At 7.55am most weekday mornings, about 60 staff at the Seating Matters’ manufacturing facility in Limavady, Co Derry meet for 45 minutes with the family owners and management. The factory makes therapeutic seating for people with disabilities.
It’s part training session to sharpen skills and knowledge, and partly a platform for both sides to air any issues from the previous day.
“We’ll maybe watch a video of a John Deere factory, or read a chapter of a book, or talk about a quote and then we’ll spend 20 or 30 minutes on improvements. ‘So what bugged you yesterday? Well go and fix it.’ We’re empowering people to fix the problems,” says Martin Tierney, managing director of Seating Matters, who co-owns the wider Tierco Healthcare Group with his brothers Jonathan and Ryan.
The idea was borrowed from Toyota, the Japanese motor giant. Unhappy with its own “chaotic” manufacturing systems, in 2017 the Tierney brothers spent a week with Toyota, meeting suppliers and experiencing first hand the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, where employees work together to achieve regular, incremental improvements to manufacturing processes.
“What we discovered is that this deep culture of respect that they have in Japanese society. Toyota has taken that into the company and said that if we deeply respect our colleagues, it would give them a lovely working environment. If our colleagues deeply respect the product, the product will get out on time. If we respect the customer, we wouldn’t waste the customers money,” Tierney says.
About half of the employees at the Limavady plant have since visited Japan to experience Kaizen for themselves. “It’s transformed how we operate,” says Tierney, who is speaking to The Irish Times in Tokyo, where he is one of 140 Irish business leaders in Japan this week as part of a CEO retreat organised by the EY Entrepreneur of the Year (EOY) programme. Tierney has been shortlisted in the international category of this year’s EOY awards.
This is Tierney’s fifth visit to Japan in as many years, for a company firmly in growth mode. The Tierco group, of which Seating Matters is one of three units, has completed five acquisitions in the past 18 months, roughly doubling its annual revenues to £16 million (€19 million), and bringing its headcount to 130.
Tierney is a convert to the Toyota approach to business. “If we cut the 45 minutes of training in the morning, the standard will just drop and drop,” he says.
Ireland and Japan are similar in many ways. Both are island nations, with few natural resources and a big regional neighbour on their doorstep. They also happen to share the United States as their largest trading partner.
But in terms of land mass, Japan is roughly five times the size of Ireland, with a population of more than 124 million squeezed into just 30 per cent of its footprint due to its mountainous topography.
Its population is forecast to reduce by 35 million by 2050 due to a chronically low birth rate. There are more cats and dogs than babies in Japan and more adult nappies are sold than for babies.
In economic terms, Japan has essentially flatlined since the mid 1990s; the country has been replaced by China as the economic powerhouse of the Asia-Pacific region.
And while the greater Toyko area is the world’s most populous metropolitan district, with more than 40 million people, economic activity outside the capital can be low, with depopulation a common feature in rural Japan.
All that said, Japan is the world’s fourth biggest economy, renowned for its quality manufacturing and operational excellence, if a little slow on the move – the EOY entrepreneurs heard how it can take up to three years to get a stock market IPO over the line, and they don’t even use lawyers for the listing documents.
The rail system in Tokyo has 48 operators, 158 lines and more than 2,200 stations. The 23 busiest train stations in the world are Japanese, yet the average delay on its famed bullet train is just 12 seconds.
Japan is also a hotbed for innovation by many top consumer brands. There are more than five million vending machines in Japan, with Coca-Cola operating a fifth of them, while Nestle has launched more than 300 flavours of the KitKat snack bar in the market. Convenience retailing is huge in the country – founded in the US, the huge 7-Eleven chain now has Japanese owners.
Many of the Irish entrepreneurs in Japan this week are eyeing the market for growth.
Pat Rigney is co-founder of The Shed Distillery in Co Leitrim, which produces the award-winning Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish gin, Irish whiskey and vodka products.
With uncertainty in its key US market caused by Donald Trump’s constant U-turns on tariffs, Rigney is increasingly looking east to open up new markets and travelled out in advance of the EOY group (as a former finalist and therefore a member of its alumni community) to scope out the Japanese market for his premium gin.
“This retreat was an opportunity to spend some time here to see how we can crack the market,” he says. “We know that Japanese consumers are buying our brands in travel retail [duty free shops at airports], and we came out to try and build local relationships in order to build a strategy to enter the market.
“We met a number of people, we visited stores and we’re at the point now that we feel confident that the brand will work here. So we need to find a partner who believes in the brand as much as we do and then get up and running.”
He notes that the company is already selling into the region, in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore.
Japan is a market where you have to play the long game, says Pat Ryan, vice-president of the Ireland Japan Chamber of Commerce, whose membership comprises about 40 Japanese companies that are investing in Ireland and Enterprise Ireland clients in the market (50 have a presence on the ground in Japan).
