8 июня 2017 г.

Text by Oksana Kozlova

CFA Association Russia continued hosting its regular business breakfast series at the Correa’s restaurant on June 8. This time CFA Russia invited Evgeniy Ivkin, an expert in crisis management, who focused on how to sustain a stable growth and avoid making poor business decisions.

Having obtained an MBA from Northwestern University in Chicago and worked in 15 different countries, Evgeniy brought an international perspective on conducting business in Russia. During the presentation he pointed out common mistakes that Russian companies make and suggested a few business strategies to prevent losses.

Evgeniy explained the method of basic screening to filter out companies that cannot be saved by a crisis manager during the times of trouble. According to Evgeniy, there are four types of business models that cannot be fixed: businesses based on personal relationships, poorly managed businesses whose owners want a crisis manager to fix everything for them, businesses whose owners want a crisis manager to bring back the money he/she stole, and businesses that became ineffective a long time ago but their owners only noticed it now.

There are two types of businesses in Russia, those that operate as a system and “chaotic” businesses. The former is a stable and coherent model, but unfortunately only 1-5 percent of Russian companies work that way. The other 95-99 percent operate chaotically, the guest speaker explained.

A key factor in conducting a successful business is to focus on something one knows really well. “The typical mistake is to change one market segment to another or what is worse to start working in a completely different industry without enough knowledge and skills”, Evgeniy said.

Another common mistake is to focus on personal interests of owners rather than those of clients. Sometimes entrepreneurs try to import business ideas from Europe or the United States and use them in Russia, but more often than not, their ideas fail due to significant differences in the market systems, client preferences and their mentality, Evgeniy explained.

To sum up his presentation, Evgeniy talked about the importance of always working on the improvement of one’s business. “Business can be compared with the traffic light: it cannot stay the same for a long time, it always changes,” the speaker concluded.