Thank you for your questions!
I’m Kida, the representative, and I’ll answer them.
You asked:
- What do you do during the day now that you’ve stepped away from day-to-day operations?
- Don’t you ever get so bored you feel like you’re going to die?
Let me address those questions.
In my previous answer, by “day-to-day operations,” I meant the work involved in handling date arrangements. I stepped away from actually exchanging emails with members and entering information into our management tools around the third year after founding the club—about four years ago.
After that, I was involved in opening branch offices and hiring employees, but I stepped away from those duties two years ago, thanks to our branch managers—whose current title is Chief.
I then mainly handled marketing, giving instructions to the Chiefs, and launching new businesses. Since the position of Manager was created this year, however, I’ve been focusing exclusively on new business ventures.
My main projects have included:
- “FirstLady,” a dinner-companion dispatch service for paid social gatherings—operated for one year before we withdrew
- Lounge-style parties (LSP)—operating for six months, but currently somewhat stagnant
- Supporting the Dating Club Association—six months with no real progress
- Supporting Yui Nanase, a dating club expert—ongoing, but taking time
- Preparing to open a Ginza location through a subsidiary
- A project to overhaul our anonymous question box
- Preparing for expansion into overseas branches
These are the things I’ve been working on personally, although all I really do is give instructions.
As you can see, I haven’t achieved any results at all. Even so, the Universe Club itself continues to perform steadily, largely thanks to the Managers and Chiefs.
The Chiefs take the lead in handling date arrangements, while the Managers advise and support the Chiefs and evaluate staff performance. They’re constantly given unreasonable demands by me and aren’t allowed to argue back, so I do feel sorry for them.
That said, there are also plenty of things that get my heart racing and excite me.
Thanks to our Managers—Takita, Aso, Matsuzaka, and Yamagishi—I feel that our operations are improving day by day.
We’re preparing to start recruiting new graduates in April 2020, and annual sales of one billion yen have also come into view for 2020.
By 2022, I expect that several staff members may leave Universe to start their own businesses.
Recently, because of family circumstances, I’ve also been spending more time working from my home computer.
As for whether I ever get so bored I feel like I’m going to die:
It reminds me of the president of the company I used to work for. He’s the person I owe a debt of gratitude to for helping me become independent.
He’s younger than I am, but he’s successfully launched various businesses and always gets directly involved in the operations when starting something new.
He probably owns around ten companies, runs more than twenty stores, and oversees more than 500 employees. Yet I’ve never seen him look busy, nor have I ever heard him say that he was busy.
He may be busy constantly looking for interesting things to do, though. I imagine that may be what you mean as well.
By ordinary standards, he must be incredibly busy, and the pressure on his shoulders must be enormous. Even so, perhaps he still feels unsatisfied and so bored that he could die. I don’t fully understand that feeling yet, but I do know this much: anyone who says they’re bored enough to die is never truly bored.
The fact that you spend more than three hours a day looking at the Universe website is incredibly rewarding for us. It made me realize once again that we need to make the site even more enjoyable.
Thank you very much.