“I would estimate it takes about twice as long as any other market to get your first customer established,” he says. “You have to have people on the ground and it’s all about building trust and relationships. You can’t do that by just flying in and out.
“To open the doors, the Japanese want to see that you have the attention to detail, the customer service and the quality that they expect. If you’re successful, you’ll get very long-term contracts but it can take two to three years to prove that you’re in the market for the long term. You need to follow up on anything you promise ... you have to deliver. It’s an exciting market.”
On Wednesday, Ireland’s ambassador, Damien Cole, addressed the EOY group at Ireland House, the newly built modern embassy building in Tokyo that opened last month and also houses the IDA, Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland, following a €23 million investment by the Government.
He noted that the two-way trade between Ireland and Japan amounts to €21 billion. This trade in goods and services has doubled over the past decade, with about 70 per cent of that figure flowing Ireland’s way.
It’s amazing that there are more than 100 Irish entrepreneurs in Japan this week to try and bring some of the learnings home because we have to improve, and learning from Japan is the best way to do it
— Martin Tierney
IDA Ireland has operated in Japan since 1972 and has 44 clients, with 60 operations in Ireland employing more than 8,000 people across the pharma, medical devices, technology, semiconductor, green engineering and financial services sectors.
“Our business model is to continuously engage with the clients, building and deepening relationships, to demonstrate our commitment to Japan, educating them on the opportunities Ireland has to offer,” says Derek Fitzgerald, Japan director for the IDA.
“We also hold a number of events and seminars … for example, we plan to launch Ireland’s new semiconductor strategy here later in the year. We are a small team, only two in business development, so working closely with Enterprise Ireland and the embassy is important.”
To boost our visibility in Japan, Ireland has taken a pavilion on a prominent pitch at Expo 2025, which is being hosted in Osaka and is expected to attract 28 million visitors between April and October. “That’s an important opportunity to raise our profile here,” Cole says.
In terms of distance, the CEO retreat was the longest one undertaken so far by the Irish EOY awards programme, which began in 1998. The itinerary included a visit to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, a trip to the business school at Hitotsubashi University, one of Japan’s oldest third-level institutions, and sessions at the headquarters of Softbank, the Japanese investment giant that in 2023 paid €473 million to buy a controlling stake in Barry Napier’s Cubic Telecom.
Napier spent time with the group. They also had presentations or speeches from executives at Sony Honda Mobility, Yamaha Motor Company, Enterprise Ireland and others.
EY managing partner Frank O’Keeffe said there was “never a better time” from a geopolitical perspective for the Irish entrepreneurs to travel to Japan to explore the market. “The heartbeat of our economy and our employment is indigenous entrepreneurs and we have to foster that relationship. Ireland Inc needs entrepreneurship because it helps to diversify our economy and we should support them to internationalise their businesses,” he says.
Kildare-based Rye River Brewing is one of the biggest independent beers makers in Ireland, with revenues of €10 million forecast for this year. Tom Cronin, the company’s chief executive and a former EOY finalist, used the trip to explore the possibility of distributing its beers into Japan.
German brewer Warsteiner is a minority shareholder in Rye River and Cronin hopes to piggy back on its distribution network to get some of its “30 unique recipes” into Japan.
“Asia is the largest beer consumption market in the world and Japan is the 10th largest beer market in the world. It’s dominated by four large players but there has been a massive growth of independent breweries [to more than 800] over the past decade or so,” he says.
They are in a city with 40 million [people] beside Mount Fuji, which is their sacred mountain and I was able to tell them that I’m in a town of 6,000 near Westport, beside our sacred mountain [Croagh Patrick]
— Harry Hughes, Portwest
“It’s a crowded space but it’s a growing category and we will certainly look to bring in our brands in quarter four of this year. I had a very good meeting with a distributor here and, while I’m here, I’m actively trying to do something.
“This will not be a massive volume play initially. It’s more about pushing out the brand and growing out export reach. Exports are 50 per cent of volume; it’s substantial for us.”
Harry Hughes, is a director of family-owned Portwest, a Mayo-based maker of protective clothing and workplace equipment. He was chosen as Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 and is chair of this year’s EOY judging panel.
He used the trip as an opportunity to meet executives at Midori Anzen, the largest workwear company in Japan. “They are in a city with 40 million [people] beside Mount Fuji, which is their sacred mountain and I was able to tell them that I’m in a town of 6,000 near Westport, beside our sacred mountain [Croagh Patrick].
“It was a courtesy call and what I wanted to achieve was to see if we could do a swap of junior managers where three or four of theirs would visit us for a month and ours would go to them. It would be an interesting experience for our management team and they seem open to the idea.”
Tierney believes Irish manufacturers can learn a lot from their Japanese peers, and that the market can be a fruitful trading ground for others.
“It’s amazing that there are more than 100 Irish entrepreneurs in Japan this week to try and bring some of the learnings home because we have to improve, and learning from Japan is the best way to do it. I feel a debt of gratitude to Japan for teaching us how to make our company better.”
