Strategies of a Smart Entrepreneur for Massive Business Growth

AVAlexander Volchek

Sales will change, marketing will change, the product will change, and your work and relationships with clients will change. For example, your company will be worth $10 million. How many times have I heard this mistake? It's such a big mistake, such narrow, small thinking on a manager's part. Why resist this at all? Why resist it? What do you need to think about to grow tenfold? My name is Alexander Volchek. Today we'll discuss growing tenfold yourself, growing your business tenfold, what you need to do, and who you need to become and be inside for that to happen. Understand that tenfold growth isn't just changing a number or a single parameter. Say you have a business and say, “We'll generate ten times more inquiries, make ten times more calls, or simply sell ten times more.” You need to immediately understand, feel, and experience the whole situation of tenfold growth. Not the process of how it will happen or the period when it happens, but what will happen to you once you and your business have grown tenfold.

When you and your business grow tenfold, everything changes. A huge number of things change: sales, marketing, the product, and your work and relationships with clients. You change, your partners change, and your relationships with them change. Your mentors, management team, and employees change. Your legal, accounting, financial, security, and technological automation systems change. The space around you changes.

The energy and office change. A huge number of things change when you make a big leap. Everything changes. Once we understand that everything changes, that many factors around us change, we need to understand that from where we are here and now, we need to make changes and move on many fronts at once. That means launching a whole range of opportunities, tasks, and strategies, a broad, extensive range. As you start considering many different directions, the first thing you need to do is define your goal. The goal isn't simply “I want to grow tenfold,” but what finally, really happens, what endpoint matters to you. For example, your company will be worth $10 million. That's your main business goal. You've decided you're in business to sell it. You say, “I need to grow tenfold. My company is worth $1 million or $500,000 now.” There's no direct proportional relationship like that. You have an ultimate goal: you want to sell it for $10 million. Or you want the business to generate steady monthly income, monthly profit you spend on yourself personally.

You say, “I need to reach $100,000 a month,” or “I need to reach $10 million a month.” You define that goal very clearly. Knowing it will lead you directly toward the result of tenfold growth. Again, the goal can't be to grow tenfold. That won't work. You'll spend all your time thinking about how to grow, instead of understanding that you're already—

understanding that you're already at the endpoint of that growth. You've grown, and there's another next step beyond it. One fundamental thing is to see what's beyond the goal: what movement lies ahead, what variations and opportunities come next. Then think about strategy, which should be clearly focused on achieving that goal. If you want to sell the company, your strategy won't contain items fundamentally aimed at extracting profit here and now, because your main focus is the company's value. If your goal is to sell it for $10 million, it's unlikely to be some tiny structure or system. You need a strategy for making it a substantial business. Next, discuss this very clearly with your other partners, owners, and shareholders, if you have them. Discuss and define the goal thoroughly together, understand it, so each of you knows this is the most important thing to do and achieve now.

If you don't have partners, consider whether you need one. When making such a big change, you often need to change yourself significantly. Another person, another partner, can accelerate that change. Besides a partner, there's another solution, another accelerator: a mentor for you and, separately, a mentor for your business. Let's call the person working with you a mentor and the person working with your business an advisor. That person is interested in your business growing strongly. The advisor is interested in your business growing—

interested in your business growing. You most likely need one. If you want to grow tenfold, you definitely need one, even if you have partners. Do you need a personal mentor? A personal mentor isn't interested in the company growing tenfold; they're interested in you personally growing tenfold. So you need a personal mentor. Perhaps more than one, in different areas. One might point out details of your business and professional work. Another might guide your inner personal growth, where professional work and business don't rank above family, health, your inner emotional state, or relationships with people outside the business. Circumstances such as where you live, what you do, and where you are in life. There may be a whole series of personal mentors. Next, look inside the business at the range of tasks and directions that let you move on many fronts at once: changing the sales system, taking different approaches to sales.

If you currently handle one hundred clients a month, you say, “To grow tenfold, I need a thousand clients instead of a hundred.” That's not true. It doesn't work like that. Or, “Instead of a thousand leads to get a hundred clients, I now need a thousand clients, so I need ten thousand leads.” That proportion may simply not work. When you grow tenfold, every funnel, parameter, conversion rate, and system can change. You don't have just one conversion rate; you have many. It's a fundamental mistake made by people who don't think broadly. Many marketers, salespeople, entrepreneurs, and finance people simply multiply numbers. When you grow tenfold, fundamentally and seriously, all your funnels, metrics, parameters, and conversion rates change.

