Mogic considers

With the combination of a small number of people + software + servers and robots
We are promoting a new era of company management.
We hope to share part of this process with you in this corner.

Representative Director Yoichi Yamane

June 12, 2024

Asked about all kinds of "growth".

Every few months a representative interview comes along.

This is the last issue of the series, which is early in the year.

We were asked about "growth" from all angles.

Surprisingly, growth is difficult to put into words.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
- I'm a little nervous about this last installment. Let me start by asking you about Mogic's growth to date. I understand that you started out as a one-person consulting firm. Why did you decide to add more people?

Yamane: Since we registered as a joint stock company, we decided that we would work with others somewhere else.

But if you start a company with a few people, the fixed costs will be heavy.

These are things like labor costs and rent.

To get the project off the ground while financing it, we had to work hard to prepare a large amount of funds at the beginning.

I wanted to do it more loosely and thoughtfully, so I started alone.

Fortunately, I got a job from a friend and acquaintance, and within a few months it looked like we could make it work, so we put a team together.

Let's grow up! Rather, I just wanted to do more of what I could do.

- It took you about a year to start your own branded service after you started your business. What did you need to do to start your own service?

Yamane: After all, it is very difficult to create and expand a service all by ourselves (laughs).

No wonder.

After choosing a field that could become a business, planning, gathering people, working out the funding, and managing the schedule, we finally release the product.

Furthermore, that's where the real challenge begins. There are running costs for servers, development, promotion, and marketing, but we can't devote that much time or resources.

So I was always looking for ways to get it off the ground with the least amount of man-hours.

It is quite different from working for a company to create a service, so we had to carefully manage our own resources and gradually got better at it.

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Long interviews like that are now being edited to rave reviews.

[To be added at a later date] Click here for the rest of the interview article.
h ttps:// www.mogic.jp/category/interview/14033

2024.06.04

Fail-safe, through-safe

When you are tinkering with machines, you often come across the word fail-safe.

In other words, a system that prevents injury even if it breaks down.

To expand, I quote from Wiki.

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Fail-safe
h ttps:// w.wiki/3VNK

Fail safe (fail safe) is a reliability design method that ensures or encourages safe operation of a device or system in the event of failure due to damage to components or malfunction due to faulty operation or malfunction.

This is based on the assumption that equipment and systems 'will always fail.

abbreviation

In the case of an airplane, it is fail-safe if it is designed to glide to a safe landing even if it loses all thrust due to engine failure.

When a helicopter's engine stops, it can glide and land in the same manner as an airplane by using the autorotation method of flight.

abbreviation

When an overcurrent flows, the fuse itself melts and breaks, thereby stopping further overcurrent and preventing the board, etc. from burning out or catching fire.

In this regard, the insertion of fuses in electrical circuits and the fuses themselves are also a kind of fail-safe.
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We assume that 'it will always fail (make a mistake)'.

I feel this idea is very important in the operation and management of the company.

Needless to say, organizations and people make mistakes all the time.

You get it wrong whether you intend to or not.

I made two mistakes just now.

And if that's the case.

Without a doubt, we have to assemble it with mistakes.

Create a system and atmosphere where even if mistakes are made, they can be made well.

I think that is my idea of management.

If that's the case, just say it out loud.

While we aim to create an environment where if someone makes a mistake, someone else can point it out, and yet, to prevent fickle human beings from forgetting to point it out, we have a system that automatically detects such mistakes, and to avoid overlooking the possibility of mistakes when the system is designed in the first place, we usually set aside an hour or so to "look for mistakes together". While we try to set aside an hour a month for "looking for mistakes together," it is not perfect, of course, and we need to maintain a relaxed atmosphere in which mistakes that have occurred can be redefined as correct answers in a different way.

and then it became

if it comes to that

It's bad luck to talk about failure right from the start.
If you think of bad things, you attract bad things to your life.
Since everything has been fine up to now, there's no need to look for something wrong.
Don't complicate things, just take it as it comes.

If someone says something like that to me, I suddenly pretend to be a fool.

Otherwise, much later.

I should have thought about it more instead of just going with the flow."
We were all so excited that we could do it.
I thought momentum was the most important thing.
I didn't think it would come to that.

I don't want to say that.

I think it's safe to go through the opinions that seem right at first glance if they don't ring a bell.

May 27, 2024

Before you know it, Mogic

Interns who have just joined the company say the same thing, strangely enough.

I've been taught so much that I haven't been able to get much done."
"I feel a little more useful today."
I don't know your name from your face. I will remember.

After a month or two, you can use the daily reporting tool.

Identify information you don't need from the other person's point of view.
Create materials that are easy to read, readable, and not boring.
Get lots of experience and think for yourself.
Keep the rhythm of your writing.
"Be able to discuss things with high resolution."

