The Art of Winning. The Startup Guide. Yury Yavorsky
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so I decided to stop by the well-known Odessa market “Privoz” and buy some presents for my family. And there I fell for a simple conmen’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 the amounts of money and the 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 manipulations. One can be working up a reputation for years and lose it in a second.
As a rule, an entrepreneur is stronger than the majority of common people surrounding him – those who are envious of his or her ability to arrange 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 entrepreneur’s career a colleague of mine (he is still a prominent businessman) asked me to do him an urgent favor and to lend him a set of leather seats for a tuned car that were produced at my shops. And I did, 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, 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 the colleague with a request to exchange it, but received a square 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 entrepreneurs whom I know in our city and our region. 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 are dependent 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? A strive 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 someone a fruit stall is the limit, for someone it is a plant, for yet another it is a corporation or an international holding.
For instance, in sports there is always a leader, who sets an example for everyone else until this person loses and their achievements become nothing but an entering exams standard in sport schools. The same kind of dynamics characterizes the current situation in business, which is why one should be able to evaluate their 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”, whom we spoke 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 the original accumulation of capital faster than your opponents. But never steal intellectual property, never infringe copyright: one 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 limits 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 is a number of gifted entrepreneurs, 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 the level of their 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 the domination of ignorance on all management levels. Their way of thinking was decades behind our time. It is no wonder that for many years now Russian automobile plants have been virtually devoured by foreign companies, but not as leading businesses bought as successful investments, rather as platforms for a fast entry into the Russian market.
Having returned to the world of entrepreneurship, I left my position of a CEO for that of a hired manager and went to study first to Switzerland, then 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 one can continue building up their 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, as the youth like to say nowadays, the right