Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich has long been the country's leading reporter. He is one of the founders of the Russian Reporter magazine, where he built a strong team of research journalists.
But the crisis in the media industry made Dmitry seriously think about new business models for real journalism. This is how his “Once Upon a Time” Lab appeared – a factory of “good stories about good people”. Colleagues under the leadership of Sokolov-Mitrich write books and essays about the heroes of development from Russian business. At the same time, Dmitry insists that this is not PR, but "dependent journalism", which in many aspects gives much more freedom of the author than modern media. Sokolov-Mitrich spoke about his unique experience to the journalists of "Small Business".

Not very big dolphins

You are currently releasing a book, Dolphins of Capitalism, about people who have built businesses around solving social problems. Who are they?

They are entrepreneurs in the truest sense of the word. After all, an entrepreneur is not the one who has a lot of money, but the one who creates a resource, carves fire from a stone. And you can create something from nothing only by solving the problems that exist around you. Like, for example, Sergei Pyatovsky from the small town of Velsk with a population of 20 thousand people, where children have nowhere to go beyond the sandbox. When he built his “Dinosaur Park” there, everyone was twiddling their thumbs, and now half of the Arkhangelsk region is coming there. Or, for example, Natalya Nikitina from Kolomna near Moscow. Together with her friends, she revived the Kolomna Pastila brand, created a whole network of interactive museums in the city, and as a result, the tourist flow to Kolomna increased 5 times, the historical center changed beyond recognition. We started with books about large companies - such as Yandex, BI Group, the Wilgud smart car service network, Anderson coffee houses, but gradually saw another niche. There are a huge number of interesting small and medium-sized entrepreneurs in the country, they have something to tell, but their advertising budgets are not interesting for the top media. But the media may be interested in their real stories, if they are presented not in a PR way, but truthfully and at a high professional level. My business is that I connect the best journalists in the country with the best entrepreneurs in the country. The result is the best texts in the country.

- But aren't you taking bread from traditional media in this way? Why should they publish these texts and not send you to the advertising department?

– And what are epitheses on magnets?

These are artificial parts of the face that are attached to a specially implanted titanium lattice. It is very convenient, by the way, to scare traffic cops. You lower the glass, tear off your nose - and that's it, traffic cop, as if blown away by the wind.

Books and content

- It turns out a paradox: companies do not have money for placement in the media, but do they have money to pay for the work of your journalists?

- Well, firstly, it is much less money, and secondly, people pay not because they have a lot or little money. People pay when they see added value for themselves. The main slogan of the Laboratory “Once upon a time” was invented by the third person in Yandex, Elena Kolmanovskaya, when she left an autograph on the book that I wrote for them: “Thank you for understanding us.” It is for this “thank you for understanding us” that our customers are ready to pay.

– And how do they then use this “understanding” in their business?

Let's take a concrete example. One of our regular clients is Build Investment Group, the largest construction company in Kazakhstan. Its head, Aidyn Rakhimbaev, ranks 20th in the list of the richest people in this country according to Forbes. The company is among the top 200 largest developers in the world. It was created 20 years ago by young boys who became friends in a hostel in Tselinograd. They rose to such heights thanks to their mania for development and orientation towards European rather than Eastern traditions of doing business. You know, in Kazakhstan there is such a thing as “agashka”. This is a successful businessman or status official. He has achieved a lot. He must have a belly and a second wife. In Alma-Ata, there are even entire business-class houses, which are almost completely populated by the second wives of agashki. So, our clients from the BI Group are such new type of “agashkas”. They don't have second wives. They are not conceited at all, the result is important to them, and not dust in the eyes. They are slim, fit and have very different ambitions. The BI Group has its own university, a corporate library on each floor and a very good, active environment. We made a “Book of Changes” for them – a living history of the company, without any retouching or embellishment. Now we are working on another book that will be released on the market and will be sold in stores. Why do they need all this? First of all, for competent HR. To attract the most talented and ambitious youth. So that those who already work in the company are constantly in good shape, understand what and for what they are doing. As Rakhimbaev himself says, "our task is to make special forces out of the construction battalion." We helped this company to comprehend itself and infect this meaning through our books, first to the staff, and then to the external audience. Actually, one more of our slogans sounds like this: “The meaning of life for your business”. We help our clients express their core values, but we only work with those who have them.

- Reject clients often?

- We refuse every second. This happens when we are confused with "talented PR people." But we are not publicists. We are not chasing the number of orders, but the quality of creative tasks. If I suggest to my authors to make a bullet out of something, very soon I will just be left alone. Order legibility is part of our business model. If we take on everything, then we will simply very quickly turn into a PR agency and find ourselves in a niche where it is crowded even without us.

And what to do with the situation when a journalist at the thought that the text is for money, a barrier falls in his mind, he writes without a soul?

- This barrier does not fall because the text is for money. This is the problem with any positive text. I have seen how even journalists with brilliant abilities and extensive experience on a positive topic begin to literally twist and they give out complete bullshit. Loving people is not easy at all. And if you don't love people, you can't understand them. And if you are not able to understand them, you will not write anything interesting. This is the main secret of a good text.

- And if the main character, telling his story, will describe how he "brought" bribes to high offices. Will you write?

- One of our heroes, Alexei Panferov, managing partner of the New Russia Growth investment fund with $500 million in assets, told us how he worked under the roof of the Solntsevo in the 90s. And he didn’t mind at all that it remained in the text - it can still be read on the Secret of the Firm website.

But even if someone really wanted to emasculate and spoil our text, we have an “ambush regiment” for this case in the form of requirements that the media and publishers make. After all, we do not make a book or a journalistic publication in order to place it later for money, but so that the text itself makes its way to the market. Due to its quality and interest. Want to play Vanity Fair? Please, go to the PR people, they will write to you what you want, only then no one will print it for free. You see, our contingent is people who are very intelligent and meaningful, they do not need information marafet, they need meanings and truth. During the 30 years of Russian capitalism, people with primitive brains have largely been weeded out. For some reason, we are especially lucky for those who came to business from science. In the long run, they were the most productive. Probably because for them business is a method of exploring the future, and this is a very correct and reliable approach.

- You worked as a journalist 14 hours a day. Now how?

