President & CEO: Kiichiro Suda
TECNET’s President & CEO Kiichiro Suda is an entrepreneur born in 1966.  After studying at Waseda University in Tokyo, he acquired hands-on knowledge about marketing and business development through several employments. In 1997, he set up Q&A Corporation independently.  He was CEO/COO until 2004. Now Q&A Corporation has grown to become one of Japan’s leading companies providing representative services of technical support (Phone/Email/On-Site) for individuals.  The annual sales during his 8-year tenure was 4 billion yen, and in 2010 they recorded 10 billion yen.  He founded TECNET, Inc in 2005.  Now he is concentrating on his second business.

Story of TECNET

The concept to support the IT sections of SMBs has been both meaningful & productive to us. And although our intentions are sincere, as a business it is difficult. This is a common understanding in the Japanese IT industry. But TECNET is overturning this concept.

TECNET’s president Mr. Suda was the founder of another company which had more than 300 employees and stable sales. In 2001, he challenged a new project in “IT support for small companies”, but the project was not successful. Half a year later he withdrew from that business. However, he reached the conclusion that “If one founds a company made completely from scratch you need committed staff and a president has to concentrate on his responsibilities 100%. Otherwise you do not hope to stand any chance”.  With this in mind, TECNET was established in 2005.

There were a lot of difficulties to be had:
1) Various IT requirements needed to be considered:
   Required technology and strategy differ depending upon enterprise.
2) Limited Sales:
   The sales per company is limited. Business processes ought to be trimmed.
3) Problem of credit:
   When a company wants an emergency help, we cannot spend time for credit investigation.
4) The necessity of going to actual locations:
   Because most everyday staff go to their actual clients place of business, sometimes this can become a disjointed affair.
5) Too many choices:
   If you know a lot about recommended products and outsourcing companies, it would be helpful to be able to choose at least one of them. However in truth, there are really too many to choose from.
6) Multi talented needs:
   In all intent & purpose, the smaller the company the wider the range of talent its staff has to be able to possess.
7) The Japanese employment custom:
   In the first place, there are not that many people who have excellent abilities in the “career change market”

TECNET spent 5 years solving these above-mentioned problems.

We decided to setup a “point system service” method as a pricing system. We hold one rule book – starting with:
“The Price to customers is payable in advance”
“Prices are kept in the form of Points”
“Points are deducted according to how much work our staff achieves”
“Acquiring individual appraisal ranking for each staff members based on their work output”
“Staff members share the workload even if it’s just a small thing”
“Engineers make estimates of how much work is involved for each project”
“Engineers are periodically alternated between projects”.

Many difficulties were solved by raising this system.

In the spring of 2010, TECNET acquired 160 registered clients and more than 1,000 prospective clients. The full workforce of 50 staff here at TECNET are working flat out. It has reached the point where we are breaking-even steadily. This year shall be the year that we prove that we can take our philosophy and turn it into reality by planning further development with the expansion of three networks:

(1) Establishment of the acknowledgment of an employee network (as professionals)
(2) Network of heads of information system departments (interchange personnel and share information)
(3) Network of recommended outsourcing companies (pigeonhole and evaluate the 100~200 companies)