2020 2021 Strategy KF Aug 12, 2020, version
This project is ongoing and a real project. There are about 200,000 Japanese households in the US. I estimated that the market size to be about 4100 million. Many will return to Japan when they advance in age. Some decide to stay until their deaths. They face a unique tax and wealth mgt environment. They must deal with not only the US tax laws and wealth mgt environment but also the Japanese counterpart. Due to (1) inheritance/gifts from their parents, (2) their plans of eventual returns to Japan, and (3) other cross-border transactions that they face.
The service organizations in this market are very fragmented, and there is no national player. Local CPA firms and local wealth mgt firms are the major competitors. H&R Blocks and Turbo Tax are also competitors, but they lack the Japanese tax and wealth mgt knowledge.
I always dreamed of building a national CPA firm. I felt that this market is the one that helps us push to achieve the goal.
To do so, we need to gain brand recognition in the US. For the last 12 months or so, I have put very manual work to increase my LinkedIn connections to this market. I devised a way to do so after many trials and errors. Today, my LinkedIn reached over 10,000 contacts (under Koh Fujimoto) ; all are with the Japanese living in the US. Our firm’s monthly newsletter gets almost 10,000. We have started our own YouTube video channel.
My goal is to build a system where the people from this market segment reach us via the network, provide their current information, including the tax returns. The system should identify opportunities for our firm and suggest to us the proposed pricing that optimizes our margins and win ratio in combination.
We should try to borrow a pre-developed system of the financial sector’s opportunity identification and sales software. But, we should add our special knowledge (Japan-US tax laws and wealth mgt knowledge) to make our AI-driven software.
Japanese have a very unique culture of strong compliance. Once they know the rules, a lot of people feel obligated to follow and be in compliance. This is a good thing and we should help the Japanease living in this country achieve their dreams and establish wonderful lives here.
I am aiming to capture $30 million in revenues in a few years by working on this market.
We aim to develop an AI based system in (1) identifying opportunities, (2) suggesting proposal pricing and (3) predicting win % of the proposals.
We do not have to invent this. We can use other program (pretrained one from an open source field) and add our specific niched strength such as our cross-border knowledge base.