#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
What distinguishes business owners with a small mindset from those experiencing explosive growth? What's unique inside a business owner who thinks big? What kind of person is that? How does someone with a very narrow mindset (who will never grow or achieve significant business growth) differ from someone with a big mindset? What does a big thinker embed into the DNA of the company, its foundation? What do they do that's special to make the company grow incredibly? So that the company can grow not just 2x, 3x, 4x, but can reinvent itself and bring completely different results.
The first distinction of a big thinker
Let's look at the difference between a business owner who creates a small business with a small mindset and a very narrow perspective, and a business owner who creates something incredible right from the start, aiming to create something very big, thinking globally. And this globality isn't just in words, not on paper – it lives inside them and in the actions, tasks, strategy, team, documents, regulations, and processes present in the business. This difference exists both between small and large businesses and between business owners or managers with a small mindset and those with such incredible inner strength. The first point: thinking that you must have a large, real, serious team – top managers, strong people who can do incredible things.
Personal experience
I recently managed a company called GeekBrains, and I had a team of 30 directors: 20 top directors and dozens of other directors, but 30 people I worked directly with every day. Together with them, hand in hand, we developed a pretty substantial business. It’s a community of 6 million people receiving IT education. It's a business that's in the top 20 companies in the world providing additional professional education in information technology.
Who is a member of a top team? It’s someone who can deliver big results and take responsibility for them; someone who isn't afraid to take on serious tasks – a real top manager.
Such top managers can sometimes grow within your company from ordinary employees, but can you form a large team solely by growing it inside your company? Practically impossible. These are people who cost a lot of money and want to earn big money. If you have a team of top managers earning small money, and you alone earn a lot, or you alone want to create a company that will earn $100 million, while your employees earn $2, 3, 4 thousand a month, and these are top managers, – you won't build such a business. Because they won't think, dream of $100 million or a billion.
The second distinction of a big thinker. Myths about goal setting
The second point and important difference between business owners with a small and big mindset is knowing the goal in business, it's incredibly important to understand. What do you want? Do you want to earn profit and make $100,000 monthly? Or do you want to build a business that you'll sell in a few years? Or do you want to create a business that will be a leader and the most famous? Or do you want to do business just to work and enjoy your professional activity every day?
Knowing and understanding the goal, living in the company through this goal – this distinguishes owners with a big mindset. And no matter how much people talk about goals, when you meet with them and ask them to clearly name the goal in business – most won't.
Recently, someone came to me and said they wanted to sell their company: "We make about 600 million rubles, that's 6-7 million dollars in revenue a year, and we want to sell it. But we want to sell it and we're thinking, why sell it now, maybe merge with a certain operator, make a partnership and sell part, and then sell more... And we want to sell so that our team isn't tied up and we can launch internationally, maybe sell in the future." This person has an educational business. I ask: "So what's the exact goal: sell right now, in the next two months, in six months, get a partner to help develop? What exactly do you want to do? Formulate it very clearly because depending on this we'll be doing completely different tasks, we'll have a different strategy." If we want to sell right here, right now, within two months – we need to quickly pack up for these two months and not think ahead about our own activities. We need to create a structure that can be handed over and sold.
If we want to get money in a year, we need to see if it's important to attract a partner now or better to build a strategy and do the right tasks, make the right growth, rely on specific indicators that will affect this purchase.
Example of a company that knows its goal exactly
We need to understand and see clearly how, who, and where will or might buy it – not in an illusion, not ephemeral, but for real. The topic of buying is very important.
I have a startup business in the States. I live in Silicon Valley, and I have a partner who said: "We're building a company, and we need to make it so that we can sell it to Facebook." But to sell a company there, you need to initially fulfill a whole list of specific recommendations, otherwise, they will never buy it in their life. At least Facebook will never buy it because this social network buys with a bunch of specific criteria.
For example, there should be certain employees working in a specified place, having a specific education (e.g., studied at Stanford), such should be the CEO, such engineers, traction. There should be no risk zones and red flags that the company will definitely not enter and will not consider. The goal is known: to sell to a specific organization.
Knowing the goal, and then moving towards it, strongly distinguishes a small owner from a large one, a person with a big mindset from a narrow one. What is goal-following? Goal-following is when you do tasks every day; your top management, top management team, your partners, all employees do tasks every day aimed at the strategy to achieve the goal.
Can you have secondary or parallel goals? Yes, you can. A big person, an owner – is someone who can understand and manage on the level of different large-scale goals, where one is in focus and a priority, and the rest go along as additional opportunities; they move together with the business.
The most important distinction of a big thinker
And we come to one of the most important distinctions between small and big thinking: it's the ability of the business owner to foresee certain circumstances, embed thousands of different goals and scenarios about moving forward.
What are "scenarios of moving forward"?
For example, in 2012 I became the owner of the company Business Youth. There were three partners: Mikhail Dashkiev, Peter Osipov, and me. The company made $20-30 thousand in revenue a month, 50-100 people in the hall. A small startup, not very well known at that time. As a business owner, I foresaw: if we want to achieve big goals, want to sell our product by the thousands, want tens of thousands of clients watching us. To do this, they will need to be served and interacted with. How to do this if there is very strong automation in sales? In the fall of 2012, we decided to automate and install Salesforce. Never will a company with a small mindset, a small organization of such scale decide to install Salesforce because it is a very expensive solution. I knew we would spend more than a million dollars on it: from 2012 to 2014 we spent more than a million dollars on implementation. But by 2013, Business Youth was considered one of the best implementations of Salesforce in Eastern Europe. This is a world giant, the largest CRM operator in the world – and we implemented it. And in October 2013, we reached $4 million in monthly revenue, $20 million a year. We started doing about 10,000 tasks a day in the sales department: calls, emails to clients.
