business, how scrupulously he selected his future dishes, trained the cooks, created the designs, thus spurring the restaurant culture in our city, as they say. 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 seller. My teenage dream was to design and create modern cars. I was driven by the desire to give clients what they needed so badly: 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 only 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 twenty years of being an entrepreneur, I can state with absolute certainty that those who started their business relying on their competence and natural talent, 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 great potential the Soviet Union had. 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 the set of brake cylinders for Volga passenger 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 call the 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 my rivals at the time in one and 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 was encouraging me was love for what I was doing.
Negotiating the terms with the client, convincing them that for a decent price you can produce better products, thoroughly checking the quality after each and every one of your employees, scrupulously following your promises – because of all that I managed to make my first repair shops and workshops more well-known than the similar enterprises of my numerous competitors.
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 that is 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 design details 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 the idea that has been stolen from you, you will think of another one. True happiness of an entrepreneur lies in the work process itself, not just in its result.
One of a hundred
Business is an art.
In order to succeed as an entrepreneur, one needs talent similar in its intensity and richness 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 would be 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 the university, but they have a gut instinct for success, an intuition, healthy adventurism, bravery of a pathbreaker and no fear of the unknown. Such people never lose heart, and misfortunes just make them more persistent in following their goals. That being said, the same researchers claim that only 1 of the four has the gift of a real entrepreneur.
I am not an expert in that field and I myself would gladly subject these numbers to a careful verification. But remember your final year at high school or your groupmates at university: how many of your peers are successful or talented in some way?