The Art of Winning. The Startup Guide
Yury Yavorsky

Translator Irina Nikitina

Illustrator Vitalij Blohin

Project manager Alexey Perevedentsev

© Yury Yavorsky, 2024

ISBN 978-5-4485-6953-1

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

First published in 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the internet and in corporate networks, for private and public use without written permission from the copyright owner.

TO MY SONS

Unless you reach at least a dead end in the direction you have taken,

it will always seem like a tunnel!

Y&Y

To an aspiring entrepreneur

Recipes for success are innumerable. But it is not my intention to try and convince the reader that my speculations and conclusions based on personal experience (which is, by the way, one of those things that money cannot buy) are bound to work in any situation.

What I do know is that the most difficult thing is to be honest with yourself. This is why everyone who is thinking about becoming an entrepreneur should not look inside their wallet, but rather inside themselves.

Start-up money is not the most important thing in business

An ear for music, a sense of rhythm, inner musicality… such things are not naturally given to everyone. Nevertheless, a huge number of kids enter music schools every year: their parents want them to become musicians.

After that the selection process begins: the first to drop out are those who are not patient and hardworking enough; some skip classes, others break down and quit; the next to leave are those without musical talent, and finally those who cannot cope with internal competition. Very few actually reach the finish line – the most talented, interested and persevering. The same is true about business.

The most challenging question for me was this: did I want to become an entrepreneur or build a career as a top manager?

Ask yourself, why do you want to become an entrepreneur? What drives you – desire to earn a lot of money or to prove something to someone? Such goals are not just false but also extremely risky. The eagerness to earn a lot of money, preferably quickly, is more treacherous than gambling. Substituting striving for self-fulfillment with the trivial intent of becoming rich can play a low-down trick on a person. In this situation, an aspiring entrepreneur risks losing everything and first of all – their time and confidence in their own abilities.

Ideally, the money stimulus is secondary. It emerges and gains importance only after the actual results of entrepreneurship are seen: the hairstyles clients of your private salon are happy with; the scones in your family bakery, for which people line up every morning; the design of an apartment that you decorated with your own hands, and that you are not ashamed to show to even the most fastidious customer.

It is only when the market starts to recognize you and pay you back that the money stimulus starts working and motivates you to expand your business. Profits and revenue are only a future criteria of success. As soon as you get your first results, close your first deal, complete the design of your first technological or manufacturing process, sell your first goods, you will turn that process into a continuously functioning profitable business.

– Business case —

…In 1994 I met an entrepreneur who opened a butter packaging business. She was working at a plant producing butter in huge chunks. She overheard a sharp and unpleasant conversation between one of her superiors and a client, who was begging them to sell him just a part of a large chunk. He was ready to pay the price of the entire piece, but the manager flatly refused because the plant had no equipment to cut the big piece in two. Then the future entrepreneur called her husband and together with the client they cut up the huge chunk of butter (which had already been bought by the non-local client), and took their half. The next day a butter packaging business was born in the city.

At that time this seemingly simple business – butter packaging – started developing faster than the internet. First butter was pre-packed by hand, and then special equipment was bought. After a while they started pre-packing butter not only for shops, restaurants, and tourist kits, but also for export.

Later, I watched a number of similar businesses develop in different cities across Russia: packaging coffee and tea, spaghetti and dumplings, sugar and pepper. Think about it: we always buy prepacked fruit and vegetables more readily, even though they are more expensive. So, why not prepack nuts and raisins, and do it like nobody else has done so far? Entrepreneurs in Turkey, Jordan, China and other countries make good money on packaging. And there is always place for new brands.

– Business case —

…An English businessman offered an old coffee packaging line and a 50% share in his business to a former track-and-field athlete from Russia. The Englishman had been trading large batches of coffee for years, but in order to find a way into the Russian market he needed a partner. Our protagonist accepted the offer: no need to invest any money, nothing else required but a good name, decency and a capacity for work. Having received the first batch of coffee from his English partner, the burgeoning entrepreneur packed it slowly and carefully, thoroughly exploring the subject. After that he visited similar enterprises abroad, and familiarized himself with the technology. After about fifteen years of hard work, studying the basics of business and refinement of the manufacturing processes, this successful entrepreneur’s company has become one of the biggest in Russia with a staff of over 300 people.

