MBA2268 The Business of Japan P4: How I’m Tapping Into a 5.6 Trillion-Dollar Economy

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Helping you grow your business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today is part four of our four part series the Business of Japan. We're going to wrap up this four part series by being very, very practical. I'm going to share with you how I'm going to be tapping into that $5.6 trillion economy of Japan. The small but significant steps that I'm going to take in my own business to take advantage of what I've learned throughout this experiment and hopefully by sharing this you could see how you can do the same. How you can apply some of the steps that I'm taking in your own business to grow your business or grow your sales to take advantage of what's going on in Japan. And these steps that I'm going to take are actually in sequential order. I'm going to show you step by step what I plan to do this year, how each step builds upon each other and how by tapping into that market, getting customers from there, by earning business, by collaborating and how even giving them my business as A business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode is sponsored by Talkify. The most common question I get asked is what is the one thing you would advise somebody to do to be successful? And here's my answer. Find the right partner in life for you. This one decision, in my opinion, can help you become successful in all areas of life. Business, health, wellness, happiness, whatever it is. This is why I'm excited to share Talkify with you today. Talkify is a new way to meet other serious singles. It's the country's number one modern matchmaking service that is designed to help you achieve relationship success. Their trusted compatibility specialist hand selects successful and compelling candidates so you can date consciously and productively. Here's how it works. The Talkify matchmakers meet you to learn about you and what you're looking for in a partner. They'll then select and screen potential match candidates for you, doing background checks, video interviews and asking the tough questions that are too awkward on a first date. From there, your matchmaker plans your day introductions and handles all the communications for you, creating a safe and stress free dating experience. And they're committed to finding your match. 80% of clients meet their person within the first 12 matches. I can't tell you how pivotal that one decision was for me. And here's why. Business and life is hard as it is. You need all the help you can get with a great partner by your side through life, to support you through your goals, your ambitions in the years ahead. And of course, you can do the same for them as well. And right now, Talkify is offering listeners 20% off when you become a client@talkify.com MBA that's T A W K-I F Y.com MBA for 20% off when you become a Client. That's talkify.com MBA. I learned so much by putting this four part series together, by my experience in Japan, being on the ground, talking to people, learning from business owners, finding out how I can take advantage of what's going on there. One thing's for sure, there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of capital to be gained. And one of the things I've noticed is that it's a very underserved market. Many people don't take the small steps it takes to enter that market. They just say, hey, I'm just going to stick to Western countries, Europe, English speaking countries to make my life easier. The problem with that strategy is that it's crowded over there because everybody's doing that. And it's a lot easier to compete and it's a lot easier to gain business where it's not crowded. So the first step I'm going to take to tap into this amazing opportunity in economy is I want to make sure that when somebody comes to my website that is from Japan that speaks Japanese, can gain value from it, that can read the blog posts, can understand what we offer, that means translating our website. This is actually not a huge task. You can hire somebody to translate your website to into Japanese. Now obviously you can do this with Google Translate if you wanted to, but it's not actually that accurate or as fluent as you like it, especially blog posts, because our blog posts are quite personal and friendly and there's a bit of humor and we want things to be smooth. We don't want things to be lost in translation. So hiring a freelance translator is going to really help. Now what I'm suggesting here is actually having your own Japanese version of your website. So say, for example, your business is all about camera bags and your site is camerabagsandmore.com I'm suggesting buying the domain camerabagsandmore JP because when people search for your site in Japan, the JP is the default and is preferred on Google. So you want to basically just create the same website that you have, but in Japanese on a new domain. Now I'm talking about your sales site. Now if you have an app that functions on a different server, that's a whole different story. We're just talking about where people learn about your products and services. So that's my first step. I'm going to find a really good translator, somebody who's fluent in English and Japanese and I'm going to hire them to translate my website webinar Ninja. Now, I might choose not to translate the whole site. So the Japanese version is a little bit of a abridged version. But I'm definitely going to get them to translate the most important pages. And the way to do that is just to go to your Google Analytics or your analytics tool and find out what are the top pages that people visit on your website in the last year. You're going to see the top pages, the top blog posts, and you might want to just start by translating the top 30 pages and that's it, just to get the ball rolling. So that way when somebody searches for me in Japan, searches for Opener's services, I'm going to easily be able to be found and they're going to love what they see because I actually created the site for Them. I didn't try to do a halfway job. I'm actually in the market now with a real product in Japan. Yes, we're online, but to them it looks really authentic. Number two, start running ads to this site, this new site. I'm going to start buying some ads and target Japanese visitors, obviously Japanese website visitors, people that are based in Japan and I can hone in on that market. And you know, Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok is very, very good at this. Finding out the right demographic, not only in terms of location, but you know, maybe business owners, maybe online stores. A lot of people don't know that Japan is one of