Yury Yavorsky – The Art of Winning. The Startup Guide (страница 2)

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.