Unfortunately, in many cases a start-up ends in a failure. Opening a new business is an endeavor taken up by entrepreneurs, already successful in other areas, as well as top managers and other people, who know nothing about the basics of business. The reason is usually the same – the wish to earn money. And yet, I repeat: money is secondary.

Start a business in an area that you are familiar with, so that you will not have to build up competence from scratch, but as an addition to what you already know.

Remember: you should not only know a lot about what you want to do, but also be very passionate about it. You have decided to open a restaurant, but you do not know a dozen different fried egg recipes, and do not constantly effuse about it talking to your friends? Better not even start.

You should sincerely love your first restaurant, small cybercafé, massage parlor or bakery.

Naturally, resources are an important aspect for building a business, and at times they can be the backbone of the technological process you are creating, but the crucial things to start are your willingness and your skills.

– Business case —

…Once my foreign guests and I went to a restaurant called “Vitalich”. I had no doubts that my international colleagues would enjoy the cuisine offered at this restaurant, quite popular in our city. But how surprised all of us were when the owner himself came out not just to greet us, but also to give us a huge dish of aspic from the meat of a wild deer that he had hunted himself! The guests were fascinated by the pile of transparent jelly cubes. It was delicious!

I vividly remember how Sergey Ruban started his business, how scrupulously he selected his future dishes, trained the cooks, created the designs, thus inspiring the restaurant culture in our city. And today, listening to him, as he talks about ancient Slavic recipes, or explains how a certain type of restaurant or café should be arranged, one can see that he did not become a restaurateur solely for the sake of money. First and foremost, it is something he loves.

When, at the beginning of the 90s, I took up entrepreneurship, there was one thing I knew for sure – I did not want to be a salesman. My teenage dream was to design and create modern cars. I was fervently driven by the desire to give clients what they needed: to equip the car with a hatch, power windows, and air-conditioning, to upgrade the passenger compartment with real leather of any color, and so on. And we designed tuned cars, unimaginable at the time, we experimented with various disks and tires, participated in summer and winter car and go-kart races, lost and won, searched and found new solutions for the development of the growing demand for non-standard cars.

I did not merely strive to earn money; the most important thing for me was self-fulfillment, becoming the best at car tuning first in my own city, and then in Russia. I am sure that any aspiring entrepreneur must try to make their business better than everyone else’s, set the goal of looking for any internal possibilities to make their dressmaker’s, hairdresser’s, their bakery, restaurant or printing house the best of the best.

The primary capital is a concept created by theoretical economists. In reality what is important is the subject, around which the future business will be built, the knowledge, the experience, and the desire to become the best.

Today, after 20 years as an entrepreneur, I can state with absolute certainty that those who started their businesses relying on competence and natural talent, and those who have kept up their reputation are still running their business successfully; as for those who bit off fat pieces of former Soviet monopolies and enterprises, they are not running a business, but rather still trying to find out who is right and who is to blame for the loss of the Soviet Union’s great potential. However, when it comes to searching for the truth, this argument has become completely useless by now, since for the Russian economy it is nothing but history.

– Business case —

…It was the beginning of the turbulent 90s – the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was on a business trip to the city of Lvov in Ukraine. I took a set of brake cylinders for Volga cars, which I had bought for 10 rubles in my native Nizhny Novgorod where they were produced, and went to the market (for the first time in my life) to sell them. I felt very uncomfortable arranging the cylinders at my feet and starting to engage with customers. Fortunately, my intuition had told me to stand next to the man, who was selling brake cylinders too. After a while he asked me:

“How much are your cylinders?”

“Eighty”, I said.

“Will you sell them to me for sixty?”

I was overwhelmed with joy, because he was offering six times the price of the cylinders, and yet the inner voice of a burgeoning entrepreneur started resisting and I suggested agreeing on 70 rubles. He accepted, took out the money and started counting:

“Seventy – one, seventy – two, seventy – three…”

Six times seventy! In the end I sold my brake cylinders for 420 rubles – 42 times their price.

Sometimes your first success is the result of good fortune.

I still have some marketing research charts from the early 90s: one of the tables encompasses 170 enterprises that were rivals of mine at the time in the same city. The competition was ferocious: no chambers of commerce and industry, no commercial or mediation tribunals, no competition regulators. Banks were providing loans at an interest rate of 400 percent a year, and cash was carried around in plastic bags. There were no ATMs, no internet, no mobile services, and the only thing that kept me going was the love for what I was doing.