All the metrics, parameters, and conversion rates. Your whole system changes, so much changes. An enormous number of new opportunities and circumstances emerge from many directions. On the other side, new problems, fears, difficulties, and illusions emerge. You need to change the sales system fundamentally. What's my internal automation like? What salespeople work for me? What illusion is there? You need to change the marketing system and understand that it will change. If you attract clients through just one channel today, making Instagram Reels, understand that growing tenfold doesn't simply mean ten times the traffic from Reels. Thinking at scale and thinking about growth means understanding that there are fifteen to twenty other marketing channels and starting to consider all of them. You can stay focused on one. You can focus only on contextual advertising, only on performance marketing, or only on your offline point of sale, where clients keep coming as before. But you need to consider a huge number of other marketing opportunities.

You need people who think completely differently and understand this, rather than knowing just one system, only how to create email campaigns because that worked for your previous growth. You should be ready to enter a new sales channel at any moment without expending new energy, creating new space, or taking a new course to understand that channel—or ten new sales channels. Of course, what do you need to make these sales and marketing changes? A strong management team. If you want to grow tenfold, you need an incredibly great team, and you need to build it. That team definitely won't ultimately consist entirely of the people you have now. Many current people will grow. It's wonderful and incredibly interesting when people stay with you. At the same time, it's incredibly—

with you. At the same time, it's incredibly good and interesting when new people join. Many people with you will leave for someone growing a hundredfold or a thousandfold, someone who doesn't want to grow at all, or someone ten or a hundred times smaller than you. Or they leave to start their own business, or no longer want to work at all. Be comfortable with your current team changing. Be comfortable with needing many great, interesting people if you want serious growth. Here's an interesting point: many people want to grow according to a particular organizational structure. They create it, and many major management systems and schools describe first making a new structure, then assigning people: you run this department, you run that one, you manage here. They start building around the structure. That's a good action. But there's another excellent option to always remember and keep with you. When you see an interesting, good person, a professional, an exceptionally strong director, a powerful manager, a strong operations person, a creative director, or a good hands-on employee who can do something every day, you change your structure for that person. You launch new areas, create a new project, and launch new ideas for that person.

Why did I say that when considering new marketing channels, you shouldn't stay focused only on the old one? Because a great, interesting new person may arrive through whom an entirely new sales channel will be created. For example, I recently managed GeekBrains. I was putting things together, and at one point we were combining GeekBrains with—

GeekBrains with Skillbox, to take it public on Nasdaq in the States. The banks J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley were working with us, and we were proceeding with a company valuation range of $1.8 billion to $2.5 billion. Knowing we were moving toward an IPO on Nasdaq, my first and most important task was to build an incredibly important, great team that would move forward with me. I independently managed one large part of the business, and my partner independently managed another. What does building a great team mean? It doesn't always mean building to fit a structure. It means knowing a particular person. I've been in business twenty years and have many contacts and connections among people. You go to someone and say, “Listen, I'm working on this project with a big, exciting goal. It's exciting in terms of interesting work and professional growth. It's also big because there's a lot of money to be earned. Let's do it together.” They ask, “What would I do?” You say, “Let's have you work on international expansion in this business.” “Does that exist now? Is it planned?” “Not yet, but I can see it interests you, Sasha.”

Or, “Take on special projects in this business. Develop government relations, GR, and our work with government. I can see that interests you.” Or, “We already have a performance marketing team, but we need new marketing, a new strategy, and new funnels. Become a director working alongside the overall performance marketing director, and handle mass marketing, large funnels, for example. You can handle major PR-driven marketing. And you can develop the brand strongly.” You won't necessarily all re—

you won't necessarily all report to one person. When I recruit a team, if I'm a leader, people come partly for the leader, to work and live alongside me. If I start putting them into a fixed structure, I say, “We already have a marketing director, so it seems all the roles for strong people are taken. It's unclear how we can work with you.” How many times have I heard this mistake! It's such a huge mistake, such narrow, small thinking by a manager. Here's an incredibly strong person who often surpasses everyone else, including you as owner, a thousandfold, and they try to fit that person into the system, under this director or that manager. How many people have those owners lost? How many were lost through poor management, by trying to put a particular strong person with tremendous growth potential and inner strength into the existing system, instead of trying to change the system for that person? That's growth, scale, and the thinking needed to grow tenfold. What do you need to do?

