Today we moved into a new office-studio — 65 square metres for the team and for filming. Why I've spent ten years growing this business on my own money.
How do I grow my business?
Today we moved into a new office-studio.
It’s a well-renovated space of 65 square metres (about 700 square feet).
We’ll have an office there for the team and our own studio for podcasts and reels.
I remember renting my first office back in 2014 in Nova Kakhovka. A tiny room of 8 square metres with just enough space for one desk and a cabinet. I was subletting it from a construction company.
That was when I first started running offline trainings. We’d gather in the hallway once the working day was over and my landlords had gone home.
It was inconvenient, but when you’re doing something for the first time, the psychological barrier is harder to get past than any of the practical difficulties.
Once I got used to the idea that I had a sublet room, renting a separate space a couple of months later felt much easier.
The same thing happened with my first employee in 2015. For about a year I kept thinking I needed an SMM manager, but I couldn’t bring myself to take responsibility for another person. Working with freelancers had already run its course for me.
When I finally made the decision and hired my first social media assistant, within a couple of months we had ten people working in the office. In any business, psychology is 80% of the result.
For the last ten years I’ve been trying to move one step at a time.
I don’t raise outside capital to grow the business. I rarely make spontaneous, unconsidered decisions. I talk to a lot of different people and do my research before getting into any process that’s fundamentally new to me.
I’ve always grown on my own money. Only once, in 2016, did I raise a couple of thousand dollars to open an interior design studio in the Kherson region — and I paid that money back within a few months.
When you move gradually, gathering resources and putting them to work carefully, the space of possibilities grows a little wider every month.
Every new piece of equipment gets bought when it’s genuinely needed and will actually be used. Every person on the team appears for a specific area of responsibility. Every square metre of the office is put to sensible use.
That approach is very different from the idea of borrowing $20,000 at interest and opening a beauty salon. In that scenario you pay for every mistake and every fuzzy piece of thinking with money, nerves and time. That approach doesn’t seem very wise to me.
When you grow gradually and on your own money, you move up to each new step only when you genuinely match it. You learn to use what you already have.
And when you’ve climbed every step of your development yourself, you can calmly go back down a few steps if you need to — because you still have a clear picture in your head of how to get back to the level you want.
That’s how I approach growing my business. I sincerely believe that if I don’t have some piece of equipment, some specialist or some other opportunity right now, then I’m simply not ready for it yet.
So starting from where you are right now, instead of waiting for someone with a suitcase of money to spot your genius and want to invest in you, seems like a very good idea to me.
Do you agree that it’s better to grow a business gradually and on your own resources?
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