Negotiating terms with a client, convincing them that for a decent price you can produce better products, thoroughly checking the quality of all your employees, scrupulously following your promises… because of all that I managed to make my first repair shops and workshops more well-known than my numerous competitors’ similar enterprises.

The result cannot be reached unless there is a goal to reach it. One cannot become an entrepreneur unless he or she sets the goal of becoming one.

Being the best is the primary task (not always accomplishable), but it is something to which anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur should aspire.

I would like to talk separately about managers and top managers. It is quite common for former managers, who have studied the subject while working for their employer, to try and open their own business. Very often they simply start copying what they have been doing up to that point. Can this be called entrepreneurship? As far as I am concerned, it is nothing but stealing. It is impossible to build a similar business of your own relying on stolen intellectual property. “Thou shalt not steal”, so do not steal. Instead, start your own business, the idea might be similar, but it should be your own.

Try to create, not to copy.

By the way, you will come across people who will try to steal your ideas, copy your designs, or the recipes of your popular dishes, your engineering solutions or your technological process created by years of burning midnight oil and depriving yourself of rest. Do not waste much time on dealing with these vultures. Patents, lawyers and discretion – that is all good and useful, but the most important thing is to keep moving, developing, so that your competitors will not be able to keep up and copy even the existing things, and you will always be one step ahead. It is quite possible that someone who steals your idea will not know how to make use of it, how to develop it, and it will bring them neither luck nor profit.

If you thought of an idea that has been stolen from you, you will think of another one. The true happiness of an entrepreneur lies in the work process itself, not just the result.

One of a hundred

Business is an art.

In order to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need talent similar in intensity and vigor to that of a military man, a sportsman or a musician. But the talent of an entrepreneur is peculiar in that it is indiscriminate: there is no area of life where it is useless. It is equally necessary in culture and sports, economy and politics, education and finance.

According to scientists, only 4 percent of the global population – 4 people out of a hundred – are particularly gifted and talented. They might not have the highest grades in their high school diplomas, they may even drop out of university, but they have a gut instinct for success, an intuition, healthy adventurism, pioneering bravery, and no fear of the unknown. Such people never lose heart, and misfortunes just make them more persistent and goal-oriented. That being said, the same researchers claim that only 1 in that 4 has the gift of a true entrepreneur.

I am not an expert in that field and I would like to see these numbers subjected to careful verification. But recall your final year at high school or your circle at university: how many of your peers were successful or talented in some way? You will see that the answer is no more than 4 percent, and only one of them was truly talented and successful as an entrepreneur. Just recollect your schoolmates and circle at university!

Why am I putting such an emphasis on these calculations? Because I am convinced that certain regularities are not only found in mathematics. One can also see them in entrepreneurs’ training – a branch of study that has already emerged and is developing rapidly. In a city with a population of 100,000 people, only 1,000 can become truly talented entrepreneurs.

It’s no secret that small and medium-sized enterprises on average provide up to fifty jobs. That means a city with a population of a million people should have no less than 10,000 successfully operating entrepreneurs able to create up to 500,000 jobs, and thus guarantee employment for the entire working-age population. In Russia, however, such calculations are subject to correction because of red tape and corruption.

Evaluate yourself and your abilities: are you ready to walk the path of uncertainty and ambiguity by yourself? Are you ready to limit your own freedom by a conscious decision and to face legal restrictions? Are you ready to move forward through a series of wins and losses? Are you ready for the changes in your social circle and a possible loss of close friends who are not going to follow you into the business world? In short, I am asking once again: are you ambitious enough, competitive enough, do you have the desire to become the best in your field?

One who is indifferent will never become an entrepreneur. Business success is rooted in the non-material, so those who have achieved some success, bought a house in a prestigious part of the city, gained a certain status and a reputation, and then rested on their laurels, can be said to be “the indifferent”.

If you are basically indifferent to work, if you feel more comfortable following orders and receiving instructions, rather than giving them, if you prefer to limit yourself to a small number of tasks and responsibilities, you are unlikely to become a real entrepreneur. Even being a leader is not enough. Yes, an entrepreneur is always a leader, but not every leader can become an entrepreneur.

