Chief Change Officer
#239 Dominic Carter: Cracking Japan’s Business Code – From Market Research to Aging Tech – Part One
Mon, 17 Mar 2025
Not everyone dreams of moving abroad, starting a business in a foreign country, and navigating life in an entirely different culture—but Dominic Carter did. He is now the CEO of The Carter Group (CarterJMRN KK, Living Best™, Carter Executive Search KK, Delacon Japan KK). Originally from Australia, he found himself drawn to Japan, where he built a career, a business, and a life over the past two decades. But the journey? Far from smooth.In Part 1 of this two-part series, Dominic shares how he went from feeling like an outsider in his own country to becoming a successful entrepreneur in Japan. Along the way, he opens up about burning out, bouncing back, and why he believes Japan attracts a certain type of person.Key Highlights of Our Interview:From Australia to Japan—By Way of Curiosity – “I always knew I’d live overseas. Japan fascinated me as a teenager, so I studied the language… but didn’t study enough.” The accidental road to an international career.Thrown Into the Deep End – “At 24, I was sent to open an office in Tokyo. I was young, underprepared… and burned out fast.” What happens when responsibility comes too soon.The Boomerang Effect – “I left Japan, thinking I was done. Six months later, I was back—this time, on my own terms.” Why walking away can sometimes lead you right back.Entrepreneurial Instincts – “I always admired entrepreneurs. Even as a kid, I knew I didn’t want a boss.” The making of a business owner in a country known for its rigid corporate culture.Building, Pivoting, and Reinventing – “I started in market research, worked with global brands, then expanded into software and aging tech.” The evolution of an entrepreneur who refuses to stay in one lane.______________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guests: Dominic Carter______________________--Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.10 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.130,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today. --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Dominic Carter and why is his journey unique?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are talking with Dominic Carter, CEO of the Carter Group, whose journey from Australia to Japan is anything but predictable. He didn't just move aboard.
He jumped headfirst into a new culture, built a career, burned out, left, and then came right back, this time on his own terms. In Part 1, we dig into his early days, how a fascination with Japan turned into a full-blown career, why opening a Tokyo office at 24 almost broke him, and what made him bet on himself as an entrepreneur. In Part 2, things get personal.
Dominic, now in his 50s, is facing the same challenge as many of us are, aging parents. Only he's not just navigating it, he's building businesses around it. We'll dive into the future of aging tech, the cultural barriers that slow innovation. and why the biggest business opportunity in Japan might just be the one no one's paying enough attention to. Let's get started.
Good afternoon to you, Dominic. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
Thank you for having me, Vince. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Chapter 2: Why did Dominic Carter move from Australia to Japan?
Dominic, you were originally from Australia, but now you're in Japan. You've been there for over 20 years or so. What brought you all the way from Australia to Japan is quite a long flight.
Sure. I think Japan tends to attract a certain type of person. And I tend to think the type of person it attracts is often people who feel that they don't really fit in very well in their home countries. I would say as a kid growing up in Australia, definitely I loved growing up in Australia. It's a great place to grow up.
But I liked my fellow countrymen, but in some ways I felt like I didn't have so much in common with them as well. So I was always... looking outside and what would be, what I thought of what my life would be like as an adult. I always assumed that I'd be living overseas. I was very interested in Japan when I was a teenager.
And so that led me to, when I was at university, I chose to study Japanese at university. I wish I'd studied harder. I always laugh because it would be so good if I'd put in the work early on to learn Japanese really well. But yeah, I was always fascinated. with everything that was outside of Australia and my existence at that time.
And I guess I had like an idealized picture of what living overseas would be like and what Japan would be like. And I always thought if aliens came to visit the Earth, I really hoped that they'd do their first stop in Japan because people there are behaved and refined and have such an amazing culture. So I'm like, I think this might be best put forward for humanity if the aliens started there.
But yeah, basically I'd always seen myself be working and living overseas and that was feeling sometimes as a little bit of an outsider in my own culture. And as I say, I think that's very common to people that come to Japan. I think they, in a way, we find something here that we can't find at home and we just feel very comfortable being here.
And I think people who, I know people who've lived here for over 40 years and it's just really a home for us.
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Chapter 3: How did Dominic Carter start his career in Japan?
Do you mind if I ask you at what age you moved over from Australia? After college or even before?
No, I had my first job. So when I graduated from university, I started working in a market research in Australia. So I forgot about my Japanese studies. But very soon, I would say within about six months of me starting in that company, they had expressed an interest in opening up an office in Tokyo. So... I put my hand up for that.
And so for the next two and a half years, because I was the only one who was really interested in it, and even though my Japanese was very scant at that time, it was more than anyone else. And so, yeah, so they groomed me to be positioned to go up there and participate in the opening of the business.
So I was working in Australia for three years and I was 24 when they sent me to Japan to open up the office. And that's what I did. I did that. I did that for four years and it was successful four years, but it was very challenging personally. It was a lot of responsibility at a very young age. So I turned out a bit, to be honest, but yeah.
But I left that job and then when I was at the airport going home, I gave in my what they call alien registration cards. If you're a foreigner, you have an ID card that you need to carry in Japan all the time. So I gave that in at the airport and I said, I'm not going to need this so you can have it. And so I went back to Australia and then within six months I was back.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Dominic face as a young entrepreneur in Japan?
So it turned out that there were people who were still interested in working together and I launched the business within about six to 12 months of going back to Australia. So I was back and that was 2003. So now we're almost 2025. So I've been going all of that time.
So basically, you first went there representing an overseas company. You did that for a few years, but decided, okay, time for a break, time to move on. You went back home, but then you returned, this time on your own. And ever since, you stayed, worked, built your business, and established your own credentials. Not to mention, you've built up your Japanese skills along the way.