– I don’t understand what “working time” is, I always work. We don't have an office, so far I don't see the need for it. We meet with the authors in a cafe, the whole team “storms” in co-working spaces. None of our texts are written "in one head". This is always the result of the work of the author and producer. It is very similar to how films are made: even the most brilliant actor will not play a role brilliantly without a good director. The most important moment of our work is to find the “formula of history” by joint efforts, to understand what it is about. From this understanding, everything else will be born - composition, style, intonation.

- You know, now many journalists are reconsidering their attitude to the concept of “freedom of speech”. Freedom is not a tickle for the brain, but access to real creative tasks. Here, for example, the same Soviet scientists. In the 70s they sat in their research institutes, designed lunar rovers and icebreakers, and in the evenings they burned the authorities in the kitchen and felt terribly unfree. Then came the 90s: go with any flag, turn whatever you want, trade in down jackets on the market. And then scientists began to understand that freedom is not about flags, but about moon rovers and icebreakers. In journalism today there is also a terrible shortage of real creative tasks. Sitting in a conditionally independent media, writing five notes a day and in the evening not remembering what the first one was about - in my opinion, this is slavery. But to create texts that will be remembered in a year or two or five - this is freedom of speech.

Escape from coaches

- Will there be any changes in the work of the "Once Upon a Time" Lab, taking into account the path already covered?

– In the near future we have to solve the problem of scaling. Is it possible to manage a large number of unique creative projects without losing quality? While there is reason to believe that this is possible. We also rely not on customer rotation, but on strategic partnerships, and this rate is already working. Ideally, I would like to come to a situation where the label "Once" Laboratory under the text becomes an analogue of the "Michelin star". If the Laboratory wrote about someone, then this person is meaningful, you can deal with him. This approach is very different from the philosophy of the media, which publish any advertisement, just so as not to break the law.

Let me disagree. In our publishing house, it is taboo to advertise clairvoyants and other obscurantism. We try not to deal with scammers.

“That's right, but we have to go even further. We don't associate with uninteresting people. We are building in Russia something that it never had before, even before the revolution - a culture of optimism. Our texts are a growth vitamin, not a tool for manipulating public consciousness. Right now, "charismatic coaches" are pouring in to us. Such a person needs a book to throw dust in the eyes of the audience. I am not allergic to the word "coach", but now there is a whole generation of twenty-year-old alleged entrepreneurs who have not done anything in their lives yet, and are already teaching others how to do business. And we immediately wrap such people. These are not our clients. We smell vanity and cynicism very subtly.

- The question is standard to horror - what do you see as your mission?

- You know, I once talked with a very famous and smart woman. Her name is Esther Dyson, she is a major American investor. At that time, I still had a poor understanding of what business was, so, like the last idiot, I asked what, in her opinion, was Russia's trouble. She grimaced and replied that Russia's trouble is that people in it think too much about what Russia's trouble is. And she asked a counter question: what, in my opinion, is America's main resource? So how would you answer this question?

- High tech?

Esther Dyson answered with one word - optimism. This is a much more powerful resource than oil, gas and even high technology. Actually, the technologies themselves appear only where there is a sufficient concentration of optimism. After all, technology is a method of transforming the world from a worse state to a better one. And if a person does not believe in a better life, then where does technology come from in his head? Russia has always lived under the dictatorship of pessimism. And only now people's hearts and heads are starting to change little by little. And I see it as my mission to contribute to this process with the books and publications of the Odnazhdy Lab. Yes, there are Western classics of this genre. But over the 30 years of Russian capitalism, we ourselves have already worked up a lot of stories and meanings on this topic. We ourselves already have something to tell - both to the world and to ourselves.

- For example?

– Take at least the same history of the Wilgud smart car service network. Two citizens of Uzbekistan, Sherzod and Barno Tursunov, a husband and wife, came to Moscow 17 years ago, lived on $100 a month, wore one pair of gloves for two in winter. We started with one trading container at the Mytishchi building materials fair. We built a large wholesale trading company "Evrodesign". We sold and started a new business - this time in the field of IT. For the end consumer, Wilgood is just a network of car services, but from the inside, it is Uber for servicemen, a highly efficient system that gives franchisees and a stream of customers, and a highly efficient “management” in which all actions are calculated to the millimeter. Henry Ford once invented the conveyor for physical effort, and these guys built the conveyor for mental effort. In the summer, the Mann, Ivanov and Ferber publishing house will release our book about them. It's called Once Upon a Time Not in America. Why not"? Because, in fact, the Tursunovs initially wanted to leave for the United States, but for some reason they were not given a visa.

- Are there any dream topics for which investors have not yet been found?

- There are a lot of topics. For example, we have long wanted to write a bestseller about garbage. Not only from an environmental point of view, but also from an economic point of view. Indeed, in a well-established economy, waste is a huge resource, in fact, the second oil. We also want to write a book about the most striking stories of the failure of Russian business. Success stories inspire well, but it is better to learn from other people's mistakes and disasters. Another idea is to make a series of essays about those who have been awarded the title of "Hero of Russia". Now do you remember at least one? When I ask people this question, most only mention Ramzan Kadyrov.

Can crowdfunding help here?

– I experimented a lot on this field, but I came to the conclusion that this tool cannot be considered stable. It only works sporadically. I have serious doubts about publications that claim to live off crowdfunding. As a rule, they have anchor investors. They just invest through crowdfunding.

You mentioned the government of Moscow - there are a lot of business people there. Maybe this is the reason why it is now "not bestial"?

- We were still looking for an answer to the question of where effective managers come to power in the Russian Reporter. Yes, there is a share of businessmen there. But not predominant. Kaluga, Tatarstan, Moscow, Belgorod - all these miracles of regional development were not made by business people at all. Now, for example, we are studying this phenomenon using the example of Moscow, and communication with the capital's officials was a revelation for me. All this Saltykovo-Schedrinskaya dregs have disappeared somewhere. They even have different faces now!

— Financially you now live or survive?

- Rather, we live.

How do you distribute income? Is there anything left to develop?