the biggest markets when it comes to E commerce. So a lot of our customers are E commerce business owners who are selling their products and services through webinars. I'm going to be targeting them with ads. So I'm investing a bit of money to get some customers to head on over to my new website and check it out. This is more of a brand awareness type of campaign. I'm not really looking to make sales. It would be great to make sales, but right now I'm just trying to make sure that people that I'm trying to target in Japan know that I exist and that we start building a relationship and they start visiting our website, signing up for our newsletter, that type of thing. Now a little tip. When it comes to marketing in Japan, one of the biggest, biggest social media sites in Japan is actually Twitter. Twitter is huge in Japan. So growing a presence on Twitter might be something you want to invest in. In fact, Twitter is more popular than Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest. It's pretty impressive. Twitter is a monster in Japan. It's something very popular. The other one you want to check out is YouTube. Running ads on YouTube. YouTube is the number one social media platform in Japan. Now a lot people don't consider this a social media platform, but running ads on YouTube is really, really a good idea because there's over 102 million users just in Japan that use YouTube. Now a close second to YouTube is a platform called Line. This is a Japanese based social media platform and you can get into that and check them out and see how you can advertise there. But I would really focus on YouTube and Twitter given the fact that these are platforms that are well established in your area and you kind of know your way around it. All right, step number three to tap into this market. Well, I get my website, it's all in Japanese. I'm now running ads targeting my Customers, my ideal customers in Japan. Now, if they become customers, I need to be able to serve them. So I'll need to make a higher end customer success or customer service in Japan. It'll be a remote hire somebody in Japan that speaks Japanese, that can serve Japanese customers in their time zone, in their language and understands their needs in that local demographic. I might ask that translator that helped me with the website to help me through that interview process. Pay them by the hour just to see. Hey, in your linguistic expert opinion, who would make a great hire? Now before I get into that fourth step, let's just recap real quick. I translated my website, created a new website for Japan. This allows me to prepare myself to be a player in Japan, to be a choice for consumers. Two, I make them aware of my existence with ads. I can target people very easily with these ad platforms. Like I mentioned, focusing with YouTube and Twitter to get started. Now that I have traffic coming from Japan, people are reading my blog posts or signing up for my newsletter. They're aware of me. I need to be able to serve these customers once I make them an offer. And that basically is the cycle of my business, of me serving these customers and getting customers from Japan tapping into this market, this underserved market, especially in the software space. Now, luckily, actually my actual product can be used in any language. I've already had that all set up in the software. If you have a product that still needs adjusting, like a book or course that needs to be translated or even subtitled, this is easily done. And now you have a product that can serve a new market. In fact, in a recent interview, Mr. Beast, who's one of the most popular and successful YouTubers of all time, shared that he takes the videos of his main channel and he has them dubbed the yes, voiceovered in different languages and creates a channel for each language. Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, you name it. Why not get more views on those videos by dubbing them in different languages? I thought this was a brilliant idea, but can be used as well in your own business, your own products. Whether they're videos, whether they're books, whether they're blog posts, you can make this happen. It's actually not that hard. Translation services have been around forever. It's not something that is hard to hire for. You can find people on Upwork, you can find people on Fiverr, you can find people on Freelancer, Dot. Lots of choices. So these three steps establishes me as a player, as an option, as a choice for consumers in Japan. Now as a business, there are things that I have found very, very useful can really help me in my own offerings. Let me give you one example that I'm thinking about and looking to survey my audience to see if they're interested. I run a small entrepreneurship retreat here in Australia called oscon. Every year we do it in the snowy mountains of Australia. We get together about 18 or 20 entrepreneurs. We spend some time together, we get to know each other, but we also learn from each other. There's some organized sessions and it's a great way for you to mastermind and learn from people in a short period of time, but also get to know people and make some friends. This event logistically is actually really hard to put together and there's a lot of moving parts here in Australia to make this happen. It's actually quite expensive to. So my overheads are quite high and my margins are quite thin because things are expensive in Australia, especially when it comes to accommodations. Food, transport, we do skiing in these events, lift tickets, experiences, all that kind of stuff is not cheap in Australia. So therefore my margins are quite low. I might pilot doing the event one year in Japan. Why? Because in my experience as a product that I can add outsource something that I can actually use to grow my event. The service industry in Japan is brilliant. The value you get is incredible. The accommodations overall, very good for the price. In fact, I did the math and the on ground expenses per day for my event would be about half the price, meaning I would make double the profit. I would just have to ask the participants to buy their own flights to get to Japan. Now this might be more of an exciting trip, a better offer, something that they always wanted to do. And I can hire maybe even a guide and a translator to help us get through the event and show us the best of Japan to make it a memorable retreat for everybody. So I'm in the process right now of researching this and seeing if I can utilize and become a customer. My business can be a customer of their business so that I can offer a better offering that makes sense for my business so I can have a bit more profit margin and also a bit more fun with my group.