If we hadn't started implementing the automation system in 2012, we would never have been able to handle such a flow of clients, wouldn't have been efficient, wouldn't have been able to develop the business and grow, would have lost the market and wouldn't have developed at all. Or, for example, the opposite situation regarding the CRM system. At the end of 2020, we take over the management of GeekBrains, another team manages it. Inside the automation is Salesforce. I decide to remove it due to many circumstances: the cost of the product, dependence on a foreign vendor, the complexity of development and support, new features that the market was oversaturated with and Salesforce couldn't fulfill. We implement another operator. Did I know that in the summer of 2022 Salesforce would shut down the entire Russian market? Not at that moment. But it was incredible luck for us: if Salesforce were still there, we'd be doomed. At the same time, by implementing another system, we gained the opportunity to grow incredibly and achieve the point where we started doing 10-15 thousand tasks a day in the sales department. Before that, GeekBrains did a thousand, two, or three thousand tasks a day. Foreseeing such moments is incredibly significant – it's like starting to do proper financial, accounting records immediately, getting involved from the start, understanding what and where the issues and problems might occur. From the beginning, understanding what legal risks might be, how your product line will or won't scale, not building illusions that it won't change. Everything changes. And you have to be calm about these changes.
Thinking big means being ready for changes. You know everything can change, and you're cool with that, not trying to plan every step ahead; it's when you see thousands of possible variations and also allow for thousands more going in completely different ways.
A big thinker is someone who is definitely ready for changes. But it doesn't mean they are impulsive or aggressive, or that they can't do systematic processes day after day. It means they do some processes systematically over one, two, three, four, five years. They know for sure that they need to do financial reporting every day and start doing it almost immediately when they start a business. They do it every day with diligence; they don't believe the finance people who say financial reports should be done once a month on the 15th of the following month when those reports are useless and no conclusions can be drawn from them. They know it needs to be done every day and will do it every day throughout the life of their company - this is the action that will always allow growth. At the same time, a big thinker is ready to do any creative things, implement an incredible number of different ideas. This is a big step and a strong difference between a big thinker and someone with a narrow mindset.
They might be in a small B2B business or have a small B2C coffee shop now, but they know they want to create a big chain, that they'll need to develop a JAR system and work with the government. They know they'll need PR, and even if they have Instagram now, in the future, there's a chance they'll need to be in the major media. And they understand: to be in the major media, to be on TV, to be written about in Forbes, it takes a long time. It doesn't happen right away; this process needs to be started.
They need to gradually start building relationships, showing up somewhere and dedicating a little time. They think ahead, and at the same time, they are not against testing various ideas. Because they know: any of these ideas can spark and turn into a vast ocean of development, which can bring a lot of money, clients, fame, incredible growth.
There are many other factors that distinguish a big owner with a big mindset from someone with a narrow mindset: laying the groundwork for PR and GR in advance, understanding internal financial experience, knowing that the company needs to be highly automated (GeekBrains had over 130 different information systems), knowing that a very strong HR team is needed.
I was once the CEO of Megaplan - the leader in Software as a Service, a cloud service for entrepreneurs in Russia. When I started managing it, there was a base of 10,000 companies; when I left, there were 120,000 companies. When I left and became the owner of Business Youth, just the day before, information came out in "Vedomosti" that we sold Megaplan to 1C. The deal was made together with Bank of the Stock Capital. When I left Megaplan, I remember that I clearly formulated two important criteria that a big owner should always hold in business.
First - the ability to listen to the client every day, trying to find out what they think, what they want, and what they talk about. This doesn't mean listening to everything and making the product exactly as they say. But it does mean still walking and hearing the client.
Second - having a strong HR team, being able to hire people, conduct mass assessments, sit 20 people together and choose the right person, be able to hire a person under the organizational structure and at the same time adjust the organizational structure for a person. You conduct interviews, talk to new people. A big owner is someone who is ready to adjust part of the company for a strong person. And not just say, "We don't have such positions," "We don't have such roles."
How to learn to think big
Questions may arise: are there people who think big? Are there people who think very narrowly? Can a person who thinks very narrowly think big? There seems to be no question that if a person thinks big, can they think very narrowly. The thing is, there's no boundary between thinking big and narrow. There's a very big thinker, but compared to another big thinker, they think very narrowly; there's a person with a narrow mindset, but compared to another person with a narrow mindset, they think very big. Therefore, anyone, wherever they are, can always expand their range of big thinking. It's not needed to burn out in the scale, to necessarily rush, move forward.
The range of big thinking is needed to find a new self, to uncover new qualities, aspects, inspiration, feeling, creativity within yourself, not to be afraid.
You come to a person and say, "Sort out the finances in your company." The person replies that this is not their area at all and they will never be able to do it, it's just unreal. If a person says this (they don't understand finances), they have the illusion that it's difficult. I, as someone who understands this, have a firm belief that it's easy. Why is there someone who says one thing is super difficult and another who says it's incredibly easy? It's not a comparison like building a house from bricks and dragging 10,000 bricks; the difficulty is clear, and it's hard to say it's easy.
The fundamental difference is that the person who doesn't understand finances is indeed shutting themselves off from new opportunities - from something new, from the world as a whole. They aren't even ready to try. It's important not to think about whether a person with a small, narrow mindset can become big and think big, not to set such a goal at all (there is no end to scale, you will never find it in your life), but to think about how you can expand your own scale here and now. Anyone can always expand their own scale. You can ask yourself: what develops first? The ability to generate a large number of tasks or systematically do different tasks? What's primary in this thinking? How to fully form this? How to become big? Of course, there's one big answer: you need to feel yourself, love. You need to feel this big, incredible scale within yourself. Because if you don't feel it, it's impossible to do it. Making a big business is very hard.