Succeeding at "Selling Snow to Eskimos"

Brian TANNURA,
Market Pioneer Japan Inc.

With approximately 5.6 million vending machines already spread throughout the land, you might think that setting up a company operating vending machines in Japan would be as logical as trying to sell snow to an Eskimo. Brian TANNURA’s story will make you think again.

Tannura is the founder and driving force behind Market Pioneer Japan Inc. (MPJ), a company that started life in 1999 as a sole-proprietorship called Oscar Japan while Tannura was working as an English teacher. Some eight years on and Tannura has grown MPJ into a company that operates 1,500 vending machines nationwide, selling primarily stickers and print logos.

MPJ is now looking to expand its workforce toward its goal of realizing 50,000 vending machines across the country by 2010 and is continuing to expand the multi-million dollar niche market Tannura helped create. But how did it all start for Tannura and MPJ?

After a brief taste of Japan as an exchange student at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka in 1994, Tannura returned to the U.S. to finish his studies and then found his way back to Japan as a Nova teacher in an attempt, as he puts it, “to put the ‘real world’ on hold.”

Working for Nova proved to be a turning point. “After a few months working for a large company, I knew clearly and felt very strongly that I did not want to have a boss. The rules, the bureaucracy, the limits and constraints of a work-a-day job all pushed me in the direction of becoming an entrepreneur,” Tannura says. “Plus I had a desire to earn a higher income and make a mark in the world by doing something unique.”

That desire to do something unique led to Tannura establishing the first foreign owned company to break into Japan’s vending machine sales market, but it was no easy task. “Starting from scratch as I did it was hurdle after hurdle – no money, no office or warehouse space, no connections, no business experience,” Tannura says, before explaining how he overcame those hurdles with a combination of determination and hard work.

“In a general, sense I would say that a can-do attitude is what allowed me to get past all of the hurdles. More specifically I used credit cards to finance the start-up and expansion, I pounded the pavement cold-calling to build connections and I thought strategically while planning and acted boldly when the time for planning was done.”

From his experience of building up Oscar Japan while holding down a full-time job Tannura also has advice for anyone worried about the financial risk of going it alone in business. “If you are worried about money, I would say start your own business while continuing to work elsewhere as this will give you the income and security to survive if things do not go as well as you hope right away,” he says.

“Once your new business income surpasses your old income or is up to where you want it to be, then quit that job that you don’t want anymore.” Sound advice from an entrepreneur who did just that on his way to building a highly successful company in a market that most people thought was already saturated – Tannura and MPJ are proof that it was not.

Market Pioneer Japan Inc.
www.marketpioneerjapan.com/

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