Message from the President

Unlocking the Potential of Businesses and Organizations

It has now been one year since June 2023, when I assumed the position of President and Representative Director of the WILL GROUP. This year was an opportunity for us to reaffirm the potential of our businesses and organizations.

Firstly, regarding our businesses, we completed the first year of our Medium-term Management Plan “WILL-being 2026.” We have now reached a critical turnaround stage. Rather than relying on the assumption that our growth will be based on our existing businesses, we will be transforming our portfolio by actively searching for and taking on new growth opportunities. My greatest concern is that if we cling to an outdated business structure, our employees and organizations may also continue operating in traditional ways, avoiding new challenges. As you know, one of the key policies in our current medium-term plan is the re-growth of our Domestic Working business. Although we previously prioritized investment in growing our fixed-term staffing service business, the current medium-term plan strives to tackle new growth sectors by expanding our permanent employee staffing service and foreign talent management service.

Our Overseas Working business has expanded to 11 countries with a focus on Australia and Singapore, and in the last decade the segment has grown to account for 40% of Group sales.

What distinguishes these businesses is that transactions with the government account for roughly half of their sales, providing a level of stability. Additionally, our permanent placement services constitute a strong driver of earnings in our overseas businesses. Our Overseas Working Business has experienced robust growth, fueled by successful M&A ventures. The key to our success lies in the exceptional leaders and professionals within these businesses—individuals with deep expertise in their respective areas. This talented team has been actively contributing to our Group’s success since the companies first joined us.

Next, I would like to address our organizations. Since last year, I have conducted visits to our business offices throughout Japan several times each month and had discussions with employees at those offices. As president, I do not have many opportunities to talk with employees on the front lines or department heads. Furthermore, internal communication within the company has weakened since the COVID-19 pandemic. To address this, I make these visits to share my thoughts directly and gain firsthand insights from our employees. During these visits, I realized there are disparities among business units in employee's feeling of actual growth having taken place, depending on the status of their business unit. At the same time, I got the sense everywhere I went that people were seeking both personal growth and the growth of their businesses.

Growth is created by taking on challenges. Businesses, organizations, and individuals cannot grow without challenging themselves. Just as we are aiming to grow the Domestic Working business by challenging ourselves to two sectors—permanent employee staffing service and foreign talent management service—we also hope to give individual employee more opportunities to challenge themselves and grow.

Fostering a New Culture of Challenge to the WILL GROUP

Regardless of the circumstances, we at the WILL GROUP will continue to move forward. The current moment is a great opportunity to build a new culture of challenging ourselves. This is the question I want to ask of all WILL GROUP employees: “What challenge do you want to take on for yourself at the WILL GROUP?” Both businesses and you yourself must always continue to grow in order to remain valuable to society and to other people. That growth is powered by challenging oneself.

At the WILL GROUP, we invest around 10% of operating profit into the development of new lines of business. Half of this investment goes to cultivating a culture that supports such challenges. New lines of business require time and effort before they become profitable, so in many cases, M&A is a more prudent option. But we do not rely entirely on M&A. We also challenge ourselves to achieve organic growth. By creating opportunities in that process to involve all employees, personnel can experience new viewpoints, ways of thinking, setbacks, and a sense of accomplishment that are all hard to come across in the course of everyday work operations. This contributes to the formation of a culture of taking on challenges. It is said that once 30% of the thinking and behavior in an organization change, the default standards of thinking and behavior within that organization will also shift. Therefore, the first step to creating a new culture of challenging oneself is for 30% of employees to become “challengers.” I believe that once they feel they have truly grown as a result of challenging themselves, the WILL GROUP will then advance to the next stage.

To this end, one specific initiative we have introduced is a “business contest” that supports employees in taking on challenges for themselves. Contest finalists are selected from over a hundred entrants. The employee selected as finalists then meet several times with experts from outside the company to refine the finalists’ project ideas. In the end, all of the finalists’ projects are reviewed by the Investment Committee, which then selects the overall winner to receive the Grand Prize. This winner is given the green light to go ahead with their idea and turn it into a business. Last year, the Grand Prize was won by a new employee in her first year at the company after being hired right out of university. This was a very powerful and exciting moment.

