A helping hand

Big businesses have been taking up more than their fair share of the oxygen in the room of late. Breathless accounts of the minutiae of the top end of town crowd the media, while a certain cohort of CEOs have become household names.

Here’s another newsflash: small and medium-size enterprises (SME) still exist. Better still, there’s a lot of support available to them to help build a strong foundation for success. Japan’s Enrise Group has the worthy goal of providing human resources, IT support, overseas expansion and other practical solutions to SMEs across Asia.

An integral part of the Group is Enrise Relations, whose vision of a prosperous future for the Asian business community is backed by tireless work in the realm of digital transformation. And as Enrise Relations President Shota Okise says, purpose is a driving force both professionally and personally.

“We only live once, so I want to make sure I have no regrets,” he tells The CEO Magazine. “And I want our staff to share this mindset.”

The search for purpose

Okise found himself on the other side of the coin many years ago, when he was a would-be leader in search of a business. During his initial interview with Enrise Relations, Okise, who’d built his career in fields as varied as manufacturing, education and television production, was asked about his ambitions.

“I wanted to be a CEO, but I didn’t have a strong sense of purpose,” he recalls. “In my mind, the only options for becoming a CEO were being an entrepreneur or a business operator.

“The Enrise Holdings President took me on with a challenge: to get results within the company while thinking about what field I wanted to be a leader in.”

What appealed most was the broad category of ‘administrative outsourcing’ for SMEs, which Okise says is a step beyond executive office support.

“Our core business involves deploying and building environments for SME clients that ensure everyone can access the internet at all times. The key difference is that our service includes information system functions, specifically the ability to manage and store data,” he explains.

“Most don’t offer this and that’s because our company started as an IT firm and the service developed from that foundation.”

Growth beyond borders

To do this, Enrise Relations has a team of engineers specializing in security, development and infrastructure, as well as a secretarial team that handles coordination and communication. All up, this team manages a stable of around 200 clients.

“We’re quite busy,” Okise says. “Despite that, we’re looking beyond Japan. There’s so much potential for major growth overseas and that’s something we’re looking into at the moment.”

This is being done through partnerships with accounting firms and other organizations that exist to help overseas businesses get a foothold in Japan.

“At the same time, Enrise Global, one of our Group companies, is actively working to sell our company’s services,” he adds.

The Japanese market is, in many ways, very nuanced and quite factional. Without a deep understanding of these localized issues, overseas companies can struggle to land on their feet in Japan.

“What works in Tokyo won’t necessarily work in Osaka,” Okise points out. “Without the right preparation, a company might not even get to a Japanese negotiating table, which is where we can help.”

Powered by people

Whether at home or overseas, Enrise Relations is faced with the same challenges as the rest of the industry – primarily AI, the measure of which is still uncertain to many. Okise believes AI’s rapid advancement is both an opportunity and a threat.

“Fundamentally, AI isn’t an enemy. I think the more work we can do using AI, the more we’ll inspire a desire to talk to people,” he reflects. “That’s why we place such an emphasis on recruiting people who possess value that AI can’t provide.”

What AI is more suited to handle are the menial tasks that aren’t a priority for the team.

“We’re not a PowerPoint production company, but we do receive a high number of requests for PowerPoint presentations,” Okise says.

“When that happens, I think AI can handle that, leaving us free to form partnerships or draw out the ‘aha’ moments from clients during the process of creating materials – human elements without which I’d worry we might lose out to AI.”

Okise says Enrise Relations’ support for businesses on the rise is a great match for his own sense of purpose.

“I met a coach for CEOs once who told me I was the type who wins by gathering good people around me,” he says. “I found those words freeing and it’s great to be able to win that way for business leaders everywhere.”