$1.45 Million a Year Helping People Quit Jobs in Japan

I stumbled across a fascinating article from 2019 about a company 🇯🇵 Japanese people can hire to quit a job on their behalf…

[Exit is] a start-up that offers a bespoke service to employees who are dying to resign but need a bit of help.

“Most of them are scared of their bosses,” says [co-founder Yuichiro] Okazaki. “They know their bosses are going to say: ‘No, you cannot quit’. I think it’s because of the culture of Japan – to quit something is bad. When they want to quit, they feel like they are a bad person.”

That’s where Senshi S and its quitting service, Exit, comes in. For a fee of 50,000 yen ($457, £353), Exit will call a client’s boss and deliver a resignation by proxy. Sometimes it takes several calls. Other times companies don’t want to deal with Exit and say the employee must come in to deliver the message themselves.

But when it’s done, the relief from clients can be immense. “There was one client who told us, ‘you are a Messiah’,” says Okazaki. The man had been wanting to leave for 10 years and “was really suffering from that job”.

The company’s website is taishokudaikou.com

Taishoku daikou literally means “retirement agency” in Japanese, and retirement in this context seems to mean quitting a job, not full-on career retirement.

The price listed on their website is now only 20,000 yen, which works out to $145.

They also say on their homepage…

We handle more than 10,000 cases every year

If they’re truly handling 10,000 cases per year (ie. 27 per day), that works out to $1.45 million in annual revenue 💰

And it sounds like a pretty simple operation to run. It’s probably just a small call center with several assertive employees trained to have the same conversation multiple times a day.

I guess you could call this type of business: quitting as a service (QaaS) 😜

And it begs the question…

What are some other things people are scared of that you could do on their behalf? 🤔

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