We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maiko Sakai. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maiko below.

Hi Maiko, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a fun one – what’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?

In the business consulting and coaching world, the most popular content type is, “How I grow my business to X,” or “What I did to take my business to the next level.” Although this is quite understandable, there are many talented consultants and coaches who help their clients achieve their audacious goals.

Just because they choose a different path i.e. remaining as a solo practitioner or keeping it small but lucrative does not mean that they do not possess skills to guide their clients through a non-linear path to success.

Another point to address is that their journey of, quote on quote, “making it big” does not guarantee that it can be easily replicated by others with an exception of a handful I respect who seem to have a solid system or methodology behind their success.

I, for one, fall under this category. Throughout my career as a business consultant to service business providers who are in transition, I have helped countless business owners to get through tough times to make their visions come true. Those are 7-figure, 8-figure organizations.

Is my firm an 8-figure firm? No.

Does this mean, I have nothing to prove? On the contrary.

My POV isn’t to knock other consultants, strategists or coaches. I am making this point to help business owners make the right decision when they decide to invest their time, energy & money in hiring such support.

Here are some helpful tips to consider:

1. Do they understand where you’ve been and where you are heading?

2. Do they have enough use cases they can share with you that are relevant to the situation you are in?

3. Are their testimonials provide details in terms of how instrumental their work was?

4. Do they listen to you intently or are they more keen on telling you what to do?

5. Energetically, do you feel they have a solid framework, system or methodology that is flexible enough to work well with the situation you have?

At the end of the day, there is no one way to go about resolving the challenges you may be facing as a business owner. What matters is whether they have the best interest in guiding your business to the right path instead of telling you that you need to buy this product or you need to opt for this package.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My business has evolved over time. Yours will, too. When I started my business, I only started it out of necessity.

I was in the music industry which was going through major changes in its business model. Not to date myself, but digital downloading of music was changing everything. As a result, many were being laid of over a few years.

At one point, I was looking at the entire floor filled with empty cubicles in the middle. The only occupied offices were the window offices on 4 sides of the floor in Times Square. I never forget that view.

Since none of us, my coworkers and I, knew when would be our time to go, I started to explore other options.

At that time, I was working as a music licensing manager to negotiate buy and sell of music commercially. I was working with film studios, ad agencies, and other record labels. A few years into doing this work, I started to receive phone calls from independent labels expressing their frustration with not getting licensing help for their labels.

They did not have enough bandwidth to hire a full-time staff just to do licensing. But they still needed help. So, my business started out as a licensing agency for independent labels while I held a day job as the head of production for a music distribution company.

Back then, “side hustling” wasn’t a thing. If I remember correctly, we were still calling it “moonlighting.”

A few years later, this avenue also dried up. It was time to pivot.

What I liked about working in this industry was that I got to meet many creative entrepreneurs like the ones who run PR agencies, radio promotion agencies, graphic design agencies, video production agencies, music mastering houses, etc.

One thing I noticed as a common thread among those entrepreneurs was that they were good at their craft, but when it came to other areas of running their business i.e. hiring, logistics, maintaining healthy company culture, finances, they were winging it.

Naturally, this caused a lot of stress and pressure on them. Back then, I used to offer free advice to them, but then I realized I could provide consulting services as a business model.

But this pivot did not come easily. First, I decided to work for a business management firm that catered high net worth entertainment professionals so that I would be able to learn more about how to help creative entrepreneurs.

To be honest, I did not like the scope of work it forced me to stay within. I got in trouble a few times for discussing out of scope matters with my assigned clients. But this ended up giving me an idea that I would do things differently. I wanted to look at their business in more holistic way as a whole to determine what needed to be prioritized to right the ship.

So, I left the firm right about the time I was finishing up my MBA and started to offer strategic consulting full time.

The strength of my firm is to help service providers transition smoothly. while keeping the cost down. For example, a music production school was always scrambling for cash although its annual revenue was in the mid 7 figure. They reached out because they were experiencing a major issue with their payroll. This called for a thorough review of its operation.

What I did was to lead the business performance review while assembling a team consists of a lawyer, banker, accountant, and insurance agent I trusted so that, together, we would build a good foundation for this business to stand on.

I have done similar work for experiential marketing agencies, staffing agency, video production house, recording studios, etc.

My bio is drafted based on what my clients told me about my role and work. The highest compliment was from the people I had to lay off or ask them to resign. “You were right, Maiko. I did not see it then, but as you said, there were more to gain by leaving that company.”

