What's inside someone who thinks big?

In this video, I explore how the approaches and thinking of small and large business owners differ, and what is inside a person who thinks big. Thinking big can fundamentally change a business and turn a small company into a leader.

I talk about the importance of a strong team of professionals who can bring big ambitions to life; why you need to understand your business’s purpose clearly and follow it; how strategy and openness to new ideas drive growth; and why an owner who thinks big is ready for change. This will be useful both to new entrepreneurs and to experienced business owners who want to broaden their horizons.

What distinguishes a business owner whose inner scope is small from one with a powerful, explosive capacity for growth? What is special inside a business owner who thinks big? What kind of person is that? How does someone whose thinking is small and very narrow—someone who will never grow or achieve major business growth—differ from someone who thinks broadly and on a large scale? What does a person who thinks big put into a company’s DNA, its foundation? What do they do differently that allows a company to grow enormously, not just two, three, or four times over, but to reinvent itself and produce an entirely different result?

Today we will look at the difference between an owner who creates a small business, thinks small, and sees things very narrowly, and an owner who sets out from the start to create something extraordinary, something very large. This is a person who thinks on an incredibly broad scale. That breadth is not just words or something on a sheet of paper. It lives inside them and in the actions, tasks, strategy, team, documents, policies, and processes within the business. This difference exists between small and large businesses, and between an owner or manager with a small mindset and one with tremendous inner strength.

The First Distinction of a Person Who Thinks Big

Point number one is the understanding that you need a large, real, serious team: a team of senior managers, of strong people capable of doing extraordinary things.

My Experience

Until quite recently, I ran GeekBrains, and I had a team of thirty directors: twenty senior directors and others as well. There were actually dozens of directors, but those thirty were the people I worked with directly, side by side, every day to develop the business. It was a substantial business: a community of six million people receiving IT education. It was among the world’s top twenty companies providing continuing professional education in information technology.

What is a member of a senior leadership team? Someone who can deliver a major result and take responsibility for it. Someone who is not afraid to take on large, serious tasks. A real senior executive. Sometimes these executives develop within your company, growing from ordinary staff positions. But can you build a large team solely by developing people internally? It is practically impossible.

These are people who cost a lot of money. These are people who want to earn a lot of money.

If your senior managers earn little while you alone earn a lot, or you alone want to build a company that will make you a hundred million dollars while your employees—and these are senior managers—earn two, three, or four thousand dollars a month, you will not build that business. They will not think on that scale. They will not be thinking about a hundred million dollars or a billion.

The Second Distinction: Myths About Goal Setting

The second important distinction between business owners who think small and those who think big is knowing the goal of the business. That goal is incredibly important. I recently posted a video on the channel about how important it is to know your goal, to understand what you are currently trying to achieve in business. What do you want? To make a profit, earning a hundred thousand dollars every month? To build a business you can sell in a few years? To build a business that becomes the leader and the best known? Or to run a business simply so you can work and enjoy your professional activity every day?

Knowing that goal, understanding it, and making it part of daily life in the company are major distinctions of an owner who thinks big. However much people talk about goals, about setting and describing them, when you meet them and say, “Tell me clearly and specifically what your business goal is,” most of the time they cannot name it.

Someone recently came to me and said, “I want to sell my company. We make about $20 million in annual revenue in comparable U.S. terms, and we want to sell it. We’re thinking of selling it now. Or perhaps merging with a particular operator, forming a partnership, selling part of it, then selling more. We also want to sell so the team isn’t tied down and we can launch internationally. Or perhaps sell in the future.”

This person has an education business. I said, “So what exactly is the goal? Sell right now, in the next two months? Sell the company in six months? Bring in a partner who will help you develop and accelerate growth? What specifically do you want to do? State it very clearly, because we will work on completely different tasks depending on what you want. We will have a completely different strategy.”

If we want to sell right here and now, within two months, we need to get the business ready quickly within that period, rather than plan our own future activities. We need to create a structure that can be handed over and sold. If we want to receive the money a year from now, we need to ask whether bringing in a partner now matters, or whether it would be better to build the right strategy, work on the right tasks and growth, and focus on the specific metrics that will influence the purchase. We need to understand clearly how the business could be bought, by whom, and where. In reality, rather than in an illusion or a vague idea.

An Example of a Company That Knows Its Goal

The question of an acquisition is very important. I have a startup, a business in the States—I live in the States, in Silicon Valley—and I have a partner. He says, “We’re building a company, and we need to build it so we can sell it to Facebook. But to sell a company to them, you need to meet a whole list of specific recommendations from the outset. Otherwise, your company will never be bought.”

