It was around a year since the company was founded, and company performance had been sluggish since summer.

Q:

How did your partnership with Imacocollabo begin?

Up to the year after I left Sony and founded the company, sales had been growing steadily, but that summer, when I wanted to move on to the next phase, sales stopped growing as fast as I had hoped. Looking back, almost everyone who left Sony to follow me and join MUSVI, including myself, were engineers, which means we embarked on our voyage without any experience in selling products or running a business. I had been running the company with a rush of dopamine during the first year, but I ended up being faced with things I had never experience head-on and lacked skills to deal with.

That was when I happened to run into Kai Fujimoto of Imacocollabo. I asked him what he was doing then, and he told me that he was working with his colleagues on a new challenge: providing consulting in a manner where they would get involved as if they were employees and even engage in practical work with them in a department manager-like capacity instead of maintaining a client-outsider relationship. When I was at Sony, I saw how the company would lose vitality as consultants stepped in from the outside and gave advice about how the company should be, so I became interested in working with him, thinking that it would be great to go beyond a consulting framework and have a relationship that crossed boundaries of company insider and outsider.

I realized what it feels like to be connected as a team.

Q:

Is there a moment in the six months you have worked with us so far that has been particularly memorable?

Yes – it was about a month after we began working together, when a difficult situation began to surface: the risk of cancellation from customers who had installed our products and the lack of sales growth were bringing about internal discord, and we were trying to establish a new sales structure but it wasn’t going well... Then, Kai and Mura asked me, “Why don’t we make time to have a management discussion?”

In the discussion, Mura said, “I do think that your role of starting one fire at a time creates a good vibe, but it doesn’t seem to have turned into a wave.” I felt that was right, and asked, “What should I do?” and then he asked me back, “What do you want to do?” His involvement had an intensive 1-on-1 coaching style. I won’t get into the details of what we did, but there was a moment where I felt, “Wow, we are really connected.” I realized I had been rushing; I must have been flailing around trying to make it all work on my own. This realization felt liberating. Since that moment, the way I work feels totally different. We are all really connected and working together, and we are making real progress. And there are more and more moments when I feel this way.

It is important to operate on two levels at once: going with the flow and taking action to move things forward.

Another memorable moment is when Mura said this: “Just going with the flow doesn’t mean all is going well. It’s important to stay active on both levels at once: to strive to manage the organization and pursue numbers while also going with the flow.”

To be honest, I believed that my ideal was having an autonomous decentralized organization driven by priniples and vision, and I did not like running the business focusing too much on numbers. However, when Mura said this to me, I realized that things are happening simultaneously on non-verbal and logical levels, and that it is important to work on both these two levels at the same time.

Now Mura and Kai attend our sales meetings. They actually do sales figure-based management, but there is love at the root of it all. They listen attentively and ask about what is underneath before implementing figure-centric management, so I feel that what is generated is completely different.

Even while being in the big flow, you still have to do all the practical things. By moving forward on both of these levels, we’re starting to make real progress. Along with our newly hired sales force, we work together as a team to think about which customers to approach first, becoming more involved with each other. Now, as evidenced by a new, large-scale installation decided at a certain major convenience store chain, I believe we are riding an entirely new wave. As a company, how far will this groove take us? How far can we go with Imacocollabo? I want to go as far as we can.