, and relaunched JINJIB as a company specializing in high school graduate recruitment.
The stakeholders in this business are high school students and their parents, school teachers and officials, and even the　government ministries in charge of labor affairs and education. In order to deliver our services, we would need to cultivate firm “trust” in our business. I decided that it would be essential for our company to be publicly listed on the stock exchange. As well as making our own business more widely known, going public would enable us to contribute to much-needed reform of the rules of high school graduate recruitment. I began reaching out to venture capitalists, and that’s when I came across MUCAP.

Many problems confronted us even after going public. One was raising the potential for high school graduate recruitment alone to provide the basis for enduring commercial relationships. We can come to specialize in high school graduate recruitment, but the original idea behind JINJIB was to serve as a human resources department for small and medium businesses. As a way of returning to this starting point, we developed a service called the JINJIB Pack (human resources department package). Most small and medium businesses don’t have an organizational unit specializing in human resources, so our service was designed to help not only with recruitment but also employee education and evaluation systems and the development of welfare and benefit programs.
I believe that the essence of business lies in contributing to and providing satisfaction for our stakeholders and wider society. Sanpo-yoshi is a common Japanese phrase meaning three-way satisfaction for the customer, the company, and wider society, but what I seek is satisfaction going SIX ways: customers, supply partners, shareholders, employees and their families, wider society, and our company. I believe that business should consist of activities leading to improvement in all six directions.
There are still many limitations and challenges in the field of high school graduate recruitment, but I want to continue doing everything I can to free up the system. This is the path I have chosen toward six-way satisfaction.