I'm guessing you speak it very well now.
always be better but yeah I'd always wanted to have my own business that was something that I'd always you know when I was a when I was a kid I admired I looked up to the entrepreneurs I thought they were the people who were the real sort of pioneers and people who was building the country this was back in the 80s so we had very famous entrepreneurs in Australia Alan Bond is a famous one and
There was another one, Christopher Scase, but they both ended up in prison. Alan Bond ended up in prison and Christopher Scase ended up in Spain escaping prison. But basically, it was a time when there was a lot of celebration of entrepreneurship. And they were the heroes. And yeah, there was some of them crashed and burned.
But I strongly believe that entrepreneurship is very important to advance culture and society. And I think entrepreneurs play a very important role in advancing society. They're obviously, I'm not saying that they're necessarily more important than other people or artists and so forth are really important and people who contribute a lot to the culture.
But I think the entrepreneur has a role to play, an important role to play and economic and philosophical role. And I always thought that and I always wanted to have my own business. I thought this would be great. I don't really want a boss. And even when I was working in Australia, I don't think they really knew what to do with me. So I had a lot of autonomy even when I was quite young.
So, yeah, I think it's just a very, it was just a very natural thing for me to do. And obviously very challenging. And we had, it was tough for a few years there and sometimes it's still tough, but I, yeah, I'm just really happy doing what I'm really happy with that choice of going out on my own really early.
Being your own boss comes with freedom, but it also means owning every decision, every action. Entrepreneurship, when successful, can bring big rewards, financially and otherwise, but behind the big paycheck comes There's also a lot of stress, pressure, and challenges that outsiders don't usually see. They just see the highlight reel, maybe even your face on a magazine cover.
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Chapter 5: How has Dominic Carter built and diversified his business?
Can you walk us through your entrepreneurial journey? Not just the ups and the downs, but also the types of things you've built along the way. I'd love to hear more about how it all unfolded.
Yes, I started off the company that I had originally worked for. They're the global leader in brands and advertising research. So my job when I first came to Japan was testing ads, TV ads, clients like Unilever and Mars and so forth. That was a very interesting time because at the time, Those clients are spending a lot of money on TV advertising. Clients still do spend a lot of money on TV.
But in those days, it wasn't the digital environment we have now. So there's a lot of focus on television. So there was a lot of the work that we were doing was considered to be very important. So it was actually quite high profile and high pressure.
But I learned a lot from that about how to communicate with consumers and things like how to adapt communications for global companies so that it works in Japan. So on and so forth. And so that was the type of work that I was doing. And when I, when I had the opportunity to come back to Japan, it was a similar type of.
It was a similar type of work that I was starting off with, but we did have the opportunity to work in the entertainment area as well. So we started working on fairly early on with Universal Studios Japan, which is a theme park, big theme park in Osaka. We were working on communications related projects and also
We ended up doing most of the marketing related research for Universal Studios, which we did until essentially until COVID came along. And that sort of unfortunately put an end to that business. But we were working very heavily in those areas of market research for some time. My interests aren't only in research. I have a research business, which is, we have a fairly, it's a fairly wide business.
type of range of projects we do everything from sort of entertainment to insurance cars luxury to human-centered design and robotics we do a really wide range of projects i've got about 40 people in that team but i also have a software business in the ad tech area and i'm also working on what i think is going to be a very a very big project around aging tech and aging related
technologies which is a special interest that i have i've started off in research everything that i've done has got a connection to what happened before like i'm not a big believer in making completely crazy leaps of faith but there's always going to be connections that you've made and ideas that you've had and relationships that allow you to look at new areas and i'm always looking at new areas because i get bored easily and i like making new things now
I can see you're one of those people who's always moving forward, not making random redness jumps, but also never letting yourself get too comfortable. Looking back, what do you think drives you? What's the common thread behind every time you push past your boundaries into the next big thing? Is it motivation, emotion, a certain mindset, or something else entirely?
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Chapter 6: What motivates Dominic Carter to keep pushing boundaries?
So I think there is, if you're interested in connection with people and understanding of people, that whole world of consumer insights and market research is a very interesting area to work in because your projects relate to understanding people. I think we also, if you look at a social role for what we do in research, it is, it does relate to giving people a voice as well.
And I think when I, when I think about it, everything that I've tried to do is about connecting with people, giving, giving voice to people, ensuring that their needs are reflected in the way that organizations that are more powerful than them relate to them. So this, of course, it can include stuff like government and whatever, but also companies that are making products.
If they listen to their users, then the product's going to be so much more useful. It's great for the user. It's good for the company.
So even with our projects in Agetech, where we're bringing Agetech into Japan, we're working on bringing interesting and breakthrough product in, still very much we're based on talking to users and using the skills that we have in consumer insights market research to make sure that we're bringing in the right products. And that we can help adapt them successfully.
We're moving from, we do plenty of straight consumer insights related work. Now we're moving to more commercialization of those insights in our business, which I think is amazing. Something I've wanted to do for so long, but it still is based on that real active listening experience.
to people and ensuring that we're making active connections with people and that we are reflecting that back in the ways that we interact with people. So that's a very strong thread because you hear people say, we're not really quite sure
what to do or we've worked really hard on this problem that we have in our business and we just don't know how to move forward or we tried this and we tried that i i say look maybe you need to spend a lot more time with your users you need to spend a lot a lot of a lot more time with your customers or the people that you're trying to work with just ask them sometimes you don't actually have to come up with all of the solutions on your own
You can partner with people. And I think if we look at the area of aging in particular, the problems that we have in Asia, the challenges that we face in aging and let alone trying to market products of people who are aging, unless we actually take a really collaborative approach with people, it's very hard to see how we're going to be successful.
So that stretch is always connecting and reflecting back what people are thinking and feeling into commercial decisions.
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