What Is Inside Someone Who Thinks Big?

AVAlexander Volchek

What distinguishes a business owner with a small inner sense of scale from one with that enormous, explosive state of growth? What's different inside an owner who thinks big? What kind of person is this? How does someone with small, very narrow thinking, who will never grow or achieve major business growth, differ from someone who thinks on a large scale? What does a person who thinks big put into a company's DNA, into its foundations? What do they do differently so the company grows enormously—not just twofold, threefold, or fourfold, but can reinvent itself and deliver an entirely different result? That's what we'll discuss today. These are people who cost a lot of money. I ask, “So what exactly is the goal?” We want to sell our product by the thousands. We want thousands, tens of thousands of clients watching us. A lot of time has to pass. It doesn't happen immediately. You need to start that process. Can you have secondary or parallel goals? Yes. In reality, without illusions or vague abstractions. An owner who thinks big is definitely ready for change. Hello, everyone! My name is Alexander Volchek. Today we'll explore this difference between an owner who creates a small business, thinks small, and sees things very narrowly, and an owner who immediately creates something incredible, who immediately strives to create something—

very big. Someone who thinks on an incredibly broad scale. That breadth isn't just words or something written on a piece of paper. It lives inside them, in the actions, tasks, strategy, team, documents, rules, and processes within the business and company. This difference exists both between small and large businesses and between an owner or manager with small thinking and one with enormous inner strength. The first point is thinking in terms of having a large, real, serious team: a team of senior executives and strong people capable of incredible things. Until very recently, I ran GeekBrains. I had a team of thirty directors, twenty top directors—and actually dozens of other directors too—but thirty people I worked with directly, hand in hand every day, developing the business together. It was a fairly substantial business: a community of six million people receiving IT education. It's among the world's top twenty companies providing continuing professional education in information technology.

What is a member of a top team? Someone capable of delivering major results and taking responsibility for those results. Someone who isn't afraid to take on seri—

who isn't afraid to take on serious, major tasks. A real senior executive. Such executives can sometimes grow within your company from ordinary entry-level employees. But can you build a large team entirely by developing people internally? It's practically impossible. These people cost a lot of money and want to earn a lot. If your executive team earns little while you alone earn a lot, or you alone want to build a company that will earn you $100 million while your employees—senior executives—earn $2,000, $3,000, or $4,000 a month, you won't build that business. They won't think about $100 million or a billion. The second important distinction between owners who think small and those who think big is knowing the business's goal. That goal is incredibly important. I recently posted a video here about the importance of knowing your goal, of understanding what your business goal is right now. What do you want? Do you want to make a profit, earning $100,000 every month? Or build a business you can sell in a few years?

Or do you want to build a business that's the leader and the best known? Or run a business simply to work and enjoy your professional activity every day? Knowing and understanding this goal, and living by it within the company, strongly distinguishes people and owners who think big. However much people talk about setting and describing goals, when you meet and ask them clearly and directly to explain their business goal, most of the time they don't name it.

Most of the time, they don't name it. Someone recently came to me and said, “I want to sell my company. In comparable U.S. terms, we make roughly $24 million—around $24 million to $28 million—in annual revenue and want to sell. We're thinking of selling now. Or perhaps merging with a certain operator, forming a partnership, selling part now and more later. We also want to sell so our team isn't tied down and we can launch internationally. Or perhaps sell in the future.” I ask, “So what exactly is the goal? Sell right now, within the next two months?” This person runs an education business. “Sell in six months? Bring in a partner who'll help you develop and give you a boost? What exactly do you want to do? Formulate it very clearly, because depending on what you want, we'll be working on completely different tasks with a completely different strategy. If we want to sell right here and now, within two months, we need to package the business quickly for that time frame, without planning ahead for our own operations. We need to create a structure we can transfer and sell to someone else.”

