#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
Message to Every Manager
A large-scale personality is a person who is ready to grow immensely, who understands business in different areas. There are 7 of these areas. Every entrepreneur, businessman, manager who wants to grow immensely must embrace these 7 areas. They need to see them, feel them, and understand them. There’s no need to rush to learn them all at once or become an expert in these areas within six months or a year. It’s important to know they exist. Throughout your life, professional activity, and work, you should constantly be aware of them, navigate them, and shape them. But knowing that these areas exist already allows you to move forward in big leaps: x10, x50, x100, x500. The knowledge itself directs your thinking and actions in a different direction.
Today, I want to give you the opportunity to see your next step in business, what you can do right now to be as effective as possible in scaling and growing. Through these 7 areas, factors that I will talk about, I will help you. 7 factors – 7 zones of a large-scale personality. You will find your personal next step: every entrepreneur, manager, person who wants to do business has their own next step. It is separate and different. I always say that it is important for you to know the next step for yourself. There is no such thing as one next step for absolutely everyone.
There are good actions that everyone can do daily: wake up and smile, think about love. Every day think about what good you did for others.
Things that touch on the values of life can be done by everyone. But in business, in professional activity, in your work related to earning money, there is always your personal next step. Otherwise, you might take some actions that are suitable for another person and have led them to incredible growth, but for you, they might lead to death – in life, professional growth, the chance and opportunity to scale, to degradation. For one person – it’s growth, for you – it’s death.
Your task today is not to form an understanding of the entire holistic system of 7 zones, steps, and areas (they will be formed over the years), but to see for yourself once again the next step through these 7 areas. At the very end, you will learn about the 8th area of strong growth for every entrepreneur.
About My Experience. How I Came to These Thoughts
I am currently in Silicon Valley in the USA. Life led me to the point where, back in 2007, I first visited Silicon Valley and, of course, didn’t know that I would move here with my wife and four children. I never set such a goal. In those years, I was already managing a large number of software development projects around the world: in the USA, Taiwan, Germany, France. I spent most of my time in Minsk, but I traveled a lot. It was then, for the first time, managing projects, that I began to look for those points and areas of my attention that are important in business. The 7 points I have formed over this time are my system, which I have been designing and developing for years. It evolves because, at the core of these zones, lies my personal management system in various businesses and with a large number of people, millions of clients. It has evolved in the process of my immersion in operational activities or, on the contrary, as an entrepreneur and businessman. I have applied my knowledge in these areas differently.
What are the 7 Areas
It’s important to first highlight the 3 areas that are fundamental and on which the rest of the system is based: customer acquisition, sales, product.
Four additional areas: management, personnel, finance, development.
Whatever business, management system I create, whatever teams I start working with, I always remember that these business zones exist. I will encounter them as an owner: minor or major, whether I have a small share or a large one, whether I am operationally involved or not; I will encounter them as a manager: it doesn’t matter if I am the CEO or one of the directors working inside. In any project, I will remember that these areas exist and will go through them in this business, trying to find the next steps through them: there are many of them, and this is very important.
Customer acquisition – this is all about marketing and finding customers for your business, project.
Customers exist in almost any field. Someone might say they have one client, and someone else might note they manage hiring, so they have no clients. If you manage personnel, the clients are your potential candidates. In the role of clients can be those customers who come to you and form these vacancies. Everything related to customer acquisition is a marketing zone. In this area, there is fundamentally a whole sphere of such success factors. Once, together with my partner Anton Krutasyuk, we formed a system in which, by highlighting areas, we identified about 120 success factors. Many people doing business think that, for example, only marketing is important to them and all other areas are not important. Nowadays, the world is such that a huge number of people are engaged in marketing.
