Redesigning
customer creation.

The world is full of gaps.

This is the first sentence I wrote on the day I founded Three Plus Six LLC. After 33 years as an advertising agency executive, it was the thought I most needed to set down.

What is a gap? It is a structural distance between what should be and what is. Gaps exist between advertisers and agencies, between strategy and execution, between brands and customers, between long-term intent and quarterly targets. And none of them close on their own. Someone has to build the bridge deliberately.

The single most important lesson from my 33 years in the advertising business comes down to this: there are far too few people willing to do the work of bridging those gaps.

A gap is a structural problem.
And structure can only be seen from the outside.

What I saw across
33 years on the inside.

My career began in 1990, when I joined Hakuhodo -- just before the collapse of Japan's economic bubble, at a time when the advertising industry still carried the glow of its golden era. Over the next 33 years, I experienced every dimension of the business: account management, marketing, brand consulting, global project direction. Along the way, I served as COO of TBWA\Hakuhodo\China in Guangzhou and, for my final five years and nine months, as Representative Director and CEO of McCann Erickson Tokyo.

During those decades, I witnessed an uncountable number of advertiser-agency relationships. I saw brilliant campaigns born from strong partnerships, and I saw exceptional ideas crushed under the weight of dysfunctional ones.

At a certain point, I became certain of something: in Japan, the advertiser-agency relationship itself is not being managed.

In the West, an entire category of independent consultants has developed over the past 30 years -- specialists who partner with global advertisers' procurement and marketing departments to manage everything from agency selection and governance to evaluation, contracting, and relationship repair.

In Japan, this function essentially does not exist. Advertisers invite three agencies to pitch. Agencies exhaust themselves on unpaid proposals. The winner enters a ritualized set of expectations and gradually wears down. No one acts out of malice, yet the structure serves no one. Year after year, it repeats.

This is the landscape I observed from the inside for 33 years.

Choosing to leave.

During my final years as CEO of McCann Erickson Tokyo, I found myself asking the same question over and over:

"Is all I can do keep navigating from inside this large ship?"

A large ship has its virtues. Large clients, large budgets, large teams, large influence. But a large ship also has its constraints. No one aboard can change the structure of the vessel itself. As long as you are on the ship, you follow the ship's logic.

And then I realized: the work of bridging structural gaps cannot be done from inside a large ship. Because gaps are problems of structure, and to see structure from the outside, you first have to step off the deck.

In June 2023, after 33 years as a company man, I founded Three Plus Six LLC.

To leave the ship
is to earn the view of the sea.

3 + 6 = 9 -- a name
with two meanings.

The name Three Plus Six carries two layers of meaning.

The first -- a family story that opens onto infinity

The first meaning is deeply personal.

My surname, Mori, sounds close to "san" -- the number three -- in Chinese. My wife's maiden name, Liu, evokes the number six. Three plus six equals nine, and in East Asian numerology, nine has long symbolized infinity.

A family origin that opens onto infinite possibility. That is this company's smallest and earliest starting point.

The second -- Tesla's law and thinking from first principles

The second meaning is more universal.

Nikola Tesla, one of the twentieth century's greatest inventors, devoted a lifetime's attention to the numbers 3, 6, and 9. Among the words attributed to him is this:

"If you knew the magnificence of three, six, and nine,
you would have the key to the universe."

Tesla believed these three numbers held the key to the fundamental structure of nature. His characteristic mode of thinking was not to observe phenomena at the surface, but to trace them back to their most elemental laws. In today's language, we would call this first principles thinking.

And more than a century later, the entrepreneur who most consciously practices that mode of thinking -- and named his company after Tesla -- is Elon Musk.

First principles thinking means decomposing a problem to its fundamental elements and rebuilding from the ground up, rather than relying on convention or analogy. Rockets are expensive not because the rocket industry is expensive, but because of what happens when you price the raw materials from zero. A marketing strategy fails not because best practices are wrong, but because the organization has not returned to its own first principles of customer creation.

