株式会社 ドリームインキュベータ 堀紘一代表取締役社長 インタビュー
Consultancy takes Japan's fledgling businesses under wing
Entrepreneur with heart has yen for nurturing potential
By SHINICHI TERADA
Staff writer
Demoralized and discouraged, the company employees would scrap and argue, giving little care to the work at hand. Today, with the help of a supportive atmosphere, their confidence is restored. They are proud of what they do and it is reflected in productive work.
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| Koichi Hori |
Turning flagging companies around is one reason the outspoken, booming-voiced Hori launched his consultancy, Dream Incubator Inc., six years ago.
That and the desire to help young and determined businesspeople and startup businesses that have the potential to fuel Japan's economic growth are driving forces behind Dream Incubator's 60-year-old founder and representative director.
Hori is one of the several Japanese government and business leaders claiming that the world's second-biggest economy needs to cultivate more entrepreneurs.
More entrepreneurs are seen as a way of boosting the recent economic upswing taking place while still many companies struggle to recover from the burst of the stock and real estate bubble in the 1990s.
Due to his work reviving fledgling companies, it is a personal dream of Hori's to one day see one of the companies in his care grow into the next Sony, the next Honda or Toyota. Many small and medium-size companies, the University of Tokyo graduate points out, lack sufficient capital or manpower and thus are in great need of consultancy.
Still, it's a long way to go before he realizes his dream of helping bring about 100 blue-chip global companies. For now, Hori's task is to discern, from among tens of thousands of companies, which ones even have the potential to be Japan's next mega-success.
For the present, he admits to only seeing two or three companies with such potential. So far, Dream Incubator has helped eight startups, most of which went public for startup emerging markets.
Business, however, has been strong for Dream Incubator, enjoying a slew of strong consulting requests from blue-chip companies where business has grown stagnant. Dream Incubator, in addition to selling stock in the companies it nurtures, also supports startups whose skills and technologies could attract new global companies to Japan. Recently, Dream Incubator revised upward its estimated consolidated revenues to 4.1 billion yen ($35 million).
Hori advises Japanese, young and old, to challenge themselves more. Americans, he says, have always exhibited a "frontier spirit," and the British similar, with their yearning for far-off lands. "You must never forget the spirit, the fight in you that you probably used to have in your 20s and 30s," Hori, who describes himself as someone with a constant hungering for knowledge, urges.
Much of Hori's entrepreneurial spirit may itself have been nurtured during his days in America. His time as a graduate student at Harvard Business School in the early '80s, surely was a factor in Hori eventually starting up his own company. During that time he was amazed to see top-ranked business school students embarking on their own startups or landing jobs at consulting firms.
Later in Japan, Hori worked as a consultant at the American-based Boston Consulting Group, where he charted and developed business plans for blue-chip company executives.
It became obvious to Hori that Americans' idea of success in the world's biggest economy was starting their own businesses and enjoying their freedom.
In contrast, young Japanese aspired to join big companies and climb the corporate ladder.
It has often been said that the traditional education and employment systems in Japan serve to develop a mind-set more appropriate for a disciplined worker than, as in the States, a leader or free-thinker. It is this mind-set, Hori believes, that has done more to hold Japanese back than anything else.
Today, through the process of helping companies, Hori says, "I feel fulfilled when I see the faces of managers and young employees at a company going from gloomy to smiling as a result of their achievements." According to Hori, the rehabilitation of a company means a rehabilitation of its employees.
"Telling people to do this and do that just doesn't work out," said Hori. "Employees don't basically buy into what some self-proclaimed 'educator' tells them. Instead, we make them aware of a problem and then build a forum where people can gain the skills and experience they need."
Hori himself, through Dream Incubator, needs to execute the plans he once helped devise for companies years ago.
"After I started up my own company," he says, "I realized that I could do anything. I also learned that if you don't achieve your goal, it is simply because you didn't put in the necessary effort, or because you gave up too soon."
And, though it may sound cliched, "in business, time is money," Hori emphasizes.
"You can never regain lost time." It takes but one late meeting for a trusting relationship to collapse, he points out -- but it takes so much longer to establish one.