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Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter, right?

And the best part? They accept Discover.

Accept Discover in a little place like this? I don't think so, Jennifer.

Oh, yeah, huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times.

Right.

So we shouldn't get the parachute pants.

These are making a comeback, I think.

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. Well, there you have it. That wraps up our four part series.

On the business of Japan.

I am excited to get started and start tapping into this incredible economy of Japan. We've learned how they are a master at mastery, why things are presented in a better way in Japan, why they value aesthet and even things that are cute and how they leverage these things to be able to make more money and build their businesses. We also learned how Japan industrialized and took the best of the west and merged it with the east and how you can do the same with your business so you can grow your profits, you can grow your actual capitalization and your customer base. And today I shared with you how I'm actually going to do it practically. What are some things I'm going to do to start tapping into this economy? And as you can see, they're baby steps. They're small little steps and I will continue to take more steps. It might sound really daunting and overwhelming to start tapping into new markets, but I like to take things step by step, slowly put my toe in the water and make sure I actually just get started so I can start learning, I can start experimenting, I can start benefiting instead of just staying in my safe zone in my own market. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. We're on every podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio, Overcast, Himalaya, you name it, we're on it. Just hit follow right now so you don't miss our next episode and get access to our back catalog of over 2200 episodes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The thing I learned the most in this whole experiment, this whole journey of learning about Japan and doing business in Japan is there are multiple ways to get to the same destination. There are multiple ways to succeed in business. There's no one way to do anything really in life or in business for that matter, because we're different, people are different, markets are different. And by learning from other people and learning from other cultures, and other ways of doing business. We diversify our toolkit, we diversify our strategies in business. It future proofs us. It helps us to have more options when it comes to making decisions in our business instead of just thinking one way or having one methodology or having one example of success. This is why it's important to learn from others, especially others that might seem a little bit different than you. Strange and on the surface maybe won't even make sense to you. But by digging a little deeper and exposing yourself to other cultures, other ways of life, other ways of doing business, this gives you a competitive advantage. You get to do things that other people like you are not doing, right, that are not trying, that are not utilizing. And that's the ultimate goal as an entrepreneur, is to be a dynamic entrepreneur, somebody that is able to do things not just in one way, but in multiple different ways. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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