One of the most important lessons I learned early in my entrepreneurial path is matching your ambitions with the business you are building. Anatoly Gaverdovskiy, a founder of VDI and my supervisor, has played a crucial role in realizing this. Let’s unpack this.

I have left EPAM Systems to establish a management consulting firm Empatika. My business thesis was that only some businesses (especially SMBs) in Russia have skills and pay enough attention to management, applying processes and practices that proved successful long ago. Things like: the theory of constraints, Drucker’s “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” etc. We called these: hygienic factors. If you just use the checklist of management hygiene and apply it to a small business, you are almost guaranteed to scale the revenue and optimize the costs.

Moreover, value-driven pricing is the best way to price products and services. Thus we charged companies not by person-hours (as is the standard practice in the industry) but rather by the share in incremental revenue or cost decrease. For SMBs in post-crisis 2009, it was a great value proposition, and in a matter of 2 years, we completed tens of projects for companies of various sizes.

But. But the problem with consulting is that it scales only with people: if you want to make 10x more revenue, you will probably have to grow the team 10x. And we only have a few outstanding talents in this world, so this was a natural constraint to our business growth. And my ambitions were far more significant than what we could achieve at the time - or I guess I was just too impatient. So, once, on a train ride from St. Petersburg to Moscow, I met my former supervisor Anatoly, who told me one of the essential pillars of wisdom:

“Bayram, your ambitions do not match the business you are in. Build products - they scale faster”.

This was excellent advice, i.e., the advice an experienced entrepreneur gives you when you are already feeling the issue but not yet realizing the root cause. 5 years later, we served 3M users worldwide with a team of 6 people using an apartment as an office.

Advice to my younger self

Meet Anatoly more often :) I mean to learn from entrepreneurs who have “been there, done that” for your current problems. Since they see what you are not yet trained to know, they challenge you to think bigger and broader, to challenge your assumptions and beliefs… to grow! Thank you, Anatoly!

P.S. Cover photo generated by Dall-E

One of the most important lessons I learned early in my entrepreneurial path is matching your ambitions with the business you are building. Anatoly Gaverdovskiy, a founder of VDI and my supervisor, has played a crucial role in realizing this. Let’s unpack this.

I have left EPAM Systems to establish a management consulting firm Empatika. My business thesis was that only some businesses (especially SMBs) in Russia have skills and pay enough attention to management, applying processes and practices that proved successful long ago. Things like: the theory of constraints, Drucker’s “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” etc. We called these: hygienic factors. If you just use the checklist of management hygiene and apply it to a small business, you are almost guaranteed to scale the revenue and optimize the costs.

Moreover, value-driven pricing is the best way to price products and services. Thus we charged companies not by person-hours (as is the standard practice in the industry) but rather by the share in incremental revenue or cost decrease. For SMBs in post-crisis 2009, it was a great value proposition, and in a matter of 2 years, we completed tens of projects for companies of various sizes.

But. But the problem with consulting is that it scales only with people: if you want to make 10x more revenue, you will probably have to grow the team 10x. And we only have a few outstanding talents in this world, so this was a natural constraint to our business growth. And my ambitions were far more significant than what we could achieve at the time - or I guess I was just too impatient. So, once, on a train ride from St. Petersburg to Moscow, I met my former supervisor Anatoly, who told me one of the essential pillars of wisdom:

“Bayram, your ambitions do not match the business you are in. Build products - they scale faster”.

This was excellent advice, i.e., the advice an experienced entrepreneur gives you when you are already feeling the issue but not yet realizing the root cause. 5 years later, we served 3M users worldwide with a team of 6 people using an apartment as an office.

Advice to my younger self

Meet Anatoly more often :) I mean to learn from entrepreneurs who have “been there, done that” for your current problems. Since they see what you are not yet trained to know, they challenge you to think bigger and broader, to challenge your assumptions and beliefs… to grow! Thank you, Anatoly!

P.S. Cover photo generated by Dall-E