An Entrepreneur
and an Expert in
Business Systematization

Life in the village is a great opportunity to acquire many different skills. You could say I’m good with my hands. Throughout my childhood years I worked a lot with the land (planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, etc.) and helped out on our farm (we had cows, pigs, chickens, geese, etc.). However, my favorite was construction work. It made me really happy and I could run around with the hammer all weekend long. I am particularly proud of a two-story rabbit house I built in a month’s time.

When I was fourteen I started earning my own money. I was selling fish I caught with my Dad in the Don River. My first big purchase was a Playstation. Other sources of my income included making and selling dried fruits (mainly apricots), selling scrap metal and breeding rabbits for sale.

I was always a good student and had good grades. However in high school, I lost my interest in going to school. As a result, I went to college in the city of Novocherkassk where I mastered basic programming skills and graduated with honors. Later, I attended Don State University but dropped out in my second year, disappointed by the level of teaching. I had spent several months writing my term paper and created a program that could register orders. Basically, that was the great-great-grandfather of modern CRM systems. My teacher had given me the “A” without even looking at it, which completely discouraged me from further studies in that school. It became obvious that I had to find a different way to learn.

Strangely enough, I had no ambition of conquering the capital. Well, to be more exact, I had—but it was the capital of Canada. I read somewhere that in that country with a maple leaf on its flag, programmers could make a very good living. I had no desire to go the refugee route, so my only chance to get into the “hockey superpower” was getting a Green Card. But that required $ 7,000. With my income of 1,500 rubles a month at the time (and I was already working in my professional field at a plant that produced agricultural equipment) it was not an option, even with a good exchange rate. So my idea was to move to Moscow, make money, and then go to Canada.

But things didn’t go according to plan. I quickly got a job in a trading company, where in a year and a half I went from a regular programmer to the head of the IT Department. By that time I had stopped thinking about Canada. I had seen Moscow from the inside and realized that there were just as many opportunities there. But I had to choose my path—where do I go from here? The option of becoming the Head of Operations was not that appealing to me. I didn’t really like sales, so I made a bold move and created my own company.

My first two attempts to start a business failed: letting my employees go, paying off debts and working hard to handle clients—the whole nine yards … Only my third attempt was successful. It was Insight-Alliance, the company that sold (and sells to this day) accounting software and helps with its implementation. Jumping ahead, I sold it later and opened a new company, Insight. However, that’s another story.

A consulting business was my next step after Insight. My wife had started a company where I joined her in 2012. She was the CEO until her second maternity leave in 2015 when I replaced her and began running the company. Today, Evolution Management has a different CEO. I delegated that position in 2019 and now focus on the responsibilities of the owner (for example, I write books).

At the time of this writing, both of my businesses are thriving and expanding. Insight, my IT company, has a staff of 20 people, and Evolution Management, 55. Both companies have CEOs and I’m not involved in daily operational management. We now have over a hundred on-going consulting projects with companies for their business systematization and automation. In 2019, my companies respectively grew by 93% and 37%. In addition to all this, I regularly give educational talks on the subject of Systematized Business in the post-Soviet countries.

As you already know, I am a family man. I have an amazing, beautiful wife, Zulfiya and four kids, all boys. The eldest is currently in a private business school in the US. I am particularly proud of that as I believe that providing the best possible education for my children is one of my main responsibilities as a father.