I live in Silicon Valley. What is remarkable about this place? California is an incredibly rich space. It’s about the budget of the Russian Federation. If California were taken out as a separate country from the USA, it would become the sixth or fifth in the world economy. This is a place of money, minds, resources, influence. And Silicon Valley is a place of incredible innovation, where the offices of the world’s wealthiest companies are located. For example, here is Apple, which is worth more than three trillion dollars, Microsoft, which has now overtaken them in value. But overall, it doesn’t matter. The whole world knows these companies, they are here. Often their leaders, people from their team, or one of the founders can be seen in person. This is such a mecca of innovation, yet a place of incredible stability. Stability is often associated with something old, outdated, unchanging, undeveloped. Often people come to Europe, and many do not like it. They say: “These are some old unfashionable spaces. What is this anyway?” This is some other kind of design, but there is incredible power in it. And here, there is super innovation with stability, where some degradation is even clearly expressed. Why do I give this example? Because degradation is also observed in marketing. There is incredibly innovative marketing by Apple and, at the same time, absolutely degraded marketing by various establishments or services that are present here for basic human life. Here, many people offline may not engage in marketing, but think about other areas. They may not know that you need to build funnels with customers, not think about counting the cost of leads, not know various indicators, what types of advertising exist. For them, this is just some incomprehensible thing, they live in their world. Meanwhile, an electrician will come home in a BMW 3 series from the 80s or 90s. This electrician will be over 70 years old. He will be in a great mood fixing your socket for $200 an hour. Different times for people, different perceptions.
You should remember that marketing exists and it needs to be done. This is not an easy area. I’ve done a lot of it and became known for being able to create a large flow of clients, with thousands, tens of thousands of registrations every day. Sales managers make, for example, 10,000 calls a day or handle 10,000 tasks. This was my experience in "Business Youth" 11 years ago when I was the owner and managing it. This was my experience in "GeekBrains" – one of the largest educational companies in the Russian-speaking space, in the TOP-20 IT educational companies in the world. At the same time, I know that not everyone needs to apply large-scale marketing tools in their business. If you apply these tools, for example, to my friend who has a salon with endosphere, a Pilates salon, nail services, or people who are engaged in filming, editing, camera work, the business will go bankrupt and become unprofitable. It won’t function.
The second important area – sales.
This is how and what you sell, how you convert the incoming flow of clients. This includes sales management systems, CRM, call centers, the work of your sales managers, operators, their motivation systems. How effectively and efficiently you serve each potential client to ensure they buy from you now and in the future. To grow their Lifetime (the amount of time a person spends with you), increase Lifetime Value (how much they pay you throughout their life with you), and reduce churn rate.
Interesting about CRM. We went to San Francisco, where they have built gardens in the air called Salesforce Garden. Salesforce is the world leader in CRM systems, Client Relationship Management or Customer Relationship Management systems. Why gardens? They made a whole area with the most famous, large, and probably the most beautiful modern building. It belongs to Salesforce. In 2013, we had one of the best Salesforce implementations in Eastern Europe.
In 2012, I became the owner of "Business Youth", we wanted to make a lot of money and grow significantly, so we started thinking about what automation system to implement in sales. Then my close friend, partner Alexander Sagun, joined my team, and we discussed this topic. In the end, we began to implement the Salesforce system, making one of the best implementations in Eastern Europe. We invested more than a million dollars in it, and it helped us earn tens of millions of dollars. For "Business Youth," it helped generate over $100 million through this system. But by 2020, I decided to remove this system from GeekBrains: I saw that another CRM system should be put in place.
How are these decisions made? From understanding that when I manage a company, I know that one of the key success factors in sales is having the right CRM system implemented. It's not just any system, but when you know why a CRM system is needed from the perspective of your strategy and principles within your business, how it will influence achieving your goals in this business, what you want to achieve with it.
For many companies, Salesforce will be unprofitable, unnecessary, and will make things worse, causing you to lose a lot of money. Some need it, some don’t. This all comes out when you know that there is a sales area that needs attention.
The third fundamental area of influence is the product.
What your product, service, or offering is, how you sell it, how you create it, how you provide a particular service, how you maintain quality, and how you serve your clients. This is the area that needs incredible attention. Interestingly, for each person and business, for a manager, there is always the most important current area of focus. For some, it's more important now to pay attention to marketing (I call it attracting clients), for some, it's important to focus on sales, for others, on the product. If you're a manager, entrepreneur, businessman, active or passive owner, you need to look at all these areas simultaneously, because you live and exist, you have a huge amount of time.