Be ready for change and for something new. The example of a company's organizational structure, management structure, and management systems shows this very clearly. Look at what happens when you come into a company and say, “Let's change the CRM system.” Everyone gets negative, especially salespeople. Salespeople don't understand what real automation is. They'll never set up a truly serious, great CRM system themselves. Nine out of ten sales directors will never set up truly excellent automation. What they do set up is poor quality. They say, “No, we don't need it.”

They immediately say, “No, we don't need it.” They don't understand why you're doing it. Sometimes you take over a business, buy part of one, or a new task or partner emerges, and people start resisting the changes incredibly strongly. Tell me in the comments if your employees have resisted change. They resist as though the change will make them die. Why resist this at all? Why resist it? It's a tiny, incredibly small speck in everything happening. Your life will change anyway. The whole team will change. Every business will die, every partnership will die, every job will end. Every employee will eventually be fired or resign. Everyone will eventually die. Everything will end. Why resist this small change? My wife and I sometimes like arguing about where a particular cabinet should go at home. At some point I realized: why am I resisting? Often, when deciding where to put a cabinet, everyone defends their position out of ego. They don't actually care where it goes.

In the end, really. It's great to let go and say, “Please put the cabinet wherever you think best.” Some time passes, and Polina comes to me: “Sasha, maybe we should move the cabinet somewhere else?” I say, “Sure, maybe let's try. I liked that spot.” You stand there thinking, “Why did I argue in the first place? Why did I quarrel? Why did I argue to keep this person instead of firing them? Why did I argue against changing the price from $4 to $4.80? Why did I argue against doubling the number of salespeople? Why did I argue against testing a new ad creative? Why did I—

test a new ad creative? Why did I argue about how a section of the homepage or part of an advertisement looked? About the color of the office chairs? The sign at the office entrance? The thumbnail for a YouTube video? Why did I argue so much and spend thousands of hours and thousands, tens of thousands of units of energy on it? How many conflicts has this caused across so many businesses? Everyone should ask themselves: why did I argue? Why do I endlessly defend my own fence? To grow tenfold, you don't need to defend that fence. Besides sales and marketing, you must change the financial system. There's a 99.9% chance your financial system isn't great. An acquaintance, a perfectly reasonable person, recently wrote to me, “Sasha, listen, I watched your videos on financial management systems again, and finally understood what it is. It's freaking incredible! My finance manager watched them with me and was so inspired. We want to implement it.” I sit there thinking, “Wait a second. A year ago, when I told you that you really needed to look at the financial system, you told me how great yours was.”

What happened? Why couldn't you hear it immediately? Someone has no financial system, then attends a course or program, or a new finance manager comes in and sets one up, and they think they now have a financial system. But there's a wide range between a great financial system and just some system. There are many of those “some systems.” An enormous number of companies set up some sort of financial system. That system needs changing. At a minimum, remember the most important rule: produce a daily cash flow report with a complete set of categories. It must be ready every day. Every morning—

every day, at ten in the morning or at noon, you should receive a report closing out the previous day. You'll clearly see how the previous week, month, quarter, and year went, with comparisons to other years. Every day. It must be done every day. It's a basic task any manager, any finance manager at all, can do in thirty minutes or an hour. Ideally, you should also see a projected P&L, a profit and loss statement, every day. That's a little harder. You'll get there when you're ready to grow a hundredfold, to make the next leap. To grow, pay attention to the accounting system. Look at what's happening there and understand it a little. As you grow more strongly, different parameters change, and you need to see and anticipate them. Likewise, look at your overall management structure: what legal entities and companies you have and how money flows between them. Examine the legal system both on the client side and internally, in processes, procedures, and employee relationships.

The full range of legal aspects. Look at your PR and brand. Of course, look at your product. Your product will be different. Be calm and comfortable about that. I advised a company making around $1 million to $2 million a month selling education. The owner always said, “I want to sell IT education in a particular programming language. I want to sell Python. I want to be the best in Python.” I'd say, “Listen, it's important that your company becomes a market leader. Market leaders, such as the Skillbox brand or a brand like Yandex—

Skillbox or Yandex Practicum, don't teach only Python, only programming, or only IT. They teach many professions. You won't earn enough from Python to grow severalfold. You're trying to fulfill a personal ambition. It doesn't fit your company's strategy and definitely doesn't lead toward the goal you all set together as owners.” You must work on the product and, alongside it, probably the most important element of growth: the right pricing. What does your product cost? What discounts, promotions, and packages are there? How do you sell today, and how will you sell over the long term? What loyalty and referral programs do you have? What kind of system is it? How will it work? I've seen so many businesses make a growth leap, then say, “Now we need to launch a referral program.” They begin working on loyalty and referral programs during the transition, after some scaling has already happened. What happens next? A pause and stagnation, because many changes you didn't anticipate at the start become very difficult, often almost impossible, to make later.

