an ideal time to go slightly off-piste (within reasonable limits) and bend the rules a little, while avoiding any penalties or fines. As far as the authorities and regulators are concerned, your company does not exist yet; the few clients you have are not highly active. For a start-up, each day can easily be its last. Bending the rules at this stage is a necessary evil, but only insofar as this "illegal" period enables you to finetune your business processes and hone them until they are functional, efficient, and legal.
Over three months, Andrey opened two more Izbyonka locations, and created an intuitive software program to automate product ordering, oriented to the volume of sales from the previous period, so that each day the program became "smarter."
But success still eluded them. For nearly four months, each of the three locations had been losing money, and none of them enjoyed heavy customer traffic. The initial start-up capital of a million rubles was running out.
It was time to start Plan B.
"At first," recalls Andrey, "I opened four locations. However, the first three Izbyonkas proved this was not the right thing to do. I was ready to end this project and look for a new, more promising niche. But I did not have any new business ideas, so I opened the fourth location – to at least fulfill my initial plan."
If it was not for that one decision, nothing would have come about: no VkusVill, no producers doing well because of VkusVill, and no book…
The fourth store opened in a new location. Before this, Andrey had intuitively chosen available space at farmers' markets, counting on the considerable traffic from the market's customers. But the final experimental location was in a shopping mall, close to a Billa supermarket in Mitino (a large suburb of Moscow).
The experiment was a slam dunk, and Izbyonka found its target audience. The suburb – Mitino – was a young district with a lot of young families with small children. For them, high-quality dairy products are a priority when shopping for groceries. It turned out that foot traffic in a shopping mall suited Izbyonka far better than the farmers' markets.
The first day in the shopping mall showed Andrey and his team that it was far too early to admit defeat. Izbyonka's refrigerators were empty by lunchtime. News of a new and innovative dairy shop with domestic products spread like wildfire, simply by word of mouth. And on that day, we grasped the immense power of the grapevine.
We modeled each successive Izbyonka on the Mitino experience. Being focused on young mothers with children, we were "squatting" near major supermarkets by offering a dramatically different product from the large chains. We abandoned the idea of farmers' markets and everything that was excessively local.
"I learned an important lesson from Izbyonka's identity crisis," says Andrey. "When you try to offer a brand-new product or service, it is important to try all kinds of different tactics and options. Your vision may very well differ from your customers' needs and desires. And never judge the success or failure of a project just on one attempt. Opening a business is a process of experimentation and adjustment to the situation. Often something that seemed to flop at the start ends up being the winning formula for your success."
RULE 3
Hire people who you find interesting and feel comfortable with, especially at the beginning.
By the start of 2010, Izbyonka was safely off life support. Its retail locations began to pay off, and the company took its first tentative steps. It was still a start-up, affected heavily by the world around it, but – borrowing yet another medical term – we observed an improvement in the patient's condition.
That is when the key employees appeared at the company, the ones who remain at its core: Alena Nesiforova, Renata Yurash, Tatyana Berestovaya, Evgeny Kurvyakov, Maksim Fedorov, and others.
The company now lives by the rules of a unified, well-functioning organism: perhaps not an ideal one, but certainly a harmonious one. In a perfect organism, all the organs work flawlessly, as if in a laboratory. Entire systems can fail in a coherent one, but the organism will turn on its immune system's defense mechanism to fix them.
Meanwhile, the concept of "us" is developing; an important phenomenon in terms of a healthy corporate culture.
Henceforth I will use "we" to mean our collective hive mind, although I can anticipate many questions from readers: "Who are 'we'? What do you mean, 'we decided'?"
Honestly, we do not have a standard answer to these questions. At some point, it became difficult to determine who produced an idea and who developed it into a working concept, or who first questioned the viability of an idea, or the person who caught the whiff of a mood, then set a rule and was the first to follow that rule. We became such integral parts of each other that, over time, distinguishing the "I" became meaningless.
Today, if you look at the way we assembled the puzzle pieces of the small but ambitious Izbyonka team, you might conclude that it was merely dumb luck, because some coincidences are otherwise impossible to explain.
Now, Alexey Ilyichev owns a medium-sized transport company that provides delivery services for Izbyonka and VkusVill. His success story amazes and defies any logical explanation.
"I live in the Tushino district, near the mall, where the second Izbyonka opened. Once, my wife asked me to buy sour cream. She told me to look in the dairy stall there. I did not find a single dairy stall and bought sour cream elsewhere. Later, my wife brought me to Izbyonka and told me to mark it as the place she wants me to buy all our dairy from. I recall a salesperson and a young man running around with boxes, and later I realized that the young man was Andrey Krivenko and Nadezhda Spirova was the salesclerk."
Ilyichev continues: "I had already been working for myself for a long time in the (private) transportation business. Out of curiosity, I asked Andrey what trucks they drove. He answered that they were just getting started and driving products around by themselves but were looking for someone to take the job on. I gave him my phone number, and ten days later, Andrey called me back. We met at the warehouse, and he showed me products and said: 'Here is the milk, and here is the kefir.' I answered: 'Right, but what is next?' Andrey said, with a surprise: 'What do you mean, what is next? Take it, drive it, unload it.' I did not even show him my passport!"
Alexey recalls the early days, "I could not believe that Andrey just handed me the keys to his warehouse full of product! It was fun back then. Such enthusiasm! Of course, I knew from the beginning that I would not be the only driver for long, and that is what exactly happened. After we opened the sixth outlet, the question of a second vehicle came up. But Andrey stepped away from solving transportation questions from the very beginning, so I handled everything." The next story is about Alena Nesiforova, who worked as a market researcher for DuPont. Nevertheless, she swapped her business trips to Paris and Barcelona for work trips to Kaluga and Ryazan after deciding to work for Izbyonka:
"I studied at the Moscow State Linguistic University, the best linguistic university in the country, and at one point tried my hand at tutoring. I posted an advert on a website, and the first call came from Alena Krivenko (Andrey's wife). She had a lot on her plate, not a lot of time, and a need for English. I was the perfect choice, as I lived right across the street from her son's kindergarten. We started working together and understood that English was not the only thing that we had in common. We talked a lot about life. A couple of years after we met, Alena told me that her husband Andrey was planning to launch Izbyonka and suggested that I give it a shot. I agreed it was a significant risk – I was leaving a large, stable company to jump into the unknown. When I look back on it now, it seems
