Читать книгу Diving Into the Red Ocean. How to Break the Rules of Retail and Come Out on Top - Евгений Щепин - Страница 5

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 like such an adventure!"

Nadezhda Spirova was one of the company's first salesclerks. She came to Izbyonka in June 2009 and is still working today. She has happy memories of those early days.

"In 2009, I moved to Moscow and worked at Kroshka Kartoshka[2] for a few months. Then my sister saw an advert in the newspaper for sales staff at Izbyonka and suggested that I go for an interview. The company still did not have an office – I met with Andrey Krivenko and Dima Kozyrev in a café. I liked everything. Andrey told me to come to look at the location on Friday, and on that Saturday, I started work and have been there ever since. In 2016, I transferred to VkusVill.

Nadezhda recalls the early sales tactics of the first Izbyonkas: "We grabbed people and persuaded them to try something. As soon as a person opened his mouth, you shoved a spoon full of cottage cheese[3] in, and while he chewed, you told him who you were and why he should buy dairy products from you. We, the first salespeople, were like the Three Stooges rolled into one. We were not afraid of being funny, and we deeply believed in the products we were selling."

There are dozens of these kinds of stories. These people, our priceless employees, were the ones who created this company. They erected this fortress, brick by brick. And they did this not because they were paid phenomenal money, or because they were being threatened with fines and punishments, or even because they were consummate professionals. It was just because each of them was first and foremost a human being, and only after that a market researcher, clerk, or analyst. Each of them created their world and did so sincerely. These people just cared.

WE, THE FIRST SALESPEOPLE, WERE LIKE THE THREE STOOGES ROLLED INTO ONE. WE WERE NOT AFRAID OF BEING FUNNY, AND WE DEEPLY BELIEVED IN THE PRODUCTS WE WERE SELLING.

And when someone asks at another conference: "What HR strategies did you use to create your team while launching your business?", we just want to walk up to that person, hug them, and wipe all those HR strategies out of their head. Life, intuition, and engagement are so much more effective than any HR strategy out there.