Sometimes I’m asked how it’s possible to be simultaneously involved in 20, 40, 200, 300, or 500 tasks, because I often say that it's better to do 300 tasks out of 500 than 10 out of 10. But for some reason, the person asking this question finds it hard to imagine being involved in 40 tasks, while they easily handle 200 Instagram comments sent by their friends or scroll through 400 different authors in their feed. They do that easily, but the other action is hard for them.
You need to calmly accept for yourself that there are different areas, but there isn’t a universally important area of focus for everyone. Moreover, sometimes this focus can destroy your entire business or all your money. And sometimes even minimal focus can bring you a growth of x10 thousand, radically changing your life.
For example, in March 2021, my wife and I woke up on a Sunday morning and lay in bed, which is very rare, because I usually get up at 5:30, and she gets up at 6 or 6:15. On Sunday she gets up at 8, and I can still get up at 5:30. We quickly asked each other: “Well, are we moving to another country?” Probably yes. We probably need to make this decision now. We said "yes" to each other and made that decision despite having four children and a huge number of circumstances we couldn’t even imagine. At that moment, we focused maximally on the most important event to form our next step. I gave this example from personal life (not from business, not from the seven factors, zones of success, the most important, fundamental in business) to show how important it is to make the right focus. Although, of course, during the day we make dozens and hundreds of these focuses.
There are four additional areas that need attention. The first is management.
How you manage the business, what your management team is like, your task management and decision-making system, your deadline system, tracking completed and uncompleted tasks, what your internal automation is like, how you manage the company as a whole.
The important fifth area is personnel.
How you create vacancies, what your organizational structure is like, your HR department, the people who are involved in hiring, your selection process, how you invite people for interviews, who looks for them, who calls them, who brings them to you for an interview, who conducts the interview. The people who call and invite, the people who convince them to come, select them for selection, the people who write the vacancies, the people who decide on the motivation, the people who select – these are all different qualities. I say "people" specifically to understand that these are different qualities, although, of course, they can be concentrated in one person or have a whole department, which will be dozens of people. The people who then accompany your employees, then fire them – this all concerns the incredibly important area of personnel.
During my 20 years of management, I have repeated and repeat now that there are two fundamental parts of any business's success that need attention. The first is the ability to listen to your client (getting feedback from your client). The second is constantly hiring people and forming your team (related to the fifth area).
The sixth area – finances.
So many people struggle with this! I have a partner in the Valley, and we're working on an AI project (it's actually a series of AI projects). As founders, co-founders, and startup enthusiasts, we create various assistants, some systems, and have a lot of discussions. He says: "I don't get it, I don't care about financial calculations at all. No matter how much I've been involved in business, I don't need to handle this." Understanding the financial area, knowing how to properly form financial statements, automate systems, create financial reporting regulations, have the right financial documents, finance team, strategy, financial planning, budgeting system, understanding the difference between cash flow and profit and loss, and knowing how to correctly calculate and compare – without this, you can't build a good business to scale.
We are talking about if you are a large-scale personality, an entrepreneur who wants to scale – you need to know this, develop in these areas. It's an incredible key to your success. 99 out of 100 CEOs, 999 out of 1000 business owners don't understand financial systems. They don't get it not because it's complex, but because that's how it has been set up in their mindset paradigm. Most of those who claim they are developing or understanding will be lying.
We recently developed a finance app with my friend and partner, which allows you to quickly form an article plan and understand what it should look like, helps with financial accounting. We will develop a lot in this field. Today, as a person involved in several dozen companies as a minority owner, majority business owner, or advisor and partner consulting some owners, executives, I notice: in 90% of cases, these companies have issues with financial accounting. This is the point that could allow these companies and helps many of them grow significantly. If you don't have the right financial system, it won't let you gather real unit economics. Without this, you can't forecast your business's movement system.
Recently, I joined an EdTech project in education for training psychologists. I've been an owner for more than a month and always understand with my partner that, when making almost all decisions, we must rely on the right financial reporting system. And to rely on it, it shouldn't just appear today. We need to take a period, like 2023, and have it properly formatted within the financial system. Of course, we will do this now. And when it appears, it will allow us to make more effective decisions about the next step. Many decisions cannot be made otherwise.