If we want to receive the money in a year, we need to consider whether bringing in a partner now matters. Or would it be better to develop the right strategy, do the right tasks, achieve the right growth, and focus on particular metrics that will influence the purchase? Clearly understand how, who, and where someone will or might buy it. In reality, without illusions or vague abstractions. Acquisition is a very important subject. I have a startup 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, we need to meet—”

we need to follow a whole list of specific recommendations from the outset, or nobody will ever buy the company. At least Facebook never will, because Facebook buys according to a whole set of criteria. For example, you need particular employees working in particular places with particular educational backgrounds, such as Stanford. You need a certain kind of CEO, certain engineers, and a certain level of traction. There mustn't be risk areas or red flags that worry the buyer, areas the company definitely won't enter or consider. In fact, the goal is very clear: sell the company, and not just sell it, but sell it to a specific organization. Again, knowing the goal and then moving toward it sharply distinguishes an owner who thinks small from one who thinks big, someone with a broad outlook from someone with a very narrow one. What does following the goal mean? Every day you do tasks. Your senior executives, your team of senior managers, do tasks every day. Your partners do tasks every day. All employees do tasks every day that serve the strategy needed to reach this specific goal. Can you have secondary or parallel goals?

Yes. An owner who thinks big can understand and manage several large goals, with one as the main priority and the others alongside it. They're additional opportunities that move together with the business. That brings us to one of the most important differences between thinking small and thinking big: the owner's ability to foresee certain circumstances, to build—

to build in thousands of different possibilities and scenarios for what lies ahead. What do different future scenarios mean? In 2012, for example, I became an owner of Business Molodost. There were three partners: Mikhail Dashkiev, Petr Osipov, and me. The company made $20,000 to $30,000 in monthly revenue, with fifty to a hundred people in the room. A very small startup, not widely known at that point. As an owner, I immediately foresaw that we had big goals and major tasks ahead. We wanted to sell our product by the thousands, with thousands, tens of thousands of clients watching us. We'd need to serve and interact with them. How could we serve and interact with them? With very strong sales automation. In the fall of 2012, we decided to automate and install Salesforce. Ordinarily, a company with small thinking, a small organization of that size, would never decide to install Salesforce because it's very expensive. I knew we'd spend more than a million dollars on it. Across 2012, 2013, and 2014, we spent more than a million dollars implementing Salesforce.

But 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 our monthly revenue reached $4 million. We made $20 million that year, and our sales department began completing around ten thousand tasks a day. A task means calling a client or writing them an email. Ten thousand tasks a day. If we hadn't started implementing automation in 2012, we never could have—

without that automation, we could never have handled that flow of clients. We wouldn't have been effective, couldn't have developed and grown the business so strongly, would have lost the market, and wouldn't have developed at all. Or take the reverse situation with CRM systems. At the end of 2020, we took over the management of GeekBrains, which another team had been running. It was using Salesforce for automation. I decided we needed to remove Salesforce for a whole range of reasons: its cost, dependence on a foreign vendor, the complexity of development and support, and new features the market was already full of that Salesforce couldn't deliver. Implementation was very difficult and slow, so we introduced another provider. Did I know then that Salesforce would cut off the entire Russian market in the summer of 2022? I didn't. But it was incredibly fortunate for us, because if we'd still had Salesforce, we'd have been done for. At the same time, introducing another system allowed us to grow enormously and reach ten to fifteen thousand tasks a day in the sales department.

Before that, GeekBrains completed one, two, or three thousand tasks a day. Foresight in such matters is enormously important. It's like establishing proper financial accounting from the outset. You need good bookkeeping from the very beginning: build it, understand it, and learn what particular issues and problems can arise. Understand potential legal risks from the outset. Understand from the outset how your product line will or won't scale. Don't imagine it will stay unchanged. Everything changes, and you need to approach change calmly, very calmly. There's a video we filmed a few weeks ago, I think, called “How a Business Owner Can Properly Step Away from Operations.” In it, I said—

your own business. In it, I said that one incredibly important sign and factor in an owner's ability and readiness to step away from operations is their inner readiness for any change: their entire team being fired, their processes being rebuilt, or the need to create new products. They're ready for change. Thinking big means being ready for change. You know everything can change in any way, and you're calm about it, moving with it rather than trying to plan every action in advance. Thinking big means seeing thousands of possible variations while allowing for thousands more that follow completely different scenarios. An owner who thinks big is definitely ready for change. But that doesn't mean they're hotheaded or aggressive, or incapable of following systematic processes every day. It means they follow some processes systematically, day after day, for one, two, three, four, or five years. They know for certain that they need to submit financial reports every day.

