Daniel Brown, Founder of Meidansha

Today, we spoke with Daniel Brown, founder and CEO of Meidansha. From an unexpected start to working on projects all over the country, Daniel tells us about his entrepreneurial journey in Japan.

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Daniel Brown. I'm from Australia originally. I came to Japan in 2003. Originally, I came to Shizuoka, because my wife is from Shizuoka. We'd been going out for about a year beforehand, so I had an interest in coming to Japan and I'd been studying Japanese at night school for about a year before coming to Japan, and when I arrived I went to Shizoka University. When I graduated I got a job at a stock brokerage, and the head office was here in Osaka, so we moved here with our newborn son.

How did you start your company?

So, I was in Shizuoka for 7 years. I arrived when I was 23. So I was already 30 by the time I entered the stock brokerage. Before I knew it, five and a half years had passed. I was going to turn 36.

So I'd seen the way the brokerage worked for five and a half years and I thought that although they're dealing in something pretty advanced, the way that sales were performed was pretty old-fashioned.

This is not just unique to Japan. In many countries around the world there are lots of restrictions on how you market finance in particular. But we weren't even allowed to send an email!

So although I had a lot of experience in things like how to read stocks and information about companies that are listed on the market—even though I knew how to deal with clients and how to sort of move a conversation, if you know what I mean—I really didn't have any understanding of, say, how to use Excel. Everything was siloed.

I wasn't really satisfied with the way that the company was doing sales, and I wanted to do it myself. So I went independent. I was independent for another two or three years, and while it was more free there were still restrictions on the way I could promote myself and so on.

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So anyway it was during that time I started to make friends here in Osaka outside of the work I was doing. One of them was an American guy living in Kyoto who was also named Daniel, which makes it really confusing for this interview so we'll just call him Danny! Danny had heard about 3D virtual tour technology in the US, and it was taking off. I think the year at the time was 2017. So anyway, he went back to the US to get set up doing this.

He asked me if I would introduce clients to him, since I was a freelancer and had connections because I was a salesperson for financial instruments. He had no sales experience.

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So I introduced one client to him. It didn't go so well! So the next time I brought someone to him, I actually did the sale myself. I talked with the customer and it was an associate of an associate sort of thing—I was a member of a lion's club; I'd been introduced to it through my sales and I would go once a month or twice a month for the previous couple of years. So I got a meeting with the general manager through that and he said, "Sure, let's do it," kind of thing. 

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So Danny and I got the deal and Danny was ecstatic because it was his first gig but also because the job was scanning a famous building, it was well known and quite prestigious.

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And so that was the starting point. From there, I did a few more sales for him until Danny asked me to go into business together as a partner, not just me doing commission sales for him. We got incorporated at the end of 2019.

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Unfortunately, it was less than 6 months later that Danny suddenly passed away, and since then I've been running the company alone.

What were some of the obstacles that you faced? You were independent as a stockbroker before Meidansha, so maybe you were a little bit better equipped to handle starting a company.

As you say, I was lucky that I was in the kind of work I was in, because yeah it was easy to make the step.

But in general, I think partners are important. It's really hard to do something like this completely on your own, especially in a foreign country. I was lucky in that respect.

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I went through, like, two or three stages of gradually becoming independent if you know what I mean. Being a stock broker is an employed, salaried position but with a relatively high level of independence because if you're bringing in the figures, no one can say anything. It's a number on the wall if you know what I mean. So as long as those numbers are there, usually people just just leave you alone.

Then my client had asked me to join the lion's club I mentioned before, and the lions clubs typically are filled with people who run businesses. Watching those people gave me a pretty good idea of what to do and how to go about setting up a business. One of the members actually helped me set up the business as well. So at the lion’s club I had people on hand to help me, and also I had people to learn from at the same time. So yeah, we could talk about stuff like what are the obstacles with hiring people, and straight away everyone talks about their own experiences, their own failures.

You have a lot of experience in Japan, and are completely fluent in Japanese. What advantages do you think that you had combining that with a foreign background and a foreign mindset?

I mentioned before that the stock brokerage was very old-fashioned, so not a lot of foreigners working there… on the flip side, people will always remember they met you! That's a massive advantage. They won't remember what you did, but they will remember that they met you. So, if I call somebody and say, "hey, do you remember we spoke last year? My name is Daniel Brown?"  they’ll say "oh, yeah. I remember you." And then the second question they'll ask me is, "Um, what did you talk to me about again?”

It's a plus and it's a minus. How you use it depends on your uh personality and how you pitch yourself.

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Another point I think is if people associate being a foreigner with whatever it is you do, then you've got a massive advantage. In my case, I’m a foreigner selling them a foreign technology, so there’s a definite advantage there. If you suddenly want to sell Japanese tea and you're foreign, maybe there'll be a surprise factor in there, but how you pitch that is going to have to be completely different to the way I’ve been pitching this. 

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But at the same time, you know, it's a thing where it just varies from person to person. Maybe a buyer could hear about it from me, but they'd be more comfortable dealing with a company that is completely Japanese, for instance.

What advice would you give to either foreign people who are keen to start a business in Japan?

I think it's not different to anywhere else in the world. But in Japan it’s important if you really are focused on whatever it is that you want to do, not just making money! It really does show if you’re just in it to make money, and people will see that; then even if you're doing your job well and you're making sure the client gets what they want and everything, they can see it's obvious this guy only wants the money. If they think you're in it just for the money, then they're going to be okay: if I ask this guy any question at all, it's just going to be, “do you want to buy this?” so I think I'll just ask someone else.

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If it's really obvious that you're in it for some, you know, loftier goal, then basically they're more likely to trust you and just… want to talk to you in general. That's pretty common throughout most of the world, I guess. It's not just Japan. But I do think it seems to resonate a bit more strongly here. People like someone with a passion, or a sort of mission.

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