- I'm probably still not quite the right entrepreneur. According to my media manager friends, I pay writers too much. Our fees are 4-5 times higher than theirs. And my counter-arguments are not market-oriented at all. I just worked as a reporter myself for 20 years and I understand that a really good essay or report is at least 2 weeks of hard work. How can you pay 10 thousand rubles for it, especially to an author with talent, experience, and a name? Does he have to live on 20 thousand a month? However, even with such a non-commercial approach to development, we still have something left. Perhaps someday this "something" will turn into a fund for investigative journalism, with interest from which it will be possible to pay for ambitious journalistic topics of a non-commercial nature.

- How much does it cost to write, for example, a book?

- We do not have a single price list, because there are no standard creative tasks. Sometimes writing 500,000 characters is easier than writing 200,000. We look at the project parameters. And we are trying to gradually increase the price, as we believe that the market is restructuring: content production will soon be expensive, and placement will be either cheap or nothing.

- Your laboratory is two years old. Ahead, after all, is the "crisis of the fifth year."

- It's easier for me, I'm the only owner. There was an offer from an investor, but I politely turned it down. There is enough liquidity for current activities, but I still don’t understand where to invest. Rent a beautiful office? What for? It is more convenient for authors to write at home, I also do not need a separate office with a secretary. Extra money would only bring down the right settings, and in business this is the most important thing. If someone tells you that he built a successful business - most likely, this is not a real entrepreneur. There is no successful business. You are always at the point of probable death. It's like a swing: today "wow!", and tomorrow "that's it! We need to shut down immediately!" I am lucky: I constantly learn from the heroes of our stories for free, it is very reassuring. Just yesterday we were talking to Sherzod and Barno Tursunov from Vilgud. When they heard about the swing, they laughed: “Dima, they are still small, yard ones. If you don't have to fall too high. And sometimes it throws us up so that just hold on. In general, I realized that being an entrepreneur is like in the movie "Beware of the car." Everyone who does not have a business dreams of buying one. Everyone who has a business wants to sell it.

Exodus

There are no journalists older than forty. If after forty people is still an ordinary journalist, something has gone wrong. The "normal" creative path involves the natural transformation of a caterpillar-journalist into something else. With a journalistic background, but different: editor, publicist, writer, consultant, PR man, businessman, boss, etc. Or even if this is still a reporter, then it is eminent, with copyright, like a staff correspondent. Journalism is the school of a young fighter, from the word "young". The age finiteness of a journalist, by the way, is another evidence of the peculiarity of this profession, along with special criteria for morality, social status, etc.

In general, every journalist either naturally transforms into some kind of butterfly, or even deliberately looks for suitable cocoons for himself. These processes are now, for many, intensified by external factors: the economic crisis or the decline of the industry.

With age (that is, with the accumulation of a name, knowledge and connections), and now also because of the media crisis, journalists mainly move to subcontractors, to corporate communications. That is, the dark side of the force.

There are many attempts to create educational projects. Understandable, honorable, but a little ridiculous. Of course, an experienced journalist may well teach the inexperienced, and there is still interest in the profession among young people who do not understand where it is climbing. But, given the decline of the market, it is somewhat short-sighted for retired journalists to hope for long-term teaching employment. Where will the trained ones work after 3-5-7 years?

Another thing is the training in journalism, again, on the side of allies, in corporate communications. There is just a boom and great prospects. It is the boom in corporate media, on the one hand, that largely contributes to the decline of traditional media, and on the other hand, it greedily absorbs the fading rays of the former sun. rooted and personally saving for many journalists.

However, there are others who try to pour old wine into new well-cut wineskins. The most violent create new, some kind of media, hoping to find a saving recipe. Finally, there are attempts to compose some kind of media project outside of traditional formats, in the hope of guessing the future business model, or even the future niche.

In 2014, Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich, former deputy. editor-in-chief of the Russian Reporter, winner of various awards and one of the best reporters in the country, came up with and launched the Odnazhda Laboratory project, in which he began to write texts with investors' money, but of his own choice, desire and in accordance with his vision. The motivation was exactly this: "A journalist of pre-retirement age is a pitiful sight." He wanted to find some new format outside of traditional media business models.

Thanks to journalism

It is worth saying that this is not the first attempt by Sokolov-Mitrich in the niche of private media entrepreneurship. He's a long-time startup entrepreneur who provides the industry with an important service: validating business models. Five years ago, in the spring of 2011, Dmitry started an interesting project called Thanks Journalism. Perhaps the first of the Russian journalists (that is, not counting bloggers and designers), he tried to collect fees according to the “pay what you want” system. The topic was very popular in the early 2010s and Sokolov-Mitrich got into the flow. Friendly resources like "Vzglyad" and "Rusrep" put a button of his personal wallet on his columns, readers began to pay a "public fee", as he called it. At his LiveJournal, he led.

On the first attempt, 2,500 rubles were thrown into his "hat for money". “The last time money made me so happy about 20 years ago, when I received my first fees,” Dmitry enthusiastically responded. He noted that "money transferred directly by readers is charged with a special emotional content." However, gratitude payments were several times lower than editorial fees. The project lasted a little over a year. In total, they managed to collect 53,709 rubles. The record amount of a public fee - 6785 rubles (then it was $ 220) was brought to him by the column "I'm afraid" on "Look".

By the fall of 2012, he stopped putting the thank you button. The sheepskin was not worth the candle. After all, one must constantly ask for money, and not privately from one or two to ten investors, but in public, from everyone. “How to ask? Shamefully - wrong, should not look like begging. And I can't be cynical. It has become somehow stupid, and I am slowly disavowing it all, - Dmitry told me in November 2012. - There is no economic sense, more damage to reputation. It seems to me that some other moral and ethical connection between the author and readers should arise.

In addition to the moral unpreparedness of the public, there are problems with the technical processing of payments. The need to make a few clicks, enter your data creates a fairly high entry threshold for impulsive gratitude. The Like’n’Pay project by Vladimir Lebedev, addressed to authors and editors, tried to shorten the procedure as much as possible and reduce payment activity to one click, but was also closed after a while due to the unwillingness of banks to bother with micropayments. (Yes, and the state has just begun to screw up the financial channels of alternative crowdfunding and check Navalny's private payers - do banks need it?). Well, there was no influx from potential client participants. They didn't want to ask, to be humiliated. “If the client even slightly asked to click a button inside their content, then the return was very good. But professional pride did not allow them to do this ... ”Vladimir Lebedev shared his memories with me.