Studying various businesses, including foreign ones, I have repeatedly found that the profits of many entrepreneurs do not surpass the salaries of managers in big state or private companies. The question is: why would you struggle, take risks, deprive yourself of sleep. What for? Not everyone is ready to answer that question honestly, but I know the secret: an entrepreneur is always driven by ambition. It is better to be the first and get less money, than the second and earn a lot – this is the principle that guides those who decide to open their own business. As for the average leader, they try to work within the limits of their competence and follow particular rules.

– Business case —

…When I was already an established entrepreneur, I was offered a job in a big corporation. I accepted the proposal because the experience was interesting to me as an opportunity for self-fulfillment and self-examination: am I ready to work under someone else’s control and within established rules? I was very curious to find myself inside a huge corporative mechanism, to understand the levels of freedom and responsibility of a top manager.

I instantly saw a huge number of disadvantages in this inflexible and conservative system. I felt highly uncomfortable: it was sad to see decisions taking ages to be made or scheming and artificial obstacles standing in the way of effective and useful suggestions. However, at the same time, I saw dozens of leaders (managers and top managers) who felt quite at home in this environment.

We spoke different languages: I wanted to profit from every process, suggested changing many things; but they acted strictly within the margins of their responsibilities, until they received new tasks from their executives. The most important thing was to follow orders accurately and on time, otherwise they were guided by the principles of “do no harm”, “do not hurry to follow the initial instructions, they might be cancelled by the following ones”, and “do not jump the gun”.

I realized that the environment of corporate business was not for me. On the plus side, it consolidated my belief in that being an independent entrepreneur was personally more comfortable than being an executive in a huge corporation.

Then again, it is not only entrepreneurs who try their hand at occupying various positions in medium, large and gigantic corporations. Very often it is the other way around: successful top managers decide to become entrepreneurs. As a rule, at the beginning those are offshoot-businesses through which former senior executives either start supplying materials and equipment to their former employer, or become mediators in the provision of services (or manufactured goods) for that corporation. It is quite clear why it happens this way: the clients are already there, the suppliers are familiar, and part of the employees are already “recruited”.

Under certain conditions, this process can grow into a strong business. But it is not uncommon for an entrepreneur like this to become ‘king for a day’. Everything depends solely on them. If a former senior executive, willing to become a true entrepreneur, has identified an actual market need instead of using connections based on corrupt, or criminal schemes, it means that he or she has chosen the right path. However, a business keeps evolving only if, from the very beginning its future owner starts investing in self-education and personnel training, equipment, and developing business processes. Otherwise any decisions will prove useless.

At the same time, regards top managers, it is important to remember that when leading executives in a business want to leave and create their own company, there is a downside to it.

The resignation of a leading top manager is a heavy blow for an entrepreneur: it always happens at the worst time, there is never a proper substitute, and no way to keep the clients. Moreover, suppliers may not be guided by established good relations: “business is business – nothing personal”.

It immediately becomes evident that trust is good, but not too much trust: a full delegation of authority merely helped the manager’s treachery to emerge and to grow. The owner should have prepared a substitute, but was afraid the employee would be offended by the distrust; they should have checked more often, but were afraid to spoil the relationship with excessive suspicion – this is something that almost every entrepreneur goes through.

Top managers betray you, steal your ideas, copy your know-how, and take valuable materials or money. And there is no recipe to avoid such situations entirely; the only way to protect yourself is through a complex suite of solutions, namely: constant work with employees, a system of contracts, and inner monitoring of the problems in your own business. And this is by no means a complete list of preventive measures and precautions.

– Business case —

…At the age of seventeen, I took part-time jobs like most of my peers, Some did construction work, while others harvested crops or unloaded freight trains. I prepared mortar and brought it to a bricklayer: first one, then two, and in a week I was already helping three bricklayers at once. I wanted to earn some money and was strong enough.

And then I heard that a construction crew was being put together to work at a roofing plant in the city of Odessa. I signed up. On the very first day, I got bored at my work place: my only responsibility was to occasionally empty a bucket of white oily liquid called “kagalin” into a vessel through which the tape of the future roofing roll crept. I decided that I could simultaneously master another operation and soon started working two shifts in a row. Just a week later, I was able to perform fifteen operations at a conveyor belt 100—150 meters long.