At least Facebook will never buy it, because Facebook makes acquisitions according to a host of specific criteria. For example, you need particular employees working in a particular place, with a particular education—people who studied at Stanford, for instance. You need a certain kind of CEO, certain engineers, a certain level of traction. There must be no areas of risk or red flags that concern the company and that it definitely will not take on or even consider. The goal is very clear: to sell, and not just to anyone, but to a specific organization.

Again: knowing the goal and then moving toward it is a major distinction between an owner who thinks small and one who thinks big, between broad and narrow thinking.

What does following a goal mean? It means that every day you carry out tasks. Your senior managers, your leadership team, carry out tasks every day; your partners do the same. Every employee works each day on tasks directed toward the strategy needed to achieve that particular goal.

Can you have secondary or parallel goals? Yes. An owner who thinks big can understand and manage several ambitious goals, keeping one primary goal in focus while the others run alongside it. They provide additional opportunities and move forward with the business.

The Most Important Distinction of a Person Who Thinks Big

This brings us to one of the most important differences between thinking small and thinking big.

What do different scenarios for the future mean? For example, in 2012, I became an owner of Business Molodost. There were three of us as partners: Mikhail Dashkiev, Pyotr Osipov, and me. The company was making twenty to thirty thousand dollars in monthly revenue, with fifty to a hundred people in the room. It was a very small startup that few people knew about at the time.

As an owner, I immediately anticipated that, since we had big goals and big tasks ahead—we wanted to sell our product by the thousands, to have thousands and tens of thousands of customers watching us—we would need to serve and interact with those customers. How could we do that? Through extensive sales automation.

In the fall of 2012, we decided to automate and implement Salesforce. Ordinarily, a company with a small mindset, a small organization of that size, would never decide to implement Salesforce, because it is a very expensive solution. I knew we would spend more than a million dollars on it, and over 2012, 2013, and 2014, we spent more than a million dollars implementing Salesforce.

Yet by 2013, Salesforce considered Business Molodost one of its best implementations in Eastern Europe. Salesforce is a global giant, the world’s largest CRM provider. We implemented it and, by October 2013, reached four million dollars in monthly revenue. We made twenty million dollars that year, and our sales department was completing around ten thousand tasks a day. A task means a call to a customer or an email. Ten thousand tasks a day.

If we had not begun implementing automation in 2012, we could never have handled that volume of customers. We would not have been efficient, could not have developed the business or grown so much, would have lost the market, and would not have developed at all.

Or take the opposite situation with CRM systems. At the end of 2020, we took over management of GeekBrains from another team. Salesforce was its automation system. I decided to remove Salesforce for a whole range of reasons: the cost, dependence on a foreign vendor, the difficulty of development and support, and new features already widely available on the market that Salesforce could not deliver. Implementation was very difficult and slow, so we moved to another provider.

Did I know Salesforce would shut off the entire Russian market in the summer of 2022? I did not. But it was an incredible stroke of luck for us, because if we had still been using Salesforce, we would have been in serious trouble. By implementing another system, we gained the ability to grow enormously and began completing ten to fifteen thousand sales tasks a day. Before that, GeekBrains had been doing one, two, or three thousand a day.

Anticipating such situations is incredibly important. It is like establishing proper financial tracking from the start. You need good accounting from the beginning: build it, get into the details, understand where particular issues and problems might arise. Understand possible legal risks from the beginning. Understand from the beginning how your product line will or will not scale. Do not imagine it will remain unchanged. Everything changes, and you need to be calm about that change, very calm.

Other Distinctions of Businesses That Think Big

There is a video—I think we recorded it a few weeks ago—about how a business owner can step away from day-to-day operations. In it, I said that one of the most important criteria and factors showing an owner is able and ready to do that is their inner readiness for any change: to dismiss the whole team, rebuild processes, or create new products. They are ready for change.

Thinking big means being ready for change.

It means knowing that everything can change in any way and being calm about it, moving with that flow without trying to plan every action in advance. Thinking big means seeing thousands of possible variations while allowing that thousands more may follow an entirely different scenario.

An owner who thinks big is definitely ready for change. That does not mean they are hot-tempered or aggressive, or unable to follow processes systematically day after day. It means they carry out some processes consistently, day after day, for one, two, three, four, or five years. They know they need to produce financial reports every day. They begin almost as soon as they have a business and do it diligently every day.