They start doing this almost as soon as they have a business. They do it vigorously and diligently every day. They don't believe finance professionals who say reports should be submitted once a month, on the fifteenth of the following month, when those reports are no longer useful and you can't draw any conclusions from them. They know: if something needs to be done every day, I'll do it every day throughout my company's life. That action will allow me to keep growing. At the same time, someone who thinks big is ready to do all kinds of creative things and implement an incredible number of ideas. That's a major distinction: this owner is ready to pursue many different ideas.

They may be in a small B2B business or currently have a small B2C coffee shop, but they know they want to create a large chain. They know they'll need to develop government relations and work with the government. They know they'll need PR. Even if they have Instagram now, they know there's a chance they'll need a presence in major media in the future. They understand that appearing in major outlets such as Kommersant or Vedomosti, appearing on television, or having Forbes write about you takes a long time. It doesn't happen immediately. You need to start the process: gradually build relationships, start appearing in places, and set aside a little time. They think ahead while also being willing to test different ideas, because any one of them could ignite and become an enormous ocean of growth. An ocean that could bring a lot of money, clients, fame, and incredible development. Many other factors distinguish an owner who thinks big from one who thinks narrowly: establishing PR and government relations functions in advance, understanding and internally engaging with finances, and understanding that the company needs extensive automation.

At GeekBrains, we had more than a hundred and thirty different information systems. Knowing you need an excellent, strong HR team. I was once CEO of Megaplan, which was a leader in software as a service, a cloud service for entrepreneurs in Russia. When I joined to run it, our client base was ten thousand companies. When I left, it was a hundred and twenty thousand.

When I left, it was a hundred and twenty thousand companies. Exactly one day before I left and became an owner of Business Molodost, Vedomosti reported that we'd sold Megaplan and 1C had bought it. The deal was done together with Baring Vostok Capital. I clearly remember what took shape inside me when I left Megaplan, eleven years ago—more than eleven years ago. Two important criteria became very clear to me, things an owner who thinks big must always maintain. First, the ability to hear the client: every day, continually trying to learn what clients think, want, and talk about. That doesn't mean doing everything they say or making the product only as they describe it. It means still going and hearing that client. Second, having a strong HR team. You're constantly recruiting, can hire people, run group assessments, put twenty people together and choose the right person. You can hire someone for your organizational structure while also adapting that structure to a particular person. You conduct interviews, meet new people, and look for new people.

An owner who thinks big is willing to adapt part of the company to a strong person, rather than just saying, “We don't have positions or roles like that.” A question may arise: some people think big, while others think very narrowly. Can someone who thinks very narrowly learn to think big? There seems to be no question about whether someone who thinks big can think narrowly. There are no boundaries to scale or to narrow thinking. None. Someone may think very big, but compared with—

someone else who thinks big, their thinking is very narrow. Someone may have narrow thinking, but compared with another narrow thinker, they think very broadly. So every person, wherever they are, can expand the range of their thinking. That range isn't there so you burn out through growth or necessarily rush relentlessly forward. It's also there so you can discover a new self: new qualities, new sides of yourself, new inspiration, feeling, and creativity. Without fear. You go to someone and say, “Get to grips with your company's finances.” They say, “No, that's absolutely not my thing. Are you kidding? I could never do it. I won't. It's simply impossible.” Since they don't understand finance, they have an illusion that it's difficult. As someone who understands it, I'm firmly convinced it's simple. Why does one person call something extremely difficult while another calls the very same thing incredibly easy?

This isn't like building a brick house and carrying ten thousand bricks. The difficulty there is clear; it's hard to call that easy. The fundamental difference is that someone who doesn't understand how to organize finances is actually closing themselves off from a new opportunity. They close themselves off from something new, from a new action, and from the world in general. They aren't even willing to try. What matters is not asking whether someone with small, narrow thinking can become someone who thinks big. Don't frame the task that way at all. There is no—

don't frame the task that way at all. There's no end to scale; you'll never find one. Think instead about how you can expand your own sense of scale here and now. Anyone can always expand it. You could ask what develops first: my ability to generate a large number of tasks or my ability to carry out those tasks systematically? Which comes first in this kind of thinking? How do I develop all of it? How do I learn to think big? There's one broad answer: feel yourself and love yourself. Feel this enormous scale within you. If you don't feel it inside, building a large-scale business is very hard. Here on this channel, we explore scale, growth, development, and finding yourself. See you next time!