A month passed. By then, apart from the two shifts, I spent several hours a day unloading train wagons loaded with roofing. For each type of work, I got a mark in my time-sheet. I was already counting how much I had earned. And then I went to get my paycheck, and saw that only part of the money was indicated in the account book. For three days the headsmen of the two shifts kept sending me to each other, until I finally gave up. I went to the train station, tired and disappointed. But I did have 200 rubles (out of the 450 that I had earned) in my pocket, so I decided to stop by the well-known “Privoz” market in Odessa and buy some presents for my family. And there I fell for a simple conman’s trick: a planted package (which at first glance contained enough money to buy a car), a scuffle, a fuss… 200 rubles covered in blood and given away in a sort of slumber, and the so-called “dummy” – a wad of paper with only two real bills in my hands. How angry I was at Odessa and its “Privoz”! And how grateful I was to it later, when I became an entrepreneur for showing me how crooked and unjust people could be, and letting me see that such incidents could never break me.

A lot of things in business are based on trust, and the stronger you get, the more trust you are going to need. This goes both for amounts of money and contract responsibilities: at times entrepreneurs give each other large sums of money without any warrant relying solely on their word.

Never try to push your way in business through cheating or manipulation. A reputation can be worked on for years and lost in a second!

As a rule, an entrepreneur is stronger than the majority of people surrounding him – those who are envious of his or her ability to run a business. Many of them dream about trying their hand at entrepreneurship. That is why is it so important to be as decent and civil as possible not just with your business colleagues, but with everyone around you.

– Business case —

…At the beginning of his entrepreneurial career, a colleague of mine (he is still a prominent businessman) asked me to do him an urgent favor: to lend him a set of leather seats for a tuned car that was produced at my shops. I did so, taking his word that he would pay me back.

When the time was up, instead of money he offered me a barter deal (an exchange of goods was common in the 90s) – a five-speed gear-box. Although I was clearly losing money, a bird in the hand is better etc, so I had to accept the offer. One of his employees brought the gear-box and we put it in the storehouse. After a while we installed it in one of our tuned cars. How disappointed we were to find out that all the gears inside the box were old and it was not even assembled correctly. I had been paid back with a “dummy” once again, but this time I knew who had done it and when. I approached my colleague with a request to exchange it, but received a flat refusal: “You should have checked at once.” But how could I have checked without installing it in a car? However, he was not going to listen to my reasoning.

Years passed by. That businessman deceived everyone around him and never gained respect. Today, he has the worst reputation among our city’s and region’s entrepreneurs. I am sure that in the end he will pay for having treated his business colleagues so unfairly.

If you belong to the “magical minority” of true entrepreneurs, be as polite as possible with those who depend on you, and the community will grow more tolerant towards you. We must treat others the way we want them to treat us.

From a leader to an entrepreneur

What makes an entrepreneur? The striving for competition, driven and stimulated by healthy ambition. Here a harsh axiom comes into play: only one shall be left in the end. That is the sort of masochism, characterizing any entrepreneur – the need to catch up with their opponents, to surpass them, to reach the top. Sometimes it is not so much the result that is important, but rather the process nourished by the spirit of competition – the source of the propulsive force.

An indispensable part of competition is the evaluation by each and every entrepreneur (both fledgling and experienced) of their level of ambition. For some, a fruit stall is the limit, for someone else it is a plant, for yet another it is a corporation or an international holding.

For instance, in sports there is always a champion, who sets the bar for everyone else until this leader inevitably loses, and their once-high achievements become run-of-the-mill entry standards to any sport schools. The same kind of dynamics characterizes the current situation in business, which is why you should be able to evaluate competitive abilities correctly. Entering the business world is not like finding a usual job, and not every burgeoning entrepreneur is ready for the upcoming struggle.

Successful entrepreneurship requires three motivational causes:

1 – eagerness to compete

2 – eagerness to keep developing your business

3 – eagerness to learn

Eagerness to compete

Even if at the beginning you are not “one of a hundred”, those whom I talked about in the previous chapter, but you have set a goal and you are persevering to achieve it… In a while you will be able to join the ranks of the most successful entrepreneurs. Provided that you are not afraid of the competition, of experimenting and finding original solutions for market expansion, developing new products, and offering new services, entrepreneurial luck is sure to wait upon you.

