Around the end of July, I posted a blog about “creative effort” and ended it with the following comment—
“SOPHOLA expresses this creative effort as the deepest self-examination and improvement in our values, but everybody is not really embodying the value. It’s my responsibility to incorporate the value into the entire team. This quarter is the quarter when I first show how to do the creative effort!”

What excited me very much for this week was that Sebastian, who just joined SOPHOLA a bit ago could embody the creative effort. He needed only 3 weeks to ask me a critical question—“Is it okay to provide some consulting service to solve client issues, instead of simply pitching SOPHOLA’s products?” In the following week, “The clients from North Europe ask me about our mission, vision, and mid-term business plan. In addition to particular marketing technology solutions, what they really need is a more comprehensive consulting and support for entering into Japan’s market. Therefore, can we provide such a service including Japanese website production, distribution, contract paperwork, and marketplace entries? Then when the setup is all done, we can definitely offer SOPHOLA’s search solutions as well,” he said.

As a matter of fact, he generated a hot lead this week. If he had continued to pitch SOPHOLA’s tech solutions without any creativity, he would not have been able to create a hot lead in this short time period. While a founder should be the first person who embodies the values he sets, the values truly become our organizational culture, if we have one or two members who act according to the values. That’s why I was very happy to see his creative effort.

As I’ve been doing, I will continue to pay attention to such creative effort and highly evaluate it. SOPHOLA is a company which gives a great degree of freedom about how to work and spend time. However, getting things done in a timely manner is very crucial with creative effort. Me? I will keep my creative effort not to hava ramen for dinner. lol

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc