Looking Back on the Early Days

A year has almost passed since we founded the company, so I want to look back on the year just gone.

Looking back across the organisation

Here I will set out what we achieved this year and what comes next year.

Rough impressions

It was a turbulent year. After nearly ten years in recruitment, this was a year of setting out afresh.
From the start we were lucky to have Tabiraki, Aoki and Takayama, the people who make up our current CXO team. Even so, the first year was hard going (laughs).

We were fortunate to receive plenty of work, and were introduced to many company owners.
The organisation itself, though, was a newborn.

marketing ⇒ sales ⇒ service delivery ⇒ invoicing

Simply getting that obvious sequence of business activity working took trial and error.
This is in fact my fourth business, so I thought I had a fair amount of confidence in starting things up, but

‘Honestly, no matter how many times you do it, starting up is tough (laughs)’
was something I thought often during the year, and I would talk it over with my wife late at night (thank you, always!).
My impression is that it was a messy year (laughs).

On performance

We hit the revenue target we had set ourselves at the outset.
I am grateful to everyone who was involved this year.
We are a team of digital marketing professionals, but marketing strategy, advertising management and support for bringing it in-house were not always enough to solve our clients’ problems, and we were often asked about the business itself and about running a company.
Those conversations let us understand other companies’ business models, research their markets and forecast their growth, and we ended up supporting clients in areas we had never expected.

On organisational strength

Much of what we achieved may come down to the potential of individual members of staff. Put the other way round, we are still fragile as an organisation.
To build that strength, from the second half of the year we introduced weekly meetings and a five-hour monthly meeting to review the month, so that we could turn the PDCA cycle quickly as an organisation. We will keep working on our organisational strength so that we can contribute as much as possible to a wide range of clients, through every kind of relationship and method.

Room to grow

Our stance of leading from the front as a team of marketing professionals will not change.

Narrowing the work we take on makes an organisation more efficient, but it can also limit what our people are capable of, and mean giving up on delivering real value to clients.

Deepen the expertise while widening it.
Dig the hole deeper while making it wider.

As an organisation and as individuals there is nothing but room to grow, and I am very excited about the future.

Towards next year

This year we did almost nothing about our own marketing, but
it is essential work if NowVillage is to grow stronger and larger from here.
To grow far beyond our first year, the CXO team is leading the preparation now, working through it step by step. By the end of our second year we will have a stable marketing setup in place and will be growing fast.

In closing

With thanks to everyone who was involved, I will end this look back on the year.
We look forward to working with you next year.