VisasQ shares expert knowledge across the globe

Knowledge-sharing businesses give people new potential to utilize their expertise and work flexibly across different sectors and life stages.

Front-runner VisasQ Inc. operates a matchmaking platform for experts in various fields and companies requiring their advice. Founded in 2012, the startup has posted robust growth, making its debut in the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market for startups in 2020 and buying out U.S.-based Coleman in 2021. Today, its knowledge-sharing database involves more than 700,000 experts in 190 countries, including 200,000 in Japan.

“There are so many ways you can succeed if there are no employment barriers of age or life stage,” CEO and co-founder Eiko Hashiba said in a recent interview, part of a monthly series conducted by Naonori Kimura, a partner for the consulting firm Industrial Growth Platform Inc. “By changing the way we work, we can achieve well-being in society — this is what I’ve believed in since the company’s founding.”

VisasQ provides “spot consulting” services in a variety of fields — information technology, marketing, retailing, wholesale, medical and insurance services — for individual as well as corporate customers. Experts have the opportunity to work hourly as a part-time or secondary job. Customers have access to expertise at costs lower than traditional long-term consulting contracts.

VisasQ’s growth reflects Japanese companies’ need to update themselves in our rapidly transforming society. “The speed at which Japanese firms are required to change themselves is accelerating, and they face more and more challenges to starting new business” as well as launching new projects and streamlining their business portfolios, the former Goldman Sachs banker said. “Because of the higher speed, they struggle to do it alone. That is the background of our corporate growth.”

In the future, VisasQ sees recruiting full-time experts as a business opportunity. “In modern society, barriers for employment styles are coming down. People working as freelancers often start to work as full-time employees, while full-timers may take second jobs if they get the chance,” Hashiba said. “The time has come when people change their work styles in various ways.”

Hashiba thinks there is more potential for the market, which should benefit her company in particular because it dominated the market earlier than others in Japan.

In its medium-term business plan released last year, the company aims at ¥30 billion ($200 million) in sales in the business year to February 2030. For the business year that ended in February, it logged a group operating profit of ¥1.23 billion on sales of ¥14.3 billion, compared to a ¥59 million operating loss on sales of ¥13.1 billion in the previous year.

The idea for starting the business was born from Hashiba’s own experience — crucially, her boss’s comment that she could not get a raise because she lacked leadership. Feeling rejected, she determined to take on a new challenge: becoming an entrepreneur. “I believed in my leadership, so that comment made me think I should try a different challenge,” Hashiba said. “Then I started to think about lots of business ideas.”

She became inspired by a book about collaborative consumption, in which people provide services through the internet — for instance, Uber and Airbnb. “That was when I realized that how we work should change,” Hashiba said.

As a single mother, she understands the struggle to manage children and a career at the same time. Also, the MBA holder from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was working at the private equity fund Unizon Capital, where she saw how a company needs knowledge and expertise when it needs to evolve.

What is more, at this time her father retired from a local bank at the age of 60, like many Japanese under the current system, and his expertise was lost to others. That was when she started to think about gathering such expertise in a new business. “It is very sad when what you have accumulated at a workplace over a long time is suddenly abandoned,” Hashiba said.

When Hashiba and her co-founder launched the company, there were no such services in Japan. By acting first, they dominated the market. She often took part in business events in order to meet various business experts and made phone calls to hunt for them.

VisasQ’s core business includes market and industry research for consulting firms and financial institutions by collecting data from interviews in industry and job markets, conducting business-to-business online surveys and offering a text Q&A answer service from at least five experts within 24 hours.

“I hear our customers say their productivity has increased. Not only that, I’m also glad they say they can get good information,” Hashiba said.

VisasQ describes its mission as to “make insightful connections possible between global leaders and people with expertise” and its vision as to “build a better future through a global platform that reduces barriers and enables the direct exchange of mission-critical knowledge.”

While growing, VisasQ has also kept thinking about what matters to it. Among its recently updated five values, the most symbolic one is “Sharpen our edge,” meaning that the company acts fast “on what matters most to be the top choice for clients and experts.” Another value, “Collaborate without boundaries,” shows that the company is always looking at the potential of overseas markets.

What VisasQ ultimately aims for is the creation of a new industry centered around the sharing of knowledge. “In the end, I hope I can create a knowledge-industry platform that can overcome the barriers of languages,” Hashiba said.