We discuss which platform to choose for deploying landing pages or educational systems. Let's first look at the financial system. What kind of motivation system should we build for managers? Let's first look at the financial system. How will we hire people? What will our organizational structure be? Let's first look at the financial system. How will we work with partners in terms of royalties? What will our strategy be concerning other countries? Let's first look at the financial system. A huge number of decisions go through the financial system. Why? If we set a goal, for example, to make a certain amount of net profit this year, to achieve specific revenue, we must then understand the entire economy: how many percent we can spend on sales, what we can spend or, on the contrary, what we can get ahead to achieve this or that result? Most interestingly, most people, entrepreneurs lack the right expense tracking system. In reality, to make the right business decisions, you need to have a proper income tracking system.
My friend's husband is launching a business and has been working on it for a long time. In this business, it turns out he hasn't thought through, hasn't fully calculated the entire budget. A huge number of people don't calculate the budget perfectly, but in reality, you need to think not through expenses you haven't calculated, which you don't have, but through the income system and understand your unit economics for growth. Think about growth and income, not expenses. But if you don't know how to properly handle expenses, you will never be able to approach the correct income calculations. Someone might think they can calculate the correct unit economics just through income, set a goal to make 40 million dollars in net profit this year. Without clearly and thoughtfully seeing the expense system, how it will change, how you'll jump from 2 million dollars in net profit to 40 – it's just not a working system, there's no such movement, you need to understand this.
The seventh area that every businessman needs to know is development.
This means constantly being in the mode of connecting your goal, strategy, and the tasks you are doing. The development area is where you allow yourself any creativity, while you very systematically form it and transfer it to other blocks.
In the development area, you might have different projects that are not typical for you today. If today your client acquisition model is through traffic acquisition, for example, through Facebook or any other system, and you say you are not interested in offline advertising, but within development, you consider if you can launch it.
In development, you might allow yourself some projects that are not in your central system, but they will attract clients. Being in this thinking area through the fact that in the development area is not your operational business, but a system for forming a large number of creative, constantly generated, endless ideas, while this is the development area that allows your business to stabilize all the time, saying: "Today offline sales became interesting to me, and I move them to a standard process", "today PR became important to me, and I move it to a usual process", "today international development became important to me, and I move it to a standard, absolutely natural process." This leads you to significant growth and scale.
And the eighth point of a large-scale person. This area is security.
As practice shows, people think they understand it because they endlessly delegate someone. But the biggest number of real problems for a person in business comes from it. The biggest problem in business happens when it leads to the risk of your own life as a businessman.
Here I include several components: legal security, any other security within the business. Sometimes in business, it’s also personal security. In some businesses, this security is directly linked to an employee, somewhere to personal data. It’s of different types: state, economic, political. This is when your focus is directed to this area: what are your contractual relationships within the company with clients, employees, partners, how everything is legally structured, what is your company’s organizational structure, your business, how you will grow, how well you understand the chain of changing events and can correlate it with various laws or your presence, for example, in different countries. How well do you understand all the forms of ownership that exist today, different accounting that can be, how much attention you paid to how important data security is. Or the physical security of specific people in your company, how much you have paid attention to this from the very beginning and understood the various risks that may arise over time.
For many people, entrepreneurs, executives, security is now the area to focus on. Often, for people, security becomes an active and interesting area when they already "hurt": like a person who goes to the doctor or takes pills when he wants to cure what is already progressing. But in reality, you need to deal with security when you don't just have nothing hurting, when nothing even smells nearby, when it's still ephemeral. You need to start understanding this a little. This applies to all eight areas, which gives you a completely different perception, vision, broad application of efforts.
I have always said that a good executive is someone who understands all eight areas, knows about 120 success factors (these are the things to be done in them). From the very beginning, I said that it’s impossible to know everything at once, to learn in one video, 10-minute, hour-long, in one course or even in a year, two, or three. Once I realized that a good leadership education system would be the one where they try to convey knowledge about the eight areas to a person so that he has some kind of movement map. In life, there are many more such areas.