Unstoppable Business Team: Strategy for Developing a Competent Entrepreneur

AVAlexander Volchek

Look at their fears, pain, and problems. You can lose that opportunity to scale and grow, lose the entire business, and lose—at some point, simply lose. Building the illusion that there won't be any quarrels, that there won't be any hurt feelings. You need to learn to accept yourself, love yourself, respect yourself, and live in balance with yourself. You're asking how to build a great, strong, ambitious, real, solid, cohesive, unbeatable team: a management team that will develop your business with you, a management team that will go through a long journey of transformation with you. Look: if you want enormous growth, you know you need to make a huge number of changes at once. Many different changes happen. When you change significantly and your business starts changing significantly, think how much responsibility rests on the management team to change too. Interestingly, in this case the responsibility isn't yours. It rests on the team, because the team may simply not want to change, not want to do it. That's their own choice, their choice.

It's not something you can order, something you have total control over. And importantly, perhaps this isn't about where you're at fault. Even if you took some wrong actions while scaling and the team didn't come along, that doesn't mean it's your fault. The executive team chooses for itself whether to move with you—

to fivefold, tenfold, twentyfold, or hundredfold growth, earn more money with you, enter new markets, or gain many clients. Or are your paths different? Let's look at the most important aspects of building this great management team. I'm deeply convinced that a good, strong team—and I'm talking about a real, large, good, strong team—is possible when it gathers around a leader. When there's a leader and you, as the owner, attract those people. I had an interesting example quite recently. When I started managing GeekBrains, we brought GeekBrains and Skillbox together to take the combined holding company public on Nasdaq in the U.S. We were already proceeding; the process was underway, and the preliminary range was $1.8 billion to $2.5 billion. A serious undertaking, jumping into a very big goal. It was important to do it with an incredibly strong, great team. I managed one part of the business, my partner managed another, and you know you have to give your part a tremendous boost. At one point, I had thirty strong directors, thirty strong leaders, twenty executives, and other good managers with whom I spent a huge amount of time, and wanted to spend that time.

Many ask, “How did you manage thirty people? That's a little strange. An odd, unclear approach. Why do we need so many people? Perhaps it's excessive.” But when you spend every day at work moving toward a large-scale goal, if you're a person with great strength who can handle many tasks, you can easily manage communicating with thirty directors. From you—

with thirty directors. Now imagine they're not just thirty ordinary people, but incredibly strong, great executives and major leaders. So first: good employees and good managers come to a strong leader. Second, when building a team or working with individuals, there's your ability to discuss things openly, honestly, and without expectations with a potential strong leader: tell them and get them excited about what kind of business you'll have and what you want to achieve. Do it honestly. Why do I say without expectations? If you create an illusion for someone from the start, dangle a carrot that doesn't exist, say they can earn astronomical money they won't earn, or promise growth that won't happen—if you exaggerate too much and don't show the truth—at some point you'll lose. That person will leave, and may create an incredible number of problems. I've hired more than a thousand people in my life and certainly hundreds of directors. During interviews now, I always try to describe as much of the existing negative side as possible, the different drawbacks, and what bad things will happen in our work and company.

Then show what opportunities the person has and why it's great to be with me. Motivate them, show my strengths and the company's strengths, and the incredibly interesting, long stretch of work ahead. That honesty is incredibly necessary. When there's honesty, the person starts trusting you and opening up. They join the company both because of you and because of the business.

They have two solid reasons for their choice. It's great when, after the interview, you leave them feeling certain they want to work for you, while you still have the option to make an offer or not. That's probably an art in itself. How to conduct a great interview and motivate someone needs a separate discussion. Once you've opened up and given them as much relevant information as possible within a certain range—of course, you may keep some things to yourself, not disclose absolutely all the risks, certain confidential partnership information, or 100% of your goals—you've still given them a range of information. Then they'll gradually give you as much information as possible. You need to make it possible for them to tell you their truth. Their truth isn't their great qualities or the good things they've done. Look at their fears, pain, and problems, their current feelings toward you, your company, and the work you do. What gives them pause?

Where might they have potential problems? It can be hard to do this in an hour-long interview, but it's possible overall. Obviously, someone won't open up 100% in an interview. They won't tell you, for example, about problems with their wife, or that their wife or husband actually decides whether they'll stay and work or not. But you can form a basic picture, because bringing them into a conversation without expectations lets them give you a little more information. Then you can see whether you're ready to work with this person. To attract strong people, you need to be a person who operates on a large scale. That doesn't mean being famous or having a million followers. It means thinking and presenting yourself on an incredibly broad, global scale.

An incredibly broad, global scale. When someone sits across from you in an interview, they feel that energy and strength and want to be around it. They don't put themselves above you in a show of superiority. They feel your spark and strength, knowing that with you there will be growth in scale, not just for your business but also in the transformation of their own inner personality. The more you can show someone your inner capacity for scale, the more likely you are to attract very strong, great leaders. This matters! Nine out of ten business owners, nine out of ten people managing businesses, make the mistake of hiring for an existing organizational structure. A structure considered right for scaling, growing, and developing. They start filling positions and hiring only for that structure. On one hand, having an organizational structure is right, absolutely right. I devote a lot of energy and attention to it and always have in every one of my companies. At the same time, you understand that this structure is dynamic and can change.

