Ryuichiro Nakao, former head of Recruit's SUUMO Counter division and now CEO of Nakao Management Research Institute, lays out a business turnaround framework he calls TTP-S: Thoroughly Copy, Then Evolve. The article, originally published in January 2020 and resurfaced on Business Insider Japan, uses his six-year tenure running SUUMO Counter — a brick-and-mortar service matching homebuyers with custom-home builders — as the central case study. When Nakao arrived, SUUMO Counter was hemorrhaging money at roughly 10× its revenue in losses. A plan for aggressive new store openings was already locked in despite no proven business model. Nakao halted the expansion within his first month. His first move was diagnostic: figuring out how many customer visits per store would make the unit economics work. He then asked a structural question — what existing business model does this most resemble? His answer: a high-end French restaurant. Both involve one staff member per table, high-ticket items, and intensive personal service. The critical difference was conversion. At a French restaurant, every seated customer eats. At SUUMO Counter, only a single-digit percentage of visitors actually built a home through the service. But surveys revealed nearly half of all visitors eventually built a home somewhere. The gap between those two numbers — the service's conversion rate and the customer's actual purchase rate — was the entire opportunity. Nakao standardized the techniques of high-performing advisors and pushed them across the organization, the 'TTP' (Thoroughly Copy) phase. This alone moved the business toward breakeven. The 'S' (evolve) phase targeted service time. Customer satisfaction was already at 97%, leaving no obvious complaints to fix. Nakao reframed the problem: compress the consultation from 120 minutes to 60 minutes without losing satisfaction. He decomposed the service into 10 steps, measured each advisor's time per step against satisfaction scores, and eliminated waste. The result was a three-phase compression — 120 to 90 to 60 minutes — which simultaneously improved customer experience (more free weekend time), reduced advisor fatigue, and expanded throughput per store. Nakao also built an early-warning system for environmental change. Each store unit submitted weekly reports categorized into 'bad signs,' 'good signs,' and 'topics.' The rule: management never punishes bad-sign reports (and thanks reporters for them), but does punish unreported bad news that surfaces later. When multiple stores flag the same bad sign, headquarters investigates before the trend matures. To sustain evolution, SUUMO Counter ran monthly 'idea contests.' With 300 employees, the operation generated 400-500 ideas per month — roughly 5,000 per year. Nakao estimates about 1% qualified as genuine evolutionary improvements, yielding around 50 actionable innovations annually. His 'sandpile theory': you need a wide base of mediocre ideas to produce the handful of good ones. Over six years, revenue grew 30×, stores expanded 12×, and headcount increased 5×. The framework maps neatly onto Recruit's broader organizational DNA — KPI-driven management, bottom-up initiative, and obsessive customer-metric tracking. What makes TTP-S notable is not the individual techniques (benchmarking, process decomposition, suggestion systems) but the explicit sequencing: copy first, then evolve, and never skip to evolution before the copy phase delivers stable unit economics. The comfort-zone / learning-zone / panic-zone model Nakao uses to pace change is standard organizational psychology, but his application — using service-time compression as the 'break' mechanism rather than product expansion — is a genuine insight.