Learn from the strongest and the best – this is the most effective way to pass the stage of original accumulation of capital faster than your opponents. But never steal intellectual property, never infringe copyright: you can steal a bucket of water, but not the spring itself.

Eagerness to keep developing your business

Being an entrepreneur always means being an “owner” rather than “someone, who holds the purse strings”. He or she makes the money work through creative projects, and then hires managers for these projects. A rentier, i.e. someone who lives off the interest from their investments, is not an entrepreneur. Stopping and saying “that’s enough” means reaching the level of your own incompetence. Surely, there is nothing bad about it in itself, but when this moment comes, even the strongest leader stops being an entrepreneur.

Eagerness to learn

You can widen the limit of your competence. And every time I reach those limits, I tell myself: if you do not learn, you will turn into a lifelong manager. Mind you, being a top-class manager is good too, but I have always wanted to have a business of my own.

There are a number of gifted entrepreneurs and naturally talented people capable of building a business out of thin air, as they say. But the majority have to keep improving their knowledge and raising their level of professionalism.

– Business case —

…I have already told you about my experience of working in a big corporation. Half a year did it for me. And the biggest vice that I discovered in the course of those six months was that ignorance dominated at all management levels. Their way of thinking was decades behind our time. It is no wonder that for many years Russian automobile plants have been virtually devoured by foreign companies, not as leading businesses bought as successful investments, but as platforms for a fast entry into the Russian market.

Having returned to the world of entrepreneurship, I left my position of CEO for that of a hired manager and went to study first in Switzerland, then the USA and Japan. I wanted to absorb the most progressive ideas in industry, marketing and logistics, understand how the already successful businesses develop, and how you continue building up entrepreneurial success.

The thinker, researcher and classic capitalism author Karl Marx said that when someone “learns to walk he also learns to fall, and it is only through falling that he learns to walk”.

One of the elements of a successful business is the choice of the right field, or, colloquially, the right “turf”. It is possible that after all the failures and misfortunes in the area you originally set your heart on, you are still willing to persevere. However, you are very unlikely to achieve anything. The failures will overstrain you, undermine your abilities, and, most importantly, destroy your confidence.

Never be afraid of experimenting when searching for a suitable field and environment for a business.

For example, wholesale purchasing of food from individual or collective farms and subsequently selling it by retail is rather a simple thing, but it requires a lot of physical labor (driving around, meetings). Not everyone is able to endure so many business trips and negotiations. Then the entrepreneur, having no time to manage all aspects of their business, decides to hire employees. They have to share the profits with them, and at this point it is important to balance the expenses, in order not to go bankrupt. Lack of profit or, even worse, loss of money is bound to cause disappointment and break your entrepreneurial spirit. Making profits is the main purpose of any business.

If an entrepreneur does not set him or herself the goal of making profits, and is trying to fulfill the desire to be appraised by someone without relying on the final results, they will inevitably find themselves at a dead-end.

In the world of entrepreneurship success is estimated solely on results, not intermediate actions. After all, the winner is determined by the score. Remember, the people around you are not going to judge every step you take.

Admirers, critics and analysts – everyone who is ready to buy the fruits of your labor and call you a successful entrepreneur, will appear only after results are reached.

If there are no results, everything seems pointless and you find yourself face to face with your failures. It does not matter that the failed entrepreneur was an art patron, that they helped the weak and the poor: they become a “nobody”.

If a company collapses, a good lathe operator or a baker will always find a new employer. Hired workers have it much easier: they collect diplomas, ranks, titles which have an impact on their competence and rates of remuneration.

As for entrepreneurs, having no qualifications, rank or title, they might not find their path a second time. There have been numerous examples in history when owners of great fortunes went bankrupt and found themselves on the margins of life.

Nevertheless, surely everyone has the right to go back to entrepreneurship. A potential merchant or industrialist may return to business after being a hired worker. If a person is aspirational enough to dream of becoming a member of the royal family, getting a title of nobility, earning billions, then ambitions supported by the abilities and extremely hard work will help him or her to reach the desired level, or at the very least pave the way for his or her children. That is what happened to Ford, as well as many other well-known European and American entrepreneurs. But 99.9% of people who start their own business do not focus on such lofty goals. Maybe, they should: sometimes the impossible is possible!