After another year of writing, he began to write

I didn't think I could eat dumplings again.
"I was lucky enough to eat a doughnut today."
"It was fun helping with the display."

He laughs.

I haven't had a chance to train interns directly recently and haven't been able to get involved much, but I'm impressed that when you are trained by a team, you somehow become more like a Mogic person.

May 20, 2024

Leverage to Reduce Power

In business, we often hear the term leverage.

Leverage = the principle of leverage, which is mainly used in the sense of a mechanism in which a small force moves a large object.

However, there are about three actual principles of leverage, the familiar ones are as follows.

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Teko (leverage)
h ttps:// w.wiki/45zx

Type 1 lever
If the force point is on the right, the order is "action point, fulcrum, force point" from left to right.

This is a typical type of trowel, which has been used to move huge stones and other objects since ancient times.

Tools that use this type of leverage to move large objects with small force include nail pullers, Western scissors, can openers, and radio pliers.

A mechanism for moving small objects fast and large is trebuchet.

A falling weight enables a stone projectile to be thrown at high speed, but the weight must be several to several dozen times heavier than the stone projectile.

Type 2 lever
This is the case where the action point is placed in the center and the force point and fulcrum are on the outside. If the force point is placed on the left side, the order is "force point, action point, fulcrum" from the left.

Tools used with great force using this method include bottle openers, nutcrackers, crab crackers, hole punches, and empty can crushers.

Type 3 lever
If the left side is the point of action, the order is "point of action, point of force, fulcrum" from left to right.

A small motion applied at the force point becomes a large motion at the point of action.

In return, this type of leverage transmits a force less than the force applied.

Tools using this type of leverage include tweezers, tongs, handheld staplers, chopsticks, and Japanese scissors.

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The third interesting point is that tweezers and chopsticks are indeed useful tools, even though they provide only a smaller force than the force applied.

In other words, the principle of leverage is not just about making it bigger, but it is used to exert power locally by concentrating it, even if it is weaker in some cases.

Create an autonomous system that successfully narrows down useful information from the endless stream of information being generated one after another.

Although it may seem paradoxical (from the perspective of the degree of information disorder = entropy), this is also a great and invisible leverage.

May 14, 2024

Antenna like a fish bone

A psychologist friend of mine once taught me about the process of "learning.

... says

In the case of child-rearing, it is not enough for parents to give their children a lot of information.

It often doesn't make sense to tell them that this is good information and that they will fail if they don't do that.

They can do it when they say it, but not in similar situations, or they don't remember it in the first place.

I will often say, "I told you before, why do you keep making the same mistakes, think about it a little.

Why do you think?

That's because the child's mind has not developed antennas that can catch that information well.

If you have antennas like fish bones in your head, just by looking and listening, information will be caught on and become blood and flesh.

That way, before you know it, you naturally end up with a fine fish.

But if you don't have antennas, all information just flows from right to left.

Even if you can imitate it well on the spot, you can't apply it because it's not gut-feeling (visually, it's not visceral)."

Then, I continued.

If so, how can you create an antenna in your head?"

again referring to

If you have antennas, you know the basic skeleton information.

It is easier to become an antenna when you have some base knowledge and also know the big picture.

If you have knowledge of the sewerage system, you may become interested in manholes while walking around.

However, this basic information is easier said than done,

It's actually hard to get into my head.

The point is that the information has to be conveyed before the antennae are created, and that basic information inevitably looks boring.

So, we will need to be creative there.

If possible, it is better to let them have various real-life experiences so that they will remember them without knowing it, or to talk about them loosely and gradually little by little every day.

That is one aspect of why people say that conversation at home is important.

So is the interest in new things from friendships.

The more antennas you have, the more information you capture, and this is seen as an attitude of curiosity.

I thought to myself, "Well, that makes sense," and so I "stopped teaching" even more.

Instead, he said, it's better to keep a wide range of unimportant stories about this and that.

It is for the same reason that I keep non-business-like books in my office.

Building a broad and shallow base of wisdom may or may not someday be competitive.

At Mogic, we are working on this over a long span of 10 to 20 years.

May 07, 2024

Plentifulness diverts funds.

When making an investment in a company, one sometimes wonders when this will be recovered as funds.

Of course, for the sake of convenience in explaining to someone or in compiling documents, the timing of collection and the rate of return are determined for convenience, but in reality, it is not always clear.

If you somehow anticipate business growth and purchase an additional 10 or so servers, there are too many other factors to determine where you really want to return them.

Let me quote from a text that explained this through interest rates.

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The Story of the Interest Rate "Price of Time
Edward Chancellor (Author), Takeshi Matsumoto (Translator)
h ttps:// bookplus.nikkei.com/atcl/catalog/24/02/21/01275/

Interest - the time value of money - is at the heart of valuation.

omission (of middle part of a text)

The act of investing - for example, building new factories, machinery, and other infrastructure - requires investors to forego consumption at this time.