Today, someone came to interview for whom we need to open a new department. Today, someone came who should work in marketing but shouldn't report to the marketing director. Someone came who should work in sales but shouldn't report to the sales director. Someone came who, according to the chart, should report to a particular manager, but will actually report to you, the person running and driving the business, watching over it and being with it every day. This dynamic organization, this dynamic organizational—

dynamic organization, this dynamic organizational structure, is important first of all for attracting new talent. It's also important because, when scaling, you never know what will happen. Say you plan to grow tenfold through a particular kind of marketing, a particular marketing channel. You say, “My performance marketing will grow tenfold, so I need this many people in marketing, sales, everywhere.” But something changes as you grow. Alongside the online channel, an offline channel opens up, for example, and your structure changes to handle the flow of clients from that offline channel. If you say, “No, we agreed we'd definitely grow only within this structure,” you're excluding new people, new opportunities, and new paths. You can lose that opportunity to scale and grow, lose the entire business, and lose—at some point, simply lose. We're used to judging people who won, who succeeded, according to particular factors.

But first, those people could often have achieved ten times more. And often we don't know the real reason they succeeded, who actually produced that big result. You know this very well from your own experience. When you want to build a strong team of people and leaders, understand that they'll interact and have squabbles and arguments. It's important to create an environment where those arguments are possible, because they'll happen anyway. It's quite difficult to sustain the illusion that there won't be quarrels, hurt feelings, or people fighting over territory. But you can create an environment where people can generally discuss it openly, at least open—

discuss it, at least openly with you as the owner, the person passionate about the business and driving it. This matters: someone can come calmly and talk about an internal conflict. In my last two businesses, GeekBrains and Agro24, some of the same people worked in design and programming. A couple of directors also worked in both. They fought at Agro24 and kept fighting at GeekBrains. Often a meeting would be quiet and calm, and afterward they'd start arguing separately. At one point I'd say, “Guys, I'm no longer interested in your internal conflict. I don't want to deal with it.” I told each person, “I want to work with you personally. I want you on the team. To stay on the team, please pay attention to yourself when communicating with the other person.” Did their communication improve while working together? Probably not. They probably learned to interact with each other. What matters is that they stayed together on my team for a long time. They stayed until the end. It's a powerful example of understanding and seeing a person's strength, rather than their weaknesses.

If you want to build a strong management team in your company, alone or with your partner, understand that everyone has negative sides, everyone carries a kind of darkness, everyone carries strange qualities. Over many years, I've learned to focus my attention strongly on a person's good side and direct as much—

as much energy as possible toward their good side while working. A good example is people who worked with me through more than two, more than three, even more than four companies. Some worked with me at Megaplan when I was CEO, at Business Molodost when I was an owner and managed it for a substantial period, at Agro24 when we built the business with Andrey Rogachev, at A2life when we built an education company, and at GeekBrains. People went through all those businesses with you. By the third or fourth business, at some point you realize you simply enjoy being with this person. But to learn to accept other people for so long through different changes, you need to learn to accept yourself, love yourself, respect yourself, and live in balance with yourself. You need to allow for the fact that a person working with you changes. They can change for the better and grow, or for the worse and decline. For some reason, employees have a hypothesis or opinion that working at a company for a long time automatically means they should get an increase in salary, position, role, or recognition.

I always say that, of course, a person develops over time. Their whole life is development. All of life is development. But development can have a positive aspect, or it can bring deterioration. Someone can grow strongly for several years, then start declining sharply. If you can sense this, look at it openly and honestly without illusions, and discuss it with—

people, showing them their truth, you'll build a strong team. A strong management team forms when you can consider each person individually, see them, see a human being first and foremost, and give them their next step. Show them a next step for themselves, without being afraid to do so. Sometimes you need to tell a strong director, “Listen, our paths no longer align. You're stronger than I am.” Or, “Our paths need to diverge because I see you have different goals, and right now you don't fit my business strategy.” That's honest. At the same time, when you see someone has changed, you can make a strong move by building some processes and part of the company around them. That also shows your strength as a person who operates on a large scale. Take any large organization in the world, any organization operating on a large scale: there will always be a mix of approaches. Some will be very systematic, rigid, incredibly complex, with no room to move, every process described in detail, and someone working twenty hours a day as a manager, executive, or director.

In that same company, there will be people, processes, areas, and activities where a manager or director has complete freedom: what to do, how to do it, how to make decisions, and when to act. Taking any big company and attaching a set of rules to it, saying, “This company has only a culture of freedom,” would be somewhat disingenuous. If you move into certain areas, such as security and the stability of customer service, or safety in terms of people's lives inside the company, you'll see an army-like, military mechanism of rigid, strong—

rigid, strong, incredibly detailed processes. You, your partners, and your team will see and observe this. Focus on the fact that hiring and building a large, serious, great executive team, a real team, is fundamentally about your own personal scale in terms of the people who surround you throughout life. How varied are those people? What is your wife or husband like? What are your relationships with your parents and close relatives like? What close friends do you have? What acquaintances? Do you have acquaintances you simply walk with? Friends you watch movies with? Friends you discuss business projects or matters with? Acquaintances you travel with? Can you talk calmly and easily with your neighbors? How wide is the overall range of your relationships? How easily do you connect with different groups, for example incredibly wealthy, inaccessible people and, at the same time, very ordinary people? And treat them all the same, in terms of honesty toward the other person.

First and foremost, you know that, regardless of what someone represents socially, there's a human being within them. You need to approach them honestly, with an inner state of love, joy, honesty, freedom, acceptance, and mutual respect. The wider your circle of communication, the easier it is to build absolutely any team. It doesn't matter whether it's an executive team managing your overall business, strategy, development, product, sales, finance, and marketing, or a small department developing a new channel or working on international expansion.

A channel or international expansion. Or a small group of acquaintances with whom you walk, read books, watch movies, or travel. So the most important thing for having a great management team is to be a great, real, honest, sincere, authentic person with values. That means two things: love for yourself and harmony with yourself; and living by the laws of the universe and treating others with incredible honesty, respect, compassion, and help. Please leave comments below this video. What is your team like? Do you have problems building it? What are your current acute pain points or issues in working with your team and management? I'll definitely review these comments and give you advice. See you in new videos!