In general, lyconomics did not take place in the Russian media. Single more or less viable projects, like Colta.ru, rather implement a traditional crowdfunding model associated with special donation management and constant generation of ideas that are attractive to sponsors.

Story management

In the Laboratory "Once" Sokolov-Mitrich puts on a completely different model. In it, not the one who wants to receive pays for the content, but the one who wants to convey their information to the public. At first glance, it certainly looks like jeans. Custom texts - eka unseen. But there are a few differences from jeans. The main thing is that the Sokolov-Mitrich Laboratory does not deal with accommodation at all. “We make money not by posting content, but by producing it. The accommodation service is the day before yesterday,” he says.

Just like the thank you experiment, Sokolov-Mitrich analyzes the work of his Laboratory publicly. The Secret of the Firm recently published his detailed article "How I Learned to Sell People Their Own Optimism" with the subtitle "There Was a Journalist - Became a Businessman." Of course, such materials promote the project well, but in this case, market analysis and reflection on one's own attempts are interesting. As for promotion - so be it. This is a public payment for Sokolov-Mitrich for his experiments in the media.

According to Dmitry, there is a division of labor in the media market: the production of content is separated from its delivery. “If this hypothesis is correct, then in five or six years, most print media will turn into a kind of cinema that shows, but does not produce. Actually, many of them already today give out only a secondary news feed and cheap journalistic illumination. Editors would be happy to publish serious texts by top authors, but they simply don’t have the money for this - high-quality content has ceased to be a tool for making a profit, writes Sokolov-Mitrich. - At the same time, the best journalistic personnel are released on the market, who are persistently looking for new ways to monetize their services. Sooner or later they will find them, and then we will see a new industry - a kind of media production for the production of real content.

Sokolov-Mitrich considers his Laboratory to be the first experience in creating a niche of "media production" on the basis of the former journalism. The authors of the Laboratory write books and other texts, sell them to publishers or editorial offices for the pennies that publishers or editorial offices are able to pay, and earn on the investments that interested sponsors put into the production of this content.

To understand how this differs from the order, you need to look at specific projects. So, Sokolov-Mitrich wrote a book about the Yandex company - about its ideology, approaches, managers, and various corporate stories. Moreover, at first the company did not want to cooperate, but after reading the first chapters, they agreed and seemed to be satisfied with the result. The business model of the project is clear: the money here comes not from the reader, but from the hero of the publication. But the value of the book still goes beyond the corporate interests of Yandex. Another project is related to the Ironman triathlon - there were entrepreneurs who were ready to finance a book about their sports hobby, and for it to be written by a serious author with good reporter training. Well, and so on.

Dmitry uses the term story-management to refer to this format. “Our clients are “sense entrepreneurs”, development leaders, people who understand that the economy of the future is not only an economy of knowledge, but also an economy of values. And the one who sells not only his product, but also his reality wins in it, ”he writes.

It is better to read Sokolov-Mitrich himself in more detail about the project. I want to use his article to analyze an interesting experience of getting out of a dying industry. Sokolov-Mitrich has a unique case in general, given that he has consistently tried models based on both reader and sponsorship payments.

Six conclusions

1. The transition from readership to sponsorship in content production is, of course, a special case of Sokolov-Mitrich. But still reflects the general trend, which I have been talking about for a long time. For the user, the content will be free. Paying for the production and delivery of media content will not be the one who wants to receive it, but the one who wants to convey it. In the Thanks Journalism project, Sokolov-Mitrich raised 53,000 rubles. And in the Laboratory "Once" - 6 million.

2. Corporate communications keep picking the raisins out of the bun. If during the period of Thanks Journalism Sokolov-Mitrich continued to work in the Russian Reporter, then for his new project he left the media. Another talented journalist, one of the best in his profile, has moved, in fact, into corporate communications. (He is unlikely to agree with this formulation, but in our conditions, normal money for story management can only come according to the corporate model - from a business or departmental payer, but not from public organizations or the funding crowd).

3. I don't think separating production from distribution is a recipe for future media success. Such structuring of the market probably takes place, but still the source of value in the media has shifted not at all towards high-quality production, but towards effective packing. Both distribution and content creation are open to everyone. But what's really the problem in the new ecosystem is the last inch of the last mile: getting the reader to read exactly your text. No golden pen can solve this problem. It goes beyond the limits of the author's competencies and is closer in type to the work of an entertainer. Beautiful writing is not enough, you need to engage the reader.

4. Story management is an elegant name, but the story is still managed not so much by the author as by the payer. The format differs from literary negroism only in the more prominent participation of the author and the publication of his name. But the author still, one way or another, writes on behalf. In any case, writing against the will of the investor will not work. And this is fundamentally different from traditional journalism, which, ideally, does not write about what its characters would like to tell. In the sponsorship model, the freedom of the author is provided only by his name. If it exists.

5. "Eminence" is not only the key to success, but also a flaw in the model used in the "Odnazhda" Laboratory. If the business model is not alienated from the famous author, then there is no business model. There is a personal project based on the talent, name and connections of the author. I would compare the new format of Sokolov-Mitrich with the work of Leonid Parfyonov - he can also raise money for his projects through fundraising, and not through sales to the reader/viewer. Success is ensured by the qualities of Parfyonov, and not by the business model. It cannot be reproduced by any journalist. Of course, the famous author attracts day laborers, but all the same, his personal brand works on the market, and not an alienated model.

6. The generation of the most free and professional journalists in the history of Russia, who grew up in the media of the 1990s, is reaching its critical age for the profession at the same time as more and more persistent signals about the decline of the industry. Generational and epochal crises reinforce each other. Many will find themselves in search of new personal formats. Except perhaps for those who expect to make it to retirement. Well, and also those who work in the media, who have become state press services. The rest should study the experience of the pioneers leaving the media.

In 2014, I came up with Once Upon a Time Lab, a small jewelry workshop that makes success stories. And a year ago, he left the position of deputy editor-in-chief of the Russian Reporter magazine, having only one client (and he was still thinking about the wording of our contract), and became an entrepreneur.

