I could not imagine how painful and scary a middle-ear infection + the flu I have had since last Saturday was… It was my first time experiencing such a difficulty of hearing the noise or voice, combined with all the typical flu symptoms which made me lay on the bed for the last few days.
Please take great care of yourself while it is getting colder.

My today’s blog theme is about “Change Your Fishing Spot.” To give you a little bit of the background, the whole Japanese advertising spends and even internet advertising have been going down on the YoY basis since the emergency call was made in Japan this April.（Source: Specific Service Industry Dynamic Statistics Survey by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Oct, 2020)

The entire ad spend and internet ad spend for July and August have been 80-95% on YoY, which is on a recovery trend. However, our businesses are still in a severe situation. Under the current circumstances, we are all asked about the importance of creative efforts by asking ourselves a question: “What can we do to improve our business performance even a bit?”（Ref：Creative Effort, Creative Effort-2）.

A kind of creative effort in sales is “to change a fishing spot.” What does it mean by that? It means to change our sales channels and approaches, as a fishing spot means a sales channel and approach. As the surrounding situation gets tougher for our businesses, it becomes more crucial to review our existing sales channels and approaches, if the existing ones do not generate any lead/order/revenue for a certain period of time. Why? It’s because our competitors start making creative efforts in such a tough situation as well.

SOPHOLA is still run in an autocratic management style, yet we will probably be able to go to our next stage once everyone at SOPHOLA naturally starts making creative efforts. So I will continue to push this important message every week!

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc
P.S. My baby is growing so rapidly by making natural & creative effort to stand & walk holding a bar and make his own creative plays!