A look into the past
During one of my meditations, I observed thoughts about the difficult moments that my wife Alina and I have faced in recent years. As migrants in a foreign country without any acquaintances, we had to start from scratch. I left behind everything I had built in my previous country, where I was someone who knew how to earn money, to become a no-one in a new country.
We had to resolve issues related to obtaining work visas, finding housing, and adapting our daughter Zarina to a completely unfamiliar environment. We had to search for tutors, schools, and extracurricular activities for her.
All my previous experiences turned out to be unnecessary and even unwanted. I had to find new ways to work remotely with a team to build a product line, secure venture capital deals, provide management consulting, write a book about culture, and promote our content through different channels to reach like-minded people. I had to create marketing and sales strategies, test thousands of hypotheses (most of which were unsuccessful), and find what works and scale it.
As soon as we built something more or less solid, a new wave of changes would turn our ship 180 degrees. Personal crises and depression forced us to rebuild everything from scratch. The pandemic was a major blow that destroyed our business model and forced us to change our culture and management processes to adapt to remote work.
At some point, we achieved what we were striving for, with all our metrics driven by well-tuned business processes. I am now entirely out of the operating system and narrowly focused on writing a new book about venture investments. However, the war in Ukraine in February 2022 forced us to rebuild everything from scratch again, except for our culture and management processes, which have remained intact.
We generated traffic, hired a targetologist, developed rebranding, and made all the packaging materials. We created dozens of new websites, commercial offers, videos for a YouTube channel, and a new content strategy. We restarted sales, developed an effective sales funnel, adapted to new people, resolved issues with obtaining visas in new realities, and found new markets.
Since March 2022, we have rebuilt 60% of our internal processes and reinforced them with adaptations, expectations, and training explanations. We want our team to take responsibility and formulate personal plans, not just expect tasks from our organization.
As a result, I now spend three times less time meeting with the team and more time focusing on tasks outside the team, watching our main metrics grow, and expanding our business to new countries. We have become the No. 1 business for Russian-speaking people, and we are eagerly waiting for outstanding entrepreneurs to join our programs in September and November.