As a rule, going back to being an entrepreneur after a failure is much harder because of the looser label, which is both an inner, psychological and an outside manifestation. This is another reason why it is not worth going back into the area where you once failed. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, but these are few. It is better and safer in every way to drop out of the game prior to a total meltdown, which will give you a small chance of recovering in a different field, either related or opposite.

Business growth, occasional bad luck and even state of instability – these are equally constant elements of entrepreneurship.

Business is more demanding than sports, it is better to give up bad habits and hobbies at the very outset of your business career. Your regime becomes totally dependent on your work and is no longer regulated in accordance with the orthodox eight-hour working day and a five-day working week. Business takes over all your free time, especially at the beginning. The environment for a leader after becoming an entrepreneur requires mobilization of all physical and psychological abilities. This is something that not only the burgeoning entrepreneur, but also their nearest and dearest should be prepared for. You should not expect to stay afloat working half-steam. This would mean fooling yourself: there are no such things as half-measures in business.

I mentioned before that when business starts consuming all an entrepreneur’s time, he or she inevitably hires people to boost production and sales. But it will not get any easier unless you concern yourself with the HR policy, get to know more complicated accounting techniques and arrange the production system. In this case it is very important to perfect the schemes and mechanisms of profit-making in the face of growing expenses (salaries, the amount of rented facilities, transport, etc.). Theoretical knowledge given at colleges and universities is not enough. Until the aspiring entrepreneur fully understands the entire mechanism of controlling overhead expenses in the course of the production process, and then gains the first profits, they will never get the feel of how their business is functioning. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of certain steps you take, dispose of the first and increase the second. And even if the business is growing successfully, one should never stop developing it, otherwise the vector of luck will immediately go down.

The job of an entrepreneur is an endless succession of events and struggles. If you are truly interested in business, you should accept a simple truth: entrepreneurs virtually exchange their time, their loved ones, and themselves, for what they do and love.

Being a “composer”

Becoming an entrepreneur is not something you can do effortlessly. But you can become an entrepreneur following the rules of the consumer market, and at the same time breaking them. This is something that only people with non-standard abilities and ways of thinking can allow themselves to do.

The crucial quality of a future entrepreneur is the ability to “compose” the process. An entrepreneur must be a “composer” or aspire to become one.

It is great for a burgeoning entrepreneur to combine the qualities of a “creator” and an “organizer”. A businessman must not only be able to “create a melody”, but also to “organize” its production and marketing, moving from the handicraft stage to one of modern structured production.

Creativity, aimed not only at producing goods and services, but also their marketing is the cornerstone, or one might even say, the philosopher’s stone of entrepreneurship.

Many examples of success on the market are based on exceptions, and it is those exceptions that modern gurus use as the basis of their training programs in business schools. However, the reality of business is way beyond the examples of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Microsoft, Ford, Trump or Steve Jobs.

The overwhelming majority of aspiring entrepreneurs do not understand how it’s possible to create a miracle such as the internet.

Entrepreneurship is a daily routine, full of headaches and hard work, which very rarely turns into a celebration of unexpected financial success. Moreover, success must never be a one-time thing, but a matter of years of stable growth. A business process can be compared to an escalator that only moves downwards. Want to be successful? Walk upwards! Want to get ahead of the others? Run without stopping!

So, your business has taken off, you reached your first success – you allow yourself to buy an expensive car and an elite house, guided, at times, not only by your own desires, but rather by established traditions…

A villa, a yacht, VIP-resorts, exotic countries… Out of fear of losing it all, the entrepreneur holds on to the steering wheel of their business so desperately that it gives them white knuckles. But as long as you are driving on your own, you remain a manager. This kind of a “split personality” – the owner and the manager – is like being a composer, who spends most of his time at the piano, but simultaneously acts as a musician in the orchestra of his own creation. To avoid wasting energy that can be channeled into creativity, the “entrepreneur-composer” must only “compose” the business, and the management itself can be delegated into the hands of a hired manager.

Success in the competitive struggle is a result of constant growth, as well as an ability to suggest new interesting methods of promoting your products and services, and constant renewal. If at the same time the entrepreneur remains a “composer”, they will always be one step ahead of their opponents.

However, there is a limit to any development, so we are inevitably facing the following question: how can you determine your maximum? Should you be satisfied with owning a cigarette stall, a hairdresser’s, or a small bakery? Is there a possibility of running a life-long small-sized business, limiting your expenses at the very beginning? Originally no one thinks about how high they will rise, but even those who sell homespun stockings, or stamp metal, want their products and their mastery to be recognized by the maximum number of people.

