The Art of Winning. The Startup Guide. Yury Yavorsky

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 a 1,000 can become truly talented entrepreneurs.

      It is not a secret that small and medium-sized enterprises on average provide up to fifty jobs. That means that 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 all on your own? 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? Shortly speaking, 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, a reputation and stopped there can also be referred to as “the indifferent”.

      If you are basically indifferent to the 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 would be 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 common leaders, they try to work within the limits of their competence and follow particular rules.

      – Business case —

      …When I was already an accomplished entrepreneur, I was offered a job in a big corporation. I accepted the proposal, because such 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 the 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 is sad to see how long it takes for decisions to be made, how scheming and artificial obstacles stand 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 gain profit from every process, suggested changing many things; as for them, they acted strictly within the margins of their responsibilities, until they received new tasks from their executives. The most important thing was to fulfil the orders accurately and on time, otherwise they were guided by the principles “do no harm”, “do not hurry to follow the initial instructions, they might be cancelled by the following ones”, “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 more comfortable for me, 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, part of the employees are already “recruited”.

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

      At the same time, speaking about 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.

      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 the 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 treachery of the manager to emerge and to grow. The owner should have prepared a substitute, but were afraid that the employee would be offended by the distrust, they should have checked more often, but were afraid to spoil the relationship with excessive suspiciousness – this is something that almost every entrepreneur goes through.

      Top managers betray you, steal your ideas, copy your know-hows, and take valuable materials or money. And there is no recipe to avoid such situations altogether, the only way to protect yourself is through a complex of solutions, namely: constant work with the employees, a system of contracts, 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 as construction workers, others were harvesting crops or unloading freight trains. I prepared mortar and brought it to the bricklayer: first one, then two, in a week I was already helping three bricklayers at once. I wanted to earn some money and was strong enough.

      And then suddenly I heard that a construction crew was 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 site: 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. Then I decided that I could simultaneously master another operation and soon started working two shifts in a row. Only a week later I was able to perform fifteen operations at a conveyor belt 100—150 meters long.

      A month passed by. By then, apart from the two shifts, I spent several hours a day unloading train cars 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