An essay for the “Experts Speak” section of Synergy Global Forum
Roman Viktorovich Vasilenko, Doctor of Economics, President of the International Business Academy (IBA)
Looking back on more than thirty years of professional experience, I increasingly come to the conclusion that there are hardly any truly accidental stages in a career. Skills that may seem secondary today can, years later, unexpectedly become the foundation for an entirely new direction.
My own professional journey began far from entrepreneurship.
In 1986, at the age of seventeen, I became a cadet at the Yaroslavl Higher Military Financial School named after General of the Army A. V. Khrulyov. This specialized institution trained officers for the financial service of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union.
After graduating, I continued my service with the Baltic Fleet. From 1990 to 1998, I served as head of the financial service of a military unit at the Leningrad Naval Base.
For eight years, I worked with budgets, military allowances, financial calculations, contracts, and reporting. It was a highly regulated environment: resources were limited, procedures were predetermined, and errors in financial documents could have very specific consequences.
From the perspective of an entrepreneur today, this may seem like a completely different world. Yet it was there that I acquired several skills that later proved to be universal.
The first was the habit of looking at economics through the lens of actual money. No matter how attractive a project may look on paper, its viability is ultimately determined by cash flow.
The second was an understanding of the importance of financial discipline. Reporting may seem like a bureaucratic formality until its absence turns into a real problem.
The third was personal responsibility. A financial decision cannot be fully justified by circumstances or the existence of an instruction. If you are responsible for an area of work, you are also responsible for the consequences of your actions.
At the time, I did not yet know how often these principles would guide me in the future.
In 1998, I left military service and entered the reserve with the rank of Captain 3rd Rank.
The transition took place at an extremely difficult time. The Russian economy was going through a severe crisis, the national currency had lost a significant portion of its value, and the banking system was facing numerous problems.
Against this backdrop, military service appeared to be a much more predictable option. It offered a modest but stable income, a clear career structure, and certain social guarantees.
Nevertheless, I decided to leave.
It is important to note that this decision was not the result of a sudden entrepreneurial inspiration. I did not have a grand business plan prepared in advance or significant capital.
I simply began to understand that my professional knowledge could be useful across a much broader range of tasks.
I knew how to work with budgets, analyze financial indicators, control expenses, and plan the use of resources.
Later, this experience helped me formulate one of the most important conclusions of my career: professional skills often have far greater value than people realize.
Within a familiar system, a particular competence gradually becomes invisible. A person sees it as part of everyday life and stops recognizing it as a competitive advantage.
But when the environment changes, the situation changes as well. What once seemed like an ordinary job function can turn out to be a valuable professional tool.
The following years became a kind of practical laboratory for me.
From 1998 to 2009, I worked in various commercial organizations, holding positions ranging from financial consultant to company executive.
My areas of focus included investments, insurance, and personal financial planning.
I gained additional experience at a Swiss consulting company. Working there allowed me to become more familiar with international approaches to private wealth management.
It was particularly valuable to observe people who had spent many years in the profession. They viewed wealth management neither as a game nor as an opportunity to make quick profits, but as a complex professional discipline.
However, the most significant outcome of this period was something else.
I had the opportunity to see a wide range of companies and entrepreneurs from the inside.
Some businesses gradually became sustainable, while others quickly lost their positions. Some managers navigated crises calmly and adjusted their strategies, while others made decisions that only made the situation worse.
I began comparing these stories.
Why can two entrepreneurs with comparable resources achieve completely different results?
Why does one company continue to exist and grow years later, while another disappears?
Why do some managers use a crisis as an opportunity to restructure, while others lose even what they have already built?
The answer was not determined solely by the industry or the initial capital.
I increasingly came to see the importance of a person’s habits, their ability to analyze what was happening, make decisions, and stick to a chosen strategy.
Today, I consider that period one of the most valuable stages of my career.
Sometimes entrepreneurs are too eager to start their own business and underestimate the opportunity to first work within someone else’s company.
Yet observing other people’s decisions allows you to gain extremely valuable experience with significantly lower risks.
You can see the consequences of a mistake without losing your own money.
In 2009, I launched a project that would eventually become the International Business Academy (IBA).
Two years later, in 2011, the academy was formally established as a private continuing professional education institution. In 2016, the organization received a state license to provide educational services.
Why did I choose education?
By that point, I already had significant experience in the financial sector. Financial consulting remained a clear and commercially attractive direction.
But my practical experience had led me to the realization that money is far from always being a person’s main limitation.
A much more serious limitation can be the absence of certain knowledge, habits, and ways of thinking.
Imagine two people.
The first receives capital, a good opportunity, and a promising project, but does not know how to plan, manage time, or control their own decisions. There is a high probability that they will lose those initial advantages within a few years.
The second does not require as many resources. They may start with fewer opportunities, but through a systematic approach, gradually build a sustainable business.
This suggests that the difference often lies not so much in the amount of capital as in a person’s ability to manage what they have.
This observation became the foundation for the concept of IBA.
I wanted to create more than just another business school offering courses in marketing, sales, and management.
The main focus was to be on the individual.
How does a person formulate goals? How do they organize their life? What habits do they develop? How do they make financial decisions? How do they interact with others? Can they maintain strategic thinking when circumstances change?