During the year, "Laboratory" reached a turnover of 6 million rubles and formed a portfolio of orders for another 4 million. We invented and brought to the market a new tool - story management - and learned how to sell it. At the same time, formally, we are still IP. We have a team, but no office, no round seal, no full-time employees.

Motivation

A journalist of pre-retirement age is a pitiful sight. I understood this back in Izvestia, where I came to the position of “young talent” in 2000. People whose names had not left the newspaper pages until recently, painfully tried to correspond to their positions, frantically searched and did not find the words and meanings of the new era, and at editorial drunks they confessed to me that they see nightmares every night about being fired.

Soon my name also began to mean something. I traveled all over the country and half the world, earned a reputation as one of the best reporters in Russia, and work in the Russian Reporter added editorial and managerial experience to this. I wrote hundreds of texts, some of which were included in journalism textbooks, published seven books, received a bunch of prestigious awards, and even managed to be a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation. But when at creative meetings young people were interested in my future plans for life, I definitely could only say one thing: “I will definitely not be a journalist of pre-retirement age.”

By the age of 40, it became completely clear to me that I did not want to spend the remaining 20 years of my active life on the same thing that I spent the previous 20 on. At this age, the main resource for a man is not money, but time. I wanted to find a new task worth living for. Writing another 300 cool reports that will be included in the textbooks is not that. Yes, journalism has become boring. As a result of force majeure economic circumstances, our profession has become a sphere of short creative efforts, and now I was interested in long efforts.

"Yandex"

The teacher comes when the student has matured. Three years ago I was offered to write a book about Yandex. I took it on with pleasure: the success story of the largest Russian IT company inspired me for a long time. The project was financed by the Russian Venture Company, but Yandex itself was skeptical at first. At our first meeting, PR director Ochir Mandzhikov said that the company had a need for such a book, but the first four attempts to cooperate with the authors were unsuccessful, so they were not yet ready to take on the fifth one.

I had to act on my own. I began to study open sources, took a series of interviews with people connected in one way or another with Yandex: the first school teacher Volozh and Segalovich, partners, investors, experts. Leonid Boguslavsky (ru-Net Ventures), Alexander Galitsky (Almaz Capital), Sergey Belousov (Parallels, Acronis, Runa Capital), Dmitry Marinichev (RadiusGroup) - each new interview irreversibly changed my picture of the world. In my 20 years in reportage journalism, I have gained a wealth of experience in observing humanity, but the world of business has somehow passed me by. In this part, I have retained a bunch of post-Soviet humanitarian complexes and stereotypes. I sincerely believed that entrepreneurship is something about sharp teeth and strong elbows, and economics is a science that describes the endless and meaningless cycle of shit in nature. Now a new world has opened up before me and it has become the main subject of research.

I sent the first two chapters to Leo Tolstoy Street for reading, and after that the ice broke - the founders of Yandex agreed to cooperate. In June 2014, Yandex.Kniga was published by the Mann, Ivanov and Ferber publishing house. The first 10,000 copies, as well as the copyright, were bought by Yandex itself. On my gift copy with reviews by Arkady Volozh and all top managers of the company, one of the inscriptions looked like this: “Thank you for understanding us!”

But the discoveries continued after the completion of the project. The PR department gave me a small tour of the regional offices, and as a result I realized one important thing. Yandex.Kniga turned out to be useful to the company not only from the point of view of eternity. For her, it has become a very effective tool for managing business here and now.

By that time, the number of "Yandexoids" had exceeded 6000. Too many of them were already ordinary "career passengers". They conscientiously performed their work, but did not understand the basic values ​​of the company - what Ilya Segalovich called "our common sense of beauty." This crisis of growth is a natural and logical phenomenon; any rapidly growing business goes through it. As a rule, company leaders at this moment begin to frantically look for ways to scale their values: they attract team builders, organize voluntary-compulsory trainings in nature, arrange a meeting marathon. Dances with tambourines begin, which the team writes off as the whims of the authorities.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Novosibirsk, Kazan, Minsk, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities where Yandex was sitting, office managers admitted that after reading Yandex.Kniga, before their eyes, the team became a team of like-minded people, and secondary employees turned into leaders. I myself saw how people's eyes lit up, without saying a word, they said about the same thing: “Of course, I knew that I was working in an interesting company, but I had no idea how cool it was!” It became clear to me that these people would never just go to work again. They became part of the story that Yandex lived, and I wrote. They are her characters now. They have found their local, and perhaps global meaning of life. Because for most people the meaning of life is not a mathematically verified truth, but the story that you are ready to live. Our consciousness is dramatic, our mind is fed not by arguments and facts, but by plots of development. In this sense, stories are brain software.

At some point, the untranslatable phrase “story management” popped up in my head. I realized that my experience of cooperation with Yandex can be replicated. The hypothesis was that a real entrepreneur is always an idealist to a certain extent, he built his business on his core values, and for further development he needs to scale these values ​​- both within his company and to the outside world.

Clients

Of the many thousands of recipes for success, this one was my favorite: Set a goal, make a plan, and get your ass up.

The purpose was clear. I want to learn how to sell stories. Not to publishers and not to the media, which have lost their solvency, but directly to customers. I want to match the best authors in Russia with the best entrepreneurs in Russia.

Tear off the ass - with this, too, there were no special problems. The reporter constantly has to step out of his comfort zone, and for 20 years it has become a habit. The job of an entrepreneur is very similar to that of a reporter. In terms of the scale of efforts, one serious journalistic topic is about the same as one contract.

But making plans for me has always been hellish torment. I don’t know how to think systematically and I don’t like it. My life tactic is different: choose the right goal and move towards it intuitively, without thinking further than the next two steps, determining their correctness by smell.

The wording "I started my business from scratch" is a blatant romantic lie. Even the classic 10 cents is still not zero, especially when you consider that, as a rule, they are accompanied by the natural talent and character of the person who has them in their pocket, as well as at least some friends and connections. In my case, the starting capital was as follows: a professional reputation, a pool of the best, in my opinion, authors in Russia, a prototype in the form of Yandex.Books, and not the last people in Russian business that I met while writing it.

