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Александр Высоцкий

Small business. Big game

Introduction

This book is not about how to come up with a brilliant business idea, but about how to organize the work of a company so that its employees function as a genuine team and are capable of implementing a worthwhile idea. Experience shows that the brilliance of an idea is undoubtedly a plus, but if you look around carefully, you will find that most flourishing companies are not actually based on any revolutionary idea. What is revolutionary about McDonald's fast food, Starbucks coffeehouses, or products sold by the majority of chain supermarkets? Every business has its own expertise, of course, but the most successful companies offer their clients fairly ordinary products. Why then, of hundreds of competing fast-food chains, have only a few achieved great success, and of hundreds of grocery stores, why have only a few grown into large chains? In most cases, the secret is not in some special know-how or secret formula; it is in how a company is run.

It’s been twenty years now since my friends and I opened our first company. We were extraordinarily enthusiastic about having our own business and felt like travelers setting out in search of adventure. We all were in our early twenties, recently graduated from a higher education military institution, and knowledgeable about computer technology. The computer industry was just beginning to take shape, and it seemed to us at the time that our knowledge and skills were all we needed to create a successful business. Of course, we were apprehensive about the obstacles we faced, but the prospects were alluring. We had no money to buy ourselves equipment to show to clients, to create a minimum inventory, or to fulfill the other requirements of an official Apple dealer in Ukraine. We therefore decided to begin by selling users and official dealers all sorts of auxiliary devices such as external hard drives, scanners, and software.

We decided to deliver to order: We simply took orders, accepted prepayment, and then supplied whatever was needed.

There was no talk at all of any sort of serious planning; we simply grabbed any order on which it was possible to turn a profit. No matter what the client wanted – instructional programs for preschool children, a professional scanner for a publishing house, a portable printer or a batch of modem cables – we took on the order. We very quickly earned the reputation of being fellows who could get anything for Macintosh computers. We found a suitable supplier in the United States – a small computer firm that bought everything we needed from various manufacturers and shipped it to us. Then we would deliver these goods to our customers. Our own equipment, meanwhile, consisted of nothing but a single computer on its last legs (good only for printing documents), a fax machine, and an electric kettle. A company that procured equipment used by oil refineries gave us a room in its office.

After several months of working by the maxim “We get what you need,” we already had good connections with authorized dealers, and thanks to this, we were able to land our first big fish. Even before we were an authorized Apple dealer, we purchased a shipment of computers from a dealer – a shipment that the customer had for some reason refused to pay for – and we sold that lot to another official dealer. Payment for these computers went from Switzerland to Turkey for some reason, in exchange for Hilal chocolates. Our profit from this transaction consisted of two computers, which became our primary asset and served us for many years to come.