Also, it made me feel so honored to hear them say, “I always ask myself, WWMD – What would Maiko do?”

Often with businesses that are in major transitions call for making hard decisions. What I offer is my neutrality to bring the best results to my client without harming people in the process. It is easier said than done, but I strive to make this a goal under any circumstances.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I will share 3 tips that I always mention to my clients who are facing difficulties managing their teams.

1. You care your business the most. No one else. Do not expect your team to care as much as you do.

There are few things to unpack from this fact. First, sit with this and figure out whether you need to adjust your expectations. Your team cares about the success of your business to their best of ability. But the reality is that they are not you. So build a buffer taking this into consideration.

Second, your job also is to care of their well=being while drawing out the best version of themselves. Are you currently doing this actively? Do you need to explore fresh ideas if what you are doing isn’t working?

Third, you may know ins & outs of your business, but your team may not. Are you communicating effectively with them so that they are clear on what you are tasking them to do?

2. You are not on a trial.

When conflicts take place among your team members, take a step back to position yourself in a neutral space so that you have a panorama view of the situation. It’s tempting to defend your position, but here is what I want you to remember: No one cares what’s right. They want their side of the story to be heard.

Do you hold a big enough container to handle this? If not, shift your focus on paying attention to all the parties involved without getting your emotions run wild. At a minimum, if you show up energetically as a stable piece in the situation, subconsciously, the rest of the parties will go along with it.

3. Communicate you vision and mission often to all parties involved.

There is no point of spending hours on drafting a mission statement only to slap it on your website. There are 2 folds to this tip.

One, ask how often you communicate your vision and mission to your suppliers, employees, and strategic partners. How about on social media? Do you explain your whys often? If not, your work is cut out for you. A bonus is that you might start enjoying sharing your vision as part of the content you provide.

If you feel like a broken record and don’t want to repeat yourself too many times, hear this – you haven’t done it enough until people repeat it back to you without asking.

Two, do you communicate how your vision & mission is relevant to what you are taking your team to do? I know, I know, it’s all there in your head, but unless you express this to your team, they can’t connect the dots.

This actually is a great exercise for you, as a business owner, to consistently think of how everything relates to your vision & mission. As a result, you might feel you need to change your strategy because of the disconnect that you just identified.

Have you ever had to pivot?

This is such a timely question because it is happening right now. The landscape of business consulting as well as coaching has changed the past 2 years, which called for re-examining the current business model.

This time around, it is not going to be a major pivot; it’s going to be a subtle one.

Up to 2022 or so, the 1 to many model was all the rage with consultants & coaches. Everyone was talking about how 1:1 isn’t scalable and that we should all do group coaching, retreats or membership. While there are great benefits of group sessions for the takers, my true passion is 1:1.

A solution? Create a space for my clients to come together but the actual consulting will be done on a 1:1 basis. It’s a win-win solution as I would love to help my community network, and this is something I’ve been developing gradually.

With the use of the right tech tools, the scalability/capacity issue can be resolved without sacrificing the quality of the work. Eventually, there will be another capacity limit that will arise, but if I ;earned anything in business, this is something I don’t have to worry about until it gets to be that point.

On top of this pivoting, I am going to introduce a new offer that is not related to the rest of the services I provide.

I will start offering an assessment-style quiz creation consulting. This was requested by my current client.

Here is the backstory. I have 2 free quizzes in my business that help me build my email list, and they are doing extremely well. But creating them wasn’t easy at all. I had to learn how to create an effective & valuable quiz from scratch. I even walked away from the process for each quiz because I simply hit the wall.

Based on my experience, I crafted a methodology that saves loads of time & energy. A year ago, I offered a free workshop just to see if anyone would be interested in learning how to do it. Many attended the workshop, but nothing happened afterward as I made no offer.

6 months later, a business owner approached me to share her story about how hard the process had been. So, I decided to run a beta with her only to learn how rewarding this work was to me not to mention how happy she was to be able to see the finishing line with confidence.

Running a business is all about providing value by doing the work that we feel aligned with. This turned out to be one of them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.maikosakai.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/MaikoSakaiBiz
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/airtightconceptsnyc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maikosakai
• Twitter: https://x.com/MaikoSakaiBiz
• Other: https://pinterest.com/MaikoSakaiBiz
  https://threads.net/MaikoSakaiBiz

Image Credits

Except the last photo with me in the black jacket, all the photos: John DeMato for DeMato Productions

The last photo: Mike Vernazza