The name Three Plus Six is both a family story and a declaration: like Tesla's law, we think from first principles. Question convention. Refuse analogy. Return to the origin. Rebuild structure from there. The numbers 3, 6, and 9 are, for me, a small incantation I repeat every day.

Where the personal and the universal meet

These two meanings -- a family story and a commitment to first principles thinking -- coexist as one in my mind.

I frame my departure from a large organization not as a dramatic break, but as an infinite story beginning at family scale. Not scale, but depth. Not speed alone, but walking together toward growth. Not broad and shallow, but narrow and deep. This is the will of Three Plus Six as a boutique firm.

And at the same time, every engagement this small company undertakes begins not from convention but from first principles. We do not import borrowed methodologies. For each project, we think the structure through from zero. Three plus six equals nine -- arithmetic anyone can do. Within that smallness, we read both infinity and first principles. This is the sensibility at the starting point of everything we do.

Two things we believe.

Three Plus Six holds two beliefs.

The first: "The purpose of a business is to create a customer." This is Peter Drucker's classical proposition, written in 1954 -- long before I was born. More than seventy years have passed, and yet this proposition remains -- or perhaps now more than ever stands as -- the correct starting point for all business activity.

Profit is not a purpose; it is a result. Shareholder value is not a purpose; it is a result. Social value, brand equity, engagement metrics -- all results. The starting point is singular: customer creation. Discovering someone's unresolved problem, generating value for that person, and sustaining a business through the exchange. Everything begins here.

The second belief: value is born from relationships.

Good customers come from good relationships. Good brands come from good relationships with good customers. Good campaigns come from good relationships between good advertisers and good agencies. Good agencies come from good relationships among good people.

At the foundation of all value creation lies the design of relationships. And relationships do not arise on their own. They must be designed with intention, nurtured with care, repaired when strained, and cultivated over a long arc of time.

These two convictions -- customer creation and relationship design -- underpin every service Three Plus Six offers. CARD, Strategy Sprint, Advisory Retainer, Open Platform Partnership -- each is simply a different expression of the same two ideas.

Customer creation is only made real
through the design of relationships.

Open Platform
as a way of working.

Three Plus Six does not believe in building everything alone. Quite the opposite. The concept of the Open Platform sits at the center of how we work.

No single project can be served by one advertiser and one strategist alone. Outstanding strategists, creative directors, media planners, designers, engineers, producers -- specialists with distinct expertise assemble for a single purpose, then disband when the work is done. This kind of flexible team structure is essential for solving today's problems.

My role is to conduct the Open Platform. Standing on the client's side, I assemble the optimal team and take responsibility from the first day to the last. Holding no stake in any agency, production company, or technology vendor, I design the right structure for each engagement from a position of neutrality.

This is a way of working that may come naturally only to someone who spent 33 years watching organizational logic override project logic from the inside. Owning no organization, carrying no fixed costs, relying on no standing vendors. Every one of these "not-havings" is a source of Three Plus Six's freedom.

And all of that freedom is deployed in the interest of the client.

Kawagoe as a base.

I chose to base Three Plus Six not in Tokyo, but in Kawagoe, Saitama.

The reasons are several. A desire to honor a connection to my home region. A preference for working at a deliberate distance from Tokyo's logic of speed -- where objectivity becomes possible. And a feeling that the temporal rhythm of Kawagoe itself suits the long view a boutique firm needs to take.

Kawagoe is a city where the past and the future coexist without interruption. Its streets of kurazukuri -- traditional storehouse architecture -- stand alongside the new, each given room to breathe. This quality of Kawagoe resonates with the kind of relationship design Three Plus Six aspires to practice.

And our role as Official Marketing Partner of COEDO KAWAGOE F.C. -- a football club in Kawagoe with aspirations to reach Japan's J-League -- is a natural extension of this anchor. Putting down roots in a community and nurturing value over a long time horizon. This posture runs beneath all of Three Plus Six's work.