Reconsider your hiring system and approach. Pay attention to HR and be comfortable with the fact that, if you hire one person a month today, you may need to hire fifty or a hundred. How do people calculate it? “I have five salespeople. I need to hire fifty more, and I'll grow.” I say, “What about salespeople leaving? You'll also need to support them internally, and they'll start working completely differently. If one salesperson sells $20,000 worth, that doesn't mean ten will sell $200,000 worth. It won't work that way. Most likely, ten will sell $120,000 or $80,000 worth. It'll look completely different.”

A hiring system is something each of you can build right now. It's especially useful in the Russian-speaking world. I'm in the States, in Silicon Valley. Many startups here already worth tens of millions of dollars, often over $100 million, may have no HR person. Honestly, that amazes me, because hiring would be much easier with one. But since each employee costs a lot here, some companies have adopted that approach. You can easily find someone to recruit people, to create a flow of potential candidates. They don't have to be an HR professional. They can be absolutely anyone capable of a simple action: post a vacancy, call many people, and make every possible effort to get them to the interview. You'll select them yourself. If you want strong growth, you need to conduct the interviews and select people yourself. So many owners say that as you grow, you stop hiring and selecting personally. Yesterday I spoke at a program with four hundred people. People often said they achieved a particular result as business owners when they reduced their working time.

Most of them had a goal of scaling. Alongside that goal, there was always this idea: if I'm scaling, it's great if I stop working myself. If you want to scale and grow, you need to set aside—not just that goal or thought, but your concern and assumptions about how much you need to work. When you want tenfold growth, you get the impression you'll have to work ten times more. When you want tenfold growth, you may get—

tenfold growth. You may get the impression that since the business has grown and is very big, you want to work ten times less. Until you reach that point, you don't know how much you'll need to work, how much you'll be able to work, or, most importantly, how much you'll want to work. I've had periods when I really didn't want to handle operations. There have been different periods. In 2007, I opened my first software development business, and in 2010 I left the partnership. When leaving, I said, “I don't want to run my own business right now. I don't want to decide whether a chair costs $20, $30, or $40. I want a substantial job as an employee.” I became CEO of Megaplan, a leading cloud service in the Russian-speaking market. There was a point when I stepped back from Business Molodost, where I was an owner and managed it for a long time. I remember saying within Business Molodost, “I've stepped down as CEO but remain an owner. I don't want to handle operations now. I don't want to be in those operations.”

There was a period when Andrey Rogachev and I launched Agro24. Andrey Rogachev founded Pyaterochka. He was the first person in Russia to earn a billion dollars outside privatization. I remember developing an incredible desire to work fifteen hours every day. Andrey and I sat together four, five, six, or seven hours daily, thinking through everything: offer details, what a landing page looked like, how to capture a huge market or attract many partners. Nobody understood where the energy and strength for operations came from. We started doing operational work simply because the desire appeared. At some point it woke up, and we found it interesting and great. When that desire ended, we closed the company, closed the startup together, parted ways, and stopped doing that operational work. We no longer wanted to do it. You don't—

you no longer wanted to do it. You don't know how you'll feel or what you'll want once you've reached tenfold growth. Please let go of worrying whether you'll need to work a lot or a little, whether you'll have anything to do. Someone says, “I'm busy now. What will I do afterward? I'm lonely, I'm alone. I need a business that keeps me occupied.” Perhaps that's exactly why you don't have a large, strong, great executive team. A strong executive team doesn't mean you start working more or less. At GeekBrains, I had thirty directors. I still easily came to the office every morning at seven-thirty, seven, or eight, and might leave at ten, eleven, or midnight. But if I didn't want to work, I'd stop at noon. It all depends on me. The most important thing to understand is that there's no single simple action that produces tenfold growth. Today I tried to show you what you can do on many fronts at once. You can do far more that way, hundreds or thousands of times more.

This was Alexander Volchek. You're on my channel, where we discuss scaling and growth for business owners, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and those who want to become one. For those who want to scale, and most importantly, those who want to grow themselves. See you in future episodes.