As a result, it takes time for profits to accrue.

In theory, investments should only be made if the rate of return is at least commensurate with the investor's time selection.

John Ray says that a society's decision to invest capital depends on "the length of time over which most of the members of that society are willing to give up a good at the present time if that good will double in value after a certain period of time has expired."

omission (of middle part of a text)

As interest rates fall, companies will tend to invest in projects that are more profitable farther down the road - in Hayek's terminology, the "production structure" is diverted.

When interest rates are kept below natural levels, misguided investments occur.

Too much time is spent in production, or to put it another way, the return on investment does not justify the initial expenditure.

To use a term made famous thanks to an Austrian economist, "malinvestment" takes many forms and appears on many scales.

For example, costly "useless projects" such as the construction of undersea tunnels, and picture-perfect technology plans that are not expected to generate a decent profit.
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The act of investing when you have as much money on hand (very occasionally) as you can raise at low interest rates (very occasionally) raises the fear in my mind that the act of investing when you have an abundance of cash on hand (very occasionally) may unknowingly lead to a similar process.

In other words, the more you feel you have plenty of cash on hand (whether you really have it or not), the more you are setting yourself up to fall into the trap of spending too much on the production structure and not getting it back at all in the time you are looking for.

To derive from the rough analogy from macro to micro, I still feel that the lack of understanding when investing is something that cannot be wiped away forever.

April 23, 2024

Business Model Exploration by the Numbers

There was a time when I was studying business models before I started my own business.

We covered three industries a day, and did so for 30 days, or about 100 industries.

The listing of industries is far from planned, and his style is to research anything that catches his eye.

Beauty salons, drugstores, convenience stores, laundromats, restaurants, taverns, snack bars, cake shops, railroads, passenger aircraft, travel agencies, guest houses, supermarkets, convenience stores, transportation companies, dual-use farmers, suburban vegetable farmers, fishermen, aquaculture, forestry, steel manufacturing, paper manufacturing, architectural design companies, nursing care facilities, insurance sales, real estate companies, Graphic design companies, advertising agencies, wholesale wholesalers, city halls, NPOs, and so on.

Since the business model is too broad, we first create a fictitious profit-and-loss statement per month, and then calculate an annual figure that takes into account seasonal fluctuations.

The next step is to estimate the initial costs, operational costs, and unexpected costs required to complete the model.

Conveniently, figures for facilities, rent, labor costs, etc. are available on the Internet, so we can pick up reasonable ones and build a structure that allows us to simulate them.

Since the structure of the industry is somewhat understood at this point, we can determine how likely the business is to be in the black or in the red by tweaking parameters such as the repeat customer retention rate and inventory turnover rate, and take a blink-and-you'll-miss-it approach.

Then we can assume the impact in case it happens, so we can make sense of it by saying, "Oh, this business is usually good, but external factors can cause it to deteriorate rapidly," and summarize it as a risk once and for all.

It's a rough method, but I think it has helped me get an idea of a model that is likely to work well across industries.

If I ever return to the countryside, I would like to try a mixed-use model with a real estate agency on the first floor and a snack bar on the second floor.

April 16, 2024

stick one's neck into trouble

Whenever I have a little free time, I help maintain the equipment, whether it's in my office or someone else's room.

We started this project by replacing the faucet with a shower head.

Unlike electrical work, it does not require a license and can be easily started, but the main drawback of the plumbing system is the small work space.

You can finally see the water hose when you poof open the lower door of the sink, take out a large amount of stuff, turn over and slowly slide in head first to the back of the sink.

I relied on the light on my phone to check the hot and cold water connections, determined the durability of the water line, and took a quick snapshot to check around the nut that secures the water valve from below, and that was the first step.

After allocating a replacement faucet online, matching detailed specifications one by one, and finally determining the price, the replacement procedure is envisioned.

However, when we actually try it, we often struggle more than expected because the old water valve may have unexpected joints.

Phew, I don't know how I got into this mess, but I am trying as much as time allows to do what I can to be useful.

I'm going to look into this or that and try to do what could be done in an instant by asking an expert.

Putting your own hands on it is also a risk you are willing to take.

What if the old faucet rusted out and couldn't be removed? What if the replacement doesn't connect properly? What if the water leaks at a later date? What if the damage caused by the leak spreads to the surrounding area?

You may think that I am getting involved in something totally troublesome.

From a business standpoint, this is a matter that should be covered by hiring a specialist for unfamiliar and time-consuming work.

That's true, but it's not just construction, it's also work and management.

Everyone thinks it looks like a hassle, so it's worth a try.

And when I tried it, wow, it's a different kind of hassle, and that's hard to get rid of.

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