Recognition is measured in demand. “I want to produce something worth a dollar, but I want every person on the planet to buy it” – this is the kind of thinking appropriate for a burgeoning entrepreneur.

– Business case —

…I have witnessed a number of my friends open their businesses and suddenly their ambitions change and develop in new ways. One such company is now working with tent materials and has become one of the strongest and most well known in its segment. When they started, the business owners (a married couple) sold shoes bought wholesale and sold retail, accumulating experience, competence and the original capital. They visited Italian plants, increased the number of sales points, but at a certain moment they suddenly decided to sow tents for motor trucks.

Why would they shift into a totally different field? The answer is simple: they were unable to resist growing competition within the shoe business. And their “composing” talent told them to change the market, channel their efforts into a field where the competition was not so harsh.

At that time, the market for tents was empty and growing. At first, they decided to collaborate with “Kamtent”, a company from Tatarstan, but pretty soon an independent company “Nizhtent” was born. In the course of the first decade, “Nizhtent” not only became a dominating company in its region, but also started developing in other parts of Russia. The equipment they bought, and their production sites with dozens of well-trained employees, allowed them to step into making pavilions from tent and other special materials, and later rent them out. All that was possible because they chose to leave the “narrowing” shoe market and move to another guaranteeing them stable business growth.

I started by selling spare parts, but one day strolling through a market, I noticed that dashboard components (there were over a hundred of them) were sold separately, and all the parts, including the tiniest ones, were in stock. Adding up the price, I realized in the same market a full dashboard was two or three times more expensive. So I bought all the components, assembled a dashboard and sold it at the nearest consignment shop, thus doubling the capital I had invested in the components.

In a few months several dashboard assemblers were working in my shops, and in the following years my fledgling business produced thousands of dashboards for the growing automobile market.

Just as one cannot write a score without notes, or become a composer without an ear for music, an entrepreneur can never develop and expand their business without education and discretion.

I have travelled and studied a lot, and visited various business-schools. One training program in Switzerland was based on a very useful slogan: “Pry!”

Pry and learn: the path that others have already walked is something to be studied as quickly as possible. It is very important to get to know the process intimately, to try and come to grips with everything that is connected with supplies, to find out how dealers and distributors work in the field that you are interested in, what are the legal norms, the taxes and the limitations, what licenses are required, and how your products or services should be licensed.

– Business case —

…A buddy of mine, having already become a successful entrepreneur in the wholesale and retail food trade, decided to start a second business. In no time at all he bought equipment for the production of toothpicks and opened a small workshop. He had learned the technological process somewhere and reasoned that having over fifty shops (and the experience of selling large batches in other friendly retail networks), it wouldn’t take long to make his toothpick business a profitable one. Unfortunately, neither his business experience, nor the perfectly copied technological process helped him, because, as it turned out, he did not have the entire “score” for the process of producing toothpicks. It was very important to determine certain things. How much was the cost of a cubic meter of timber? What quality timber should be used? Was there a possibility for regular cooperation with a serious supplier and how should one deal with packaging?

He opened that production line because he owned a small forestry, which could provide him with cheap timber of any size and quality. But it transpired that timber logging, production of toothpicks, packing and selling them are separate businesses that vary in profits, volumes and complexity. When the entrepreneur combined them, the result he got was a failing toothpick business he subsequently had to sell along with the logging business. As for food retail, he is still very successful in this field.

Once I decided to help someone build a business from scratch. I was sure that in order to do that it was enough to use certain knowledge that I had, chose the right product and a place to sell it, and everything would work. We chose the German leather brand “Picard”, bought a sufficient amount and wide range of products directly from the plant, and with the highest possible discounts, brought them to Russia, went through customs, and opened two sales points. Successful sales continued for only ten months, while the owner of the business was in charge herself. However, then she had to delegate management to a trusted top manager. After a while the business stopped bringing profits and was finally shut down.

However “correctly” a business is organized, it should be managed by its owner. No consultant will ever arrange a business so that it keeps bringing continual profits without any participation from the entrepreneur, because as the “play” of the business is being written (a business process is never embalmed), only an “entrepreneur-composer” can make changes and be consistently successful. But the business process itself will never be over.

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