For me, these questions gradually became central.
Over the years of working on IBA, I encountered a number of patterns that could not have been fully understood at the outset.
There is always demand for education, but people do not seriously change simply because they hear the right theory.
They need to see evidence that the desired result is actually possible.
That is why another person’s example can often be more powerful than any motivational formula.
When a participant sees a professional who was once in roughly the same situation they are in, the end goal becomes more tangible.
That is why we placed considerable emphasis on guest speakers at the academy. They included experts from different countries and professional backgrounds, including Alan Pease, Andreas Vins, and other practitioners.
There is a great deal of discussion in education about flexibility. But experience shows that a complete lack of structure can work against the learner.
If a person has no clear commitments, deadlines, criteria for progress, or discipline, learning can easily turn into nothing more than consuming information.
People often need not maximum freedom, but a well-designed system in which they can see their own progress and understand what result they are working toward.
Another important lesson came through public speaking.
You can speak to thirty people in a small room, or you can step onto a stage in front of tens of thousands.
The subject matter may remain similar, but the way you communicate changes completely.
A lecture for 30,000 people at Gazprom Arena is not simply an enlarged version of a session for a small group.
You need to approach attention, pacing, the structure of the material, and emotional dynamics differently.
I developed this experience gradually through speaking engagements at various venues, from the Rossiya Concert Hall to Synergy Global Forum in 2017.
In 2021, my book The Hunter for Success: How to Achieve Your Goal was published by Peter Publishing House.
In it, I brought together twelve principles that, in my view, repeatedly emerge in the stories of successful people.
At the same time, I deliberately avoided presenting them as a universal formula for wealth.
I was more interested in showing recurring patterns that can be found in the biographies of people with very different backgrounds, personalities, and professional experiences.
A film of the same name was also created based on the book. As part of the project, I had the opportunity to interview Arnold Schwarzenegger.
For me, this was not simply about having a famous name associated with the project. It was important to capture the experience of a person whose professional and personal biography has value in its own right and make that experience accessible to a Russian-speaking audience.
The book achieved a significant print run.
But I consider the main result of writing it to be something other than the number of copies sold.
Writing the book forced me to structure my own views.
As long as an idea exists only in your mind, it can seem completely obvious. But as soon as you try to put it into writing, you have to prove to yourself that the idea is actually coherent.
It is a useful intellectual test.
That is why I recommend that entrepreneurs try writing a book at least once — even if it is nothing more than a personal document that no one else will ever see.
The process quickly reveals which beliefs are based on real experience and which are simply the result of being accustomed to thinking a certain way.
The Synergy audience is well acquainted with the basic principles of entrepreneurship, so I see little point in repeating obvious recommendations.
Instead, I would like to highlight four ideas that I now consider particularly important.
The longer a person engages in a particular activity, the more familiar it becomes.
They stop seeing their own skills as something special.
But the market sees expertise differently.
What seems elementary to you may represent significant value to someone else.
That is why it is important not only to acquire experience, but also to learn how to turn it into a clear product, service, methodology, or area of expertise.
Entrepreneurial failure does not always result from one major wrong decision.
Sometimes problems accumulate gradually.
A person stops maintaining their routine, postpones important tasks, fails to keep promises they have made to themselves, and stops managing their working system effectively.
Each individual setback seems insignificant.
But over several years, these small things can determine the final outcome.
That is why I see discipline not as a moral characteristic, but as a genuine factor of competitiveness.
An entrepreneur should have a simple and honest answer to the question: what problem does my product solve for the customer?
If it is impossible to answer that question without complicated explanations and numerous qualifications, it is worth taking a closer look at the business model itself.
The ability to explain the value a business creates is not a matter of putting together a beautiful presentation. It is one of the signs that the entrepreneur themselves understands how their business works.
Stepping in front of a large audience creates new opportunities, but it also increases the level of responsibility.
Once a person becomes a public figure, their decisions begin to be discussed and evaluated by people who know considerably less about them than they know about themselves.
That evaluation may be unfair, emotional, or superficial.
But it becomes part of the public reality.
Therefore, public visibility should be viewed not as a one-time resource, but as a long-term commitment.
If a person decides to take a prominent public position, they should understand that the consequences of that decision may remain with them for many years.
If I look at my biography as a whole today, there appears to be little in common between its individual stages.
Military financial service. The commercial sector. Investments. Consulting. Company management. Education. A book. Public speaking.
Yet I do not see these as a collection of unrelated episodes.
Each stage provided the next tool.
The military taught me financial discipline and responsibility. The commercial environment allowed me to see a wide range of business models. Working with entrepreneurs gave me the opportunity to compare different approaches to decision-making. Creating the academy allowed me to systematize the experience I had accumulated and pass it on to others.
In 1998, when I left the fleet, I could not have known where that decision would lead me.
Today, I still cannot say what the alternative course of my life would have been.
But I know one thing for certain: none of the stages I went through turned out to be unnecessary.
That is why I would like to encourage entrepreneurs not to be too quick to write off periods that currently seem temporary, insignificant, or unrelated to their main goal.
Sometimes that very experience becomes the foundation for the next major step several years later.
The key is to understand your own trajectory, maintain discipline, and keep moving forward even when current circumstances make you question the direction you have chosen.