The first thing I did was to sit down and sculpt a three-page something in which I briefly and clearly (so it seemed to me) outlined the meaning of the existence of the "Once" Laboratory and the essence of its offer to potential clients. Familiar marketers ridiculed this bag and showed it how it should be. But I didn’t like the “how to” - it was very boring and did not differ in any way from the proposal of some PR agency. From the very beginning, I decided for myself that we are an instrument of development, not manipulation, and are no more like PR than a lecture hall is like a concert by Grigory Leps. It seems that both there and there people sit on chairs and listen to a person on stage, but the meaning of these actions is fundamentally different.

I began to randomly send the bag anywhere: to acquaintances of entrepreneurs, top managers of large companies, regional journalists, publishers of business literature, progressive officials, just friends. The result turned out to be the same. At best, a fruitless meeting "out of old memory", at worst - silence, but more often - a polite "think about it." At the same time, very many people liked the idea of ​​selling stories, even a small lodge of “fans” gradually formed, who, with sincere curiosity, from time to time were interested in how I was doing and gave advice.

One of these tips turned out to be really valuable. A former colleague, who retired from journalism ten years ago and made a career in a large company, advised me to just be more persistent: “Write again at least some of the "silent people." Say that you are collecting feedback and you are interested in their opinion about your proposal. So I did. The result was a pleasant surprise: very busy people wrote detailed letters in response, which, however, desperately contradicted each other.

Some argued that the idea is interesting, but applicable only to government agencies. Others were sure that the state was just not up to it, but business might be interested. Still others sighed sadly: there is a crisis in the yard, what success stories are there. The fourth, on the contrary, assured me that right now the business community has matured to my proposal, since the time has come for non-standard optimization methods. Fifths added to this that the generation of businessmen that started in the 1990s will soon begin to leave the stage and very many big entrepreneurs will want to leave behind a personal story, sing their own My Way. Finally, the author of the simplest letter, without further ado, simply invited to a meeting - "to discuss something."

So I got my first client.

It was Leonid Boguslavsky, a major Russian Internet investor, creator of the international investment fund ru-Net Ventures, No. 55 on the Russian Forbes list. Leonid was the first investor in Yandex, we met while I was working on the book, but almost two years have passed since then. It turned out that during this time he was seriously interested in the long triathlon. At the age of 64, Leonid made the Ironman race three times (3.8 km swimming, 180 km cycling, 42 km running) and even qualified in his age category for the World Championship in Kona - an amateur triathlete's dream. Leonid suggested that I think about a book about endurance - in sports, in business, in life. The book should be serious, motivating and at the same time easy to read. I proposed to collect under one cover seven stories about entrepreneurs, each of whom first achieved success in business, and then in sports. The project was given the working title "Out of Force".

Why did Leonid need this? The perfect blend of idealism and pragmatism. First, the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Second, educating young entrepreneurs about long-term efforts and ambitious business goals. Thirdly, promoting your own business project with the help of a book. On the basis of his passion for triathlon, Leonid decided to become a co-investor of one of the first Angry Boys Sports coaching centers in Russia, and the book should become an additional tool for creating a new market.

To better understand the spirit of triathlon, I also decided to run a little. But "a little" did not work. As I worked on the project, my distance also lengthened. 3 km - 5 km - 10 km. Today I run a half marathon every Sunday, and on April 10 in Rotterdam I will run my first marathon. An important observation: entrepreneurship is very conducive to a healthy lifestyle. Health is beginning to be seen as a vital resource.

The second client of the "Laboratory" was another "iron man" - Boguslavsky's friend and partner in Angry Voys, one of the founders of the New Russia Grouth investment fund Alexei Panferov, the most titled Russian amateur triathlete.

And then events unfolded, as in the famous scene from the movie Once Upon a Time in America, where young Noodles and his friends demonstrate to smugglers how to hide bootleg alcohol from the eyes of a police patrol in the muddy waters of the Hudson. As a ballast, flooding valuable cargo, they suggest using bags of salt. The police float by, the salt dissolves, the cargo floats. In the same way, new clients of the "Laboratory" suddenly began to emerge one after another. It turns out that the "three-page something" was not in vain after all. All this time, it wandered through the right mailboxes, wandered through the chain of recommendations and detonated from time to time. And if at first I was still a little bluffing when I said “we” to the client, then at some point it became clear that “Once” is no longer my self-employment, but for the time being a small, but real business.

In May 2015, we had a client in Kazakhstan - BI Group, the flagship of the national construction industry, a business with an annual turnover of $ 1.4 billion. The leaders of BI Group had the same growth problem as Yandex: together with subcontractors, it already numbered 30,000 people. The management of current processes was set up in an ideal European way, but for further growth, this mass of people also needed to be inspired. Construction is one of the most conservative sectors of the economy, they do not like change, and the code of work ethics is based, at best, on conscientious hard work. But the way to the builder's brain is through his heart. BI Group has simply grown to the point where it needed to explain itself to itself once again - so that both the ordinary foreman and the guest stars of the top management would get stuck.

To write and publish my “Once Upon a Time in Kazakhstan” with the utmost talent and utmost sincerity. In this, we quickly found mutual understanding with the head of the BI Group, Aidyn Rakhimbaev, a person from the second ten of Kazakhstan's Forbes. Our first correspondence lasted two hours in the middle of the night - it was clear that this was a matter of paramount importance for Aydin. At that moment, I finally understood: our clients are the first persons. There is no need for any PR people, negotiations with marketers, contact should be directly with the leaders of the development of companies, because only they are the bearers of the very values ​​that we can scale with the help of stories. If the owner of the business does not have bright eyes, cooperation can not even begin - all the same, nothing will work out and everyone will be dissatisfied.

This strategy has fully justified itself and allowed us to save a lot of time, effort and money. Firstly, we decided not to spend money on advertising at all and rely on "word of mouth marketing" of the first persons among ourselves. Secondly, we have learned to refuse "not our" clients. These are the cases when potential customers confuse us with PR people: “They say you write great, now my girls will give you all the materials, and you should try there. Story? Values? Come on, make up your own mind."

Looking for employees

In my personal calendar of significant dates and events, August 5 now occupies an important place - on this day I created the first workplace in my life. Even if it’s only for a year, for a specific project, it’s still an amazing, poignant feeling, comparable, perhaps, only to what it was in my chaste pioneer childhood, when you invite a girl to dance and she agrees.

The authors are capricious people, many of them strive to make you responsible for their fate, but this problem is nothing compared to other issues that I soon had to solve. How to build your own business? How to establish regular sales? How to motivate employees? How to delegate trust? A reporter by nature is a loner, so the last question was especially difficult for me. It was necessary to learn how to share - efforts, responsibility, money. It turned out that this is an incredibly painful stage in the life of any entrepreneur.

Own clients have become very valuable clues. People who have already achieved success and passed those steps at which I have only stumbled so far taught me with their stories, and sometimes gave valuable advice on specific issues. After some time, I had something like an absentee board of directors, whose members most often did not even know each other. Development people like to watch other development people grow and are always ready to help them with this. Especially if it does not require a lot of time and does not pose a threat to the business.

One of the clients, Alexei Panferov, already mentioned above, told how he worked at MDM Bank in the early 2000s and was responsible for the entire investment block. “This company had an ingenious management model based on complete trust and a fair distribution of profits,” said Alexey. - Why put a person on a salary, and then control him? After that, it ceases to be effective. You just need to give him a mandate of trust, agree on the division of profits and never break these agreements: here is your earnings, here is your expense, here is your percentage of the result. The salary? What salary? Pay is a cost. Earn money - share. As a result, you work inside someone else's business, in fact, as an entrepreneur, and your interests absolutely correlate with the interests of the company.

I liked this system. Due to the indifference to systemic thinking already mentioned above, I do not like to steer processes, but I see goals well and know how to focus on them. Therefore, I decided to manage not people, but tasks and pay not for working hours, but for goals achieved, thus building an effective entrepreneurial environment around my business.

But the first steps in this direction were not easy. I outlined a circle of acquaintances who, as it seemed to me, have a tendency to take the initiative. I offered them cooperation on entrepreneurial terms: you work with clients, attract orders, bring them to the finish line and get your share. It was about six figures. These people were unemployed, many of them had no families, why not try?! Nevertheless, finding partners turned out to be more difficult than finding clients. People did not think in tasks, people thought in salaries. The phrase “yes, I don’t care what to do, as long as the money is paid,” I hear since then with great regret.

Valuable advice was given by one of the “members of the board of directors”: “Why are you persuading them? No need to persuade anyone! Just talk about your business to those who want to listen, and your people will find you."

So I did.

The first person who found me was Dmitry Kartushin. A young guy, not yet 30, graduated from Baumanka, works at Rosneft, develops the company's strategy and management model in the field of information technology. All is well, but the soul requires more. He had ambitions in the field of consulting, he actively grew in this direction, and I realized that if we study together, this is what we need. In addition to "sales people", I have long needed a person who would think not about individual projects, but about the business as a whole, about its strategy and development. Dima agreed to do this not for a salary. We took the actual at that time income of the "Laboratory" (Dima did not check, he took his word for it) and agreed that he works for a share of income exceeding the current level. I liked his easy nature, ability to trust and - finally! - think systematically.

The second person "without a salary in my head" was called Irina Chirkova. We met when she was the brand director of QIWI. Since then, Irina has founded her own business, Mplug, which cooperates with her clients as an outsourced marketing department, selling them strategies and turnkey solutions. For a long time, Irina and I just watched each other's successes, but at some point we realized that we could be mutually beneficial. She did not become a partner of Odnazhda, but she liked the story management tool itself. It seemed to her more effective than many traditional marketing solutions, and she included it in her arsenal. Our further cooperation has shown that stories allow not only to effectively manage business processes, but also solve marketing problems - create reputations, increase brand awareness, promote the product through the personal success story of its leader. Ira began to recommend story management to her clients, and soon the "Laboratory" had several very interesting projects. Subsequently, we began to replicate the experience of such cooperation, and as a result, in addition to word of mouth marketing, we have a whole network of marketers, publishers, consultants and other people who have access to the first persons of Russian business.

Growth and crisis

Soon, on the basis of euphoria, I began to have the first signs of the most dangerous illness of an entrepreneur - defocusing.

When you start living and thinking in business terms, you suddenly find yourself in a very dense space of opportunity. At this stage, you need to be able to refuse them, otherwise these opportunities will kill you. I did not understand this, it seemed to me that the more positive movement around you, the better. Government agencies, the media, and other startups, including foreign ones (for example, Hackpack by Justin Varilek), began to show interest in Once Upon a Time. But with each new meeting, I understood less and less what I was still doing. It has long been time to make a website, but what should it be like and how should you position yourself in general? Is it enough to make just a business card website or to aim at a new type of media - with an auction of stories and a revolutionary sales system? If so, then there will not be enough own funds for such a project, investors will be required, and this is a new marathon of negotiations. Or should you start small? Okay, but even if that's the case, who are you aiming for - just business? Or in the public sector too? Or maybe try the media after all? And should we limit ourselves to stories at all? The market also needs high-quality analytics.

Dmitry Kartushin from Rosneft and I held several meetings, and these meetings were like working with a psychologist. He helped me think. He structured the stream of consciousness, tested "Wishlist", attracted experienced entrepreneurs to evaluate them. It turned out that even after six months of good growth, my main problem is still the same - to realize my product and separate my client from someone else's. As a result, after a month of painful thought process, the site storymanagement.ru still started working. The result was what I knew even without Dima, but this time nothing superfluous interfered with knowledge.

Knowledge first. Our clients are "meaningful entrepreneurs", development leaders, people who understand that the economy of the future is not only an economy of knowledge, but also an economy of values. And the one who sells not only his product, but also his reality wins in it.

Knowledge is second. We make stories - and only stories. Because stories are the only effective tool for scaling the ideals that rule people, companies, states, civilizations.

Knowledge third. Our clients are leaders in development, and it doesn't matter if it's a business, government or charity. All of them are united by a common worldview, a desire to invest in the right topics, to promote in the minds of people the values ​​and meanings that make you want to live and act. All the rest - to the PR people!

Knowledge fourth. We earn not on the placement of content, but on its production. Accommodation service - the day before yesterday. In the information age, there are a great many delivery channels, but not a single, even the coolest platform guarantees a real audience. It can only be provided by the very quality of the content, whether it be a book or a series of stories for the media. Truly powerful, poignant posts go viral across the Internet at lightning speed, no matter what launch pad they're launched from. The philosophy behind Once Upon a Time is simple: Extremely high quality text will spread itself.