Other events include the biannual WILL Summit for executives above a certain level, where participants discuss a wide range of topics including DX, global issues, start-ups, and promoting women's empowerment in the workplace in an effort to enhance the four key elements embedded in the WILL company name: Working, Interesting, Learning, and Living.

This year, we have also embraced the theme of self-challenge at Group kick-off events and town halls, where participants shared the challenges they want to tackle and the hurdles they face along the way. We are creating opportunities for people to inspire and support one another in overcoming their personal challenges.

All WILL GROUP employees have the spark of challenge within them. That is our biggest strength. Many employees have a strong desire to transform the present and to increase their opportunities to take on new challenges. We first want to take good care of such employees, and we want to spread that fire of self-challenge throughout the entire WILL GROUP.

By creating a new culture of taking on challenges and promoting positive changes in behavior among people and organizations, we will forge a new path forward to further growth.

Evolving the Business Portfolio Towards 2030

When announcing financial results, we revised the management targets in our medium-term plan to more reasonable standards based on changes in the external environment. However, there has been no change in our basic policy of seeking to regrow our Domestic Working business. In fact, we will shift to a management style focused on maximizing the promotion of this strategy. This approach is driven by our desire to continue enhancing corporate value and achieve leaps in progress during the next medium-term plan period and beyond.

In the current medium-term plan, we will continue to boost the performance of the WILLOF CONSTRUCTION company, which is in the architect engineer sector. Current sales are roughly four times what they were in 2017, immediately before the acquisition. We aim to achieve a turnaround to profitability in the year ending March 2025, and make this business a core pillar for the company.

As a new initiative, we launched WILLOF promotion, which utilizes TV personalities for commercials, internet advertisements, and social media marketing. As a result of this push, brand recognition increased by 340%, and willingness to use the service grew by 450%, both achieving significant improvement.

Next, why have we made the regrowth of our Domestic Working business a core policy and focused on permanent employee staffing. The WILL GROUP is a general staffing company based primarily on fixed-term staffing services. The assets that drive our business are operational know-how and the skills of our personnel. This is why we believe the easiest pivot for us is into the “permanent employee staffing service” sector, which is forecasted to grow and to offer high profit margins. To differentiate ourselves from our competitors, we aim to draw on the assets we developed over roughly 20 years in the fixed-term staffing service sector, which we grew to a size of 100 billion yen.

At present, we are focusing on rebuilding our profit-generating capabilities and enhancing our financing capabilities. One crucial goal of the current medium-term plan is to create a path to stable profit growth.

The WILL GROUP aims, with all our strength, to maximize and optimize the positive choices for workers. By 2030, many fixed-term staffing service personnel will be converted into non-fixed term employees in order to create a unique career path mechanism for “permanent employee staffing service,” which our competitors will not be able to replicate. For example, once an IT engineer progresses in their career to a certain point as temporary staff, they will sometimes wish to transition to a non-temp position. We want to create a framework that enables such engineers to stay at the company rather than resigning, providing them with the next step in their career path so that they can advance through the stages of a career and ultimately thrive as an expert in their field. By doing this, we believe that WILL GROUP engineers will become a presence that exceeds that of ordinary engineers at the workplace. At the same time, we will draw on our strengths as a global company to provide support services for forming career paths for non-Japanese employees both in Japan and overseas.

Employee Happiness Leads to Happiness for All Stakeholders

To be perfectly clear, I believe that the most important stakeholders of all are the WILL GROUP employees, and they are the ones we should prioritize first. Of course, our shareholders, customers, business partners, and other stakeholders are all important. However, WILL GROUP management will focus our efforts above all on ensuring that each and every employee can experience a sense of growth and joy in the value they provide through their work, and take a positive outlook on the future ahead. If our employees are happy, then all stakeholders will be happy as well, which means that we can achieve our core mission.

The WILL GROUP will continue to challenge ourselves, while having a positive impact on the labor market. One of our company principles that we hold dear is to “Believe in Your Possibility.” We hope you believe in the potential of WILL GROUP and are excited about what lies ahead.