They do not accept the finance team’s claim that reports should be produced once a month, on the fifteenth of the following month, when the reports are no longer needed and no conclusions can be drawn from them. They know: when something needs doing every day, I will do it every day throughout the life of my company. That action will always allow me to grow.

At the same time, a person who thinks big is ready to do all kinds of creative things and bring an incredible number of different ideas to life. That is a major distinction. They may currently run a small B2B business or a small B2C coffee shop, but they know they want to build a large chain. They know they will need to develop government relations and work with government. They know they will need public relations, and even if all they have now is Instagram, they know they will probably need a presence in major media outlets in the future.

They understand that appearing in major media—in Kommersant or Vedomosti, on television, or in a Forbes article—takes time. It does not happen immediately. You need to get the process started: gradually build relationships, begin making appearances, and devote a little time to it.

They think ahead and are also willing to test different ideas, because they know any one of those ideas could catch fire and become an incredibly vast ocean of growth. An ocean large enough to bring a great deal of money, customers, recognition, and extraordinary development.

How to Discover Your Own Capacity to Think Big

There are many other factors that distinguish an owner who thinks big from one who thinks narrowly:

• Planning for public relations and government relations in advance.
• Developing a personal, deeply felt understanding of finances.
• Understanding that the company needs extensive automation. At GeekBrains, we had more than a hundred and thirty different information systems.
• Knowing that you need an excellent, strong HR team.

My Experience at Megaplan and Business Molodost

At one time, I was the CEO of Megaplan, a leading Software as a Service company providing a cloud service for entrepreneurs in Russia. When I began running it, our customer base included ten thousand companies. When I left, it was a hundred and twenty thousand.

Exactly one day before I left and became an owner of Business Molodost, Vedomosti reported that we had sold Megaplan to 1C. The deal was done together with Baring Vostok Capital.

I remember very clearly what took shape in me when I left Megaplan, more than eleven years ago now. Two important criteria became very clear to me, things an owner who thinks big should always maintain in a business.

• First, the ability to hear the customer: every day, consistently, trying to learn what customers think, what they want, and what they talk about. That does not mean accepting everything they say and building the product exactly as they tell you to. But it does mean going out and hearing the customer anyway.
• Second, having a strong HR team. You are continually recruiting, able to hire people, run group assessments, bring twenty people together and choose the right one. You can hire someone to fit the organizational structure and also adjust the structure to accommodate a particular person. You conduct interviews, talk to new people, and look for new people.

An owner who thinks big is ready to adapt part of the company to a strong person, instead of simply saying, “We don’t have positions like that” or “We don’t have roles like that.”

How to Learn to Think Big: Limits and Discovering Yourself

A question may arise: some people think big, while others think very narrowly. Can someone who thinks very narrowly learn to think big? The question of whether someone who thinks big can think very narrowly does not seem to arise.

The point is that there is no limit to how broad or how narrow thinking can be. Someone may think on a very large scale, yet compared with another person who thinks big, their thinking is very narrow. Someone may think narrowly, yet compared with another person with narrow thinking, they think on a very large scale. So everyone, wherever they are, can broaden the range of their thinking.

You do not need that range in order to burn yourself out by taking on more, or to strain and push forward at some extraordinary pace. You also need it to discover a new version of yourself, to uncover new qualities, new sides of yourself, new inspiration, new feelings, and new creativity.

To stop being afraid. You go to someone and say, “Get to grips with your company’s finances.” They say, “No, that isn’t my area at all. Are you kidding? I’ll never be able to do that. I won’t. It’s simply impossible.” If someone says that, they do not understand finance and have an illusion that it is difficult. As someone who understands it, I am firmly convinced that it is simple. Why does one person call the same thing extremely difficult while another calls it incredibly easy?

This is not the same as building a brick house and hauling ten thousand bricks. There, the difficulty is clear, and it is hard to call it easy. The fundamental difference is that someone who does not understand how to organize finances is actually closing themselves off from a new possibility. They close themselves off from something new, from a new action, from the world in general. They are not even willing to try.

What matters is not wondering whether someone with small, narrow thinking can become someone who thinks big. Do not frame the task that way at all.

You might ask: what develops first? Is it my ability to come up with a great many tasks, or my ability to carry out those different tasks systematically? What comes first in this way of thinking? How do I develop all of it? How do I learn to think big?

There is, of course, one broad answer to that.

You need to be in touch with yourself and love yourself. You need to feel that vast, extraordinary capacity within you. If you do not feel that capacity in yourself, it is very hard to build a business on a large scale.

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