Fifth Knowledge. Our ultimate (or rather, infinite) mission is to create in Russia what it has never had before. A culture of optimism. This is not about rose-colored glasses, but about the fact that the source of your life is only yourself. We believe that ordinary human optimism is the main economic resource of the planet, and we want to develop this resource in our country. Whatever Count Tolstoy says, all chronically unhappy people are equally unhappy, and successful people are infinitely diverse.

When Ilya Slutsky from Media Arts Group heard all this, he reacted like this: - Everything is fine, but there is a problem. - Which? - Your potential customers are only five hundred people throughout the country. - Five hundred?! We thought much less.

At the same time, the best journalistic personnel are released on the market, who are persistently looking for new ways to monetize their services. Sooner or later they will find them, and then we will see a new industry - a kind of media production for the production of real content. Already today, many photographers, for example, collect money for their projects through crowdfunding, and publish them almost for free. If these processes continue to grow stronger, then as a result the media will be restructured following the example of the television industry. What do TV channels produce? At best, only news. Everything else is supplied to them by television production companies that earn in a variety of ways.

If our hypothesis is correct, then "Laboratory" is the first serious step in this direction. Actually, we are already successfully working on the "television model" with book publishers. We sell them content for the pennies that they are able to pay, and earn on the investments that we attract to the project. Our task for the next year is to try to extend the same model to cooperation with the media. If it works out, then other market participants will follow the example of the "Laboratory", creating similar content factories for the production of high-quality analytics, real investigations, travel essays and other genres. Changes in the media market will be very significant. Instead of media is the message, we will see message is the media.

But to be honest, I do not want this hypothesis to be confirmed. I would have had enough of a small boutique business. Because after 40 years the main resource for a man is not money, but time.

Cover photo credit: Tom Cockrem/Getty Images

Made by "Once Upon a Time"

We found and wrote these stories because we believe they are important, true, and inspiring. We see hundreds of entrepreneurial stories around and transform them into book bestsellers, exciting media publications, and living corporate literature.

You act - we write

You build leading companies, create new markets, solve the most complex managerial tasks. We - comprehend, express, tell.

The Once Upon a Time Lab is a story-making jewelery and a forge of a culture of optimism, which is the main resource of any national economy.

Some books are written straight from the title. It defines the meanings, sets the tone, anticipates the conclusions. But often the name appears at the very end - as an unexpected conclusion from what we managed to learn, think about and understand. Such books are the most useful and exciting, since the author, leaving point A, did not yet know where he would come - to point B, C or Z. Exactly the same happened with the Dolphins of Capitalism.

Interest in those who are commonly called social entrepreneurs arose during our work in Forbes and Russian Reporter magazines. At the same time, the desire to tell about these non-standard businessmen-idealists was also ripe for the Our Future Foundation. Its employees have long understood that in Russia this phenomenon, although it has not yet become a trend, has long gone beyond the scope of individual anomalies. Since 2007, the fund has been lending to over 170 projects from 49 regions of the country, allocating more than 420 million rubles of interest-free repayable loans for development.

The portfolio of these projects seemed like a suitable database to us. Among the most successful cases of the fund, we chose ten, adhering to the criterion of diversity of ideas and geography. As a result, these ten stories cover a variety of business areas - from tourism for the disabled to trade in purified water, and the heroes of our stories live and act throughout Russia - from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka.

The book does not have one author, and this is also our conscious choice. For each story, we have engaged a personal researcher. All of them are the best reporters in the country, people with extensive experience in serious journalism, while having their own unique author's point of view and creative method. It is not surprising that the heroes of our stories, having seen the final text, sometimes protested against certain interpretations and formulations. But we preferred to take the side of healthy authorial arbitrariness. It was important for us to look at this new phenomenon for the country through the eyes of an outside observer, and not the hero himself.

There was already a generally accepted definition: “Social entrepreneurship is an innovative activity, initially aimed at solving or mitigating social problems on terms of self-sufficiency and sustainability.” Simply put, solving the problems of society with the help of business tools. A social entrepreneur is not a philanthropist or a disinterested person. He sometimes earns very well and wants his business to bring even more profit. But at the same time, a social entrepreneur is not a "shark of capitalism" seeking to improve his well-being at any cost. Business for him is a highly effective tool for transforming reality, and the starting point is a social problem that he is trying to solve in accordance with his values ​​and ideals.

One of the fundamental foreign articles on this topic (J. L. Thompson, "The world of the social entrepreneur") says that if ordinary entrepreneurs evaluate the success of their activities, focusing on profit, revenue or share price, then for a social entrepreneur the main criterion is social return. However, after a series of interviews, we became convinced that almost everyone in our top ten was immediately set on making money, and they saw the same opportunity in a social need as in a regular market one. But at the same time, they clearly understood that without commercial success there would be no public good. And vice versa.

Compare two statements. Maria Bondar, St. Petersburg: “The trick of social business is that the more money you earn, the more people you help. And if it didn’t work, then it didn’t help.” Alexander Meshchankin, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky: “My task is not to feel sorry for the disabled, but to treat them as clients. Only then will there be a sustainable financial model from which everyone will benefit.” But at the heart of such pragmatism lies the idea of ​​undeniable benefit. As a result, we realized that we were making a book not about some specific entrepreneurship, but about entrepreneurship as such. About business in its purest form. Because real business is not about how to ride some resource, but about how to create this resource yourself.

And a new resource can be created only by solving some social problem, and nothing else. A new resource arises from a certain imperfection of the surrounding world, multiplied by its own active ideal. The entrepreneur notices this imperfection and invents, suggests how it can be corrected. If at the same time he has enough will, then he takes the first steps. At first, he tries, to the best of his ability, to make a machine to correct reality “on his knee”. Like-minded people appear, a team arises. But enthusiasm is also not eternal, so at some point a project to correct reality requires resources. Like-minded people begin to look for them, evolve very strongly and gradually learn to think not with problems, but with opportunities - that is, they become part of the entrepreneurial culture. If