Rick Cogley is CEO of eSolia Inc., a bilingual solutions provider specializing in IT management for non-Japanese corporations operating in Japan. He has lived in Yokohama for the majority of the 22 years he has been in Japan, with most of that time spent in the IT business. eSolia’s offices, as the result of circumstances when the company was founded 10 years ago, are in the slightly unfashionable (for foreign-owned companies, at least) Bunkyo-ku, in central Tokyo. Cogley describes eSolia’s job as “helping people to come over here [to Japan] and succeed” which he sees as “a worthwhile thing to do” and one which he enjoys doing.
Photography by Hiromi Iguchi
Journal: What is eSolia?
Rick Cogley: We have a core team of about ten people, with another ten consultants used regularly. They’re basically bi-cultural—mostly Japanese who have spent time overseas and are used to non-Japanese business practices. I’m the only non-Japanese member of the core team, but about half our consultants are not Japanese. We’ve had non-Japanese who’ve not been able to fit into the business culture here, and have had problems as a result. We need people who can “act Japanese” when necessary.
It’s important for our people to have good personality and language skills; it’s about communication. You can teach technical skills, but you can’t teach personality or cultural immersion.
Journal: Who are eSolia’s clients?
Cogley: Typically our clients are multinationals doing business here in Tokyo. We have had one or two Japanese clients, and we have done one or two projects within the region, but the majority of our work is done within Tokyo or Yokohama for business from outside Japan.
I’d say that between 20 and 30 percent of our customers are in financial services.
Journal: What services are you providing to your clients?
Cogley: There’s a full continuum. Sometimes the clients want a full IT service, where everything is outsourced, and we try to provide that if that’s what’s wanted. At the other end, it can be very simple, just a weekly, or even a monthly visit. In those last cases, you can’t do everything, so you have to rely on the IT department in Europe or the U.S. to do most of the heavy lifting and take care of day-to-day support. But even in these cases, we may do some small projects, such as office moves or upgrades.
We try to be good at communication and let the head office IT know what’s going on here, and we control the local vendors. We don’t sell everything—we can’t give big discounts on a lot of hardware—we’re not that sort of company and we don’t try to be, but we can coordinate and make sure that our clients get what they want. One of the things we said when we started out is that we didn’t want to be colored by any one vendor. We’ve got various certifications within our team, but we don’t push that sort of thing until we find out what the client’s requirements actually are. Being tied too tightly to a supplier can lead to deals that are less than honest—you’re under pressure to shift a set quantity of boxes in a set timeframe.
In many ways, we can be seen as implementors, with local knowledge to make things work in this particular Japanese environment. We’re also enforcers, making sure individuals don’t go down to Akihabara and buy random equipment.
Journal: Speaking of which, what sort of local competition do you face?
Cogley: Sometimes Japanese vendors are competing for the same business as us. But we’ve actually beaten some of these big Japanese vendors a number of times because we’re able to communicate with the IT departments and the management of the clients better than the Japanese vendors can.
We were called in once at the last minute to provide bilingual liaison services at a meeting where the overseas IT department was coming to Japan to meet a large vendor who had been talking to the somubu (general affairs, or operations department) and were feeding them a line of absolute garbage. They weren’t taking any notice of their client’s internal standards and were recommending the wrong kit and solutions. The somubu were just about to sign up at the end of the meeting and I held up my hand and said “Wait,” but they [the somubu] wanted to discuss all this in front of the vendor—most unusual for Japan—because they’d been talking with the vendor for the previous six months and they were ready to sign. We took over the local management of the project at the request of the IT department, and the vendor didn’t like this at all!
We told them that we weren’t going to cut them out, but we wanted good prices. We told them that we understand prices are more expensive in Japan, but they don’t have to be triple the U.S. prices. We changed one component where they were quoting a local alternative to the corporate global standard and knocked the quote on this approved system down from 25 million yen to 14 million, via a rival quote at 12 million. I asked them how they could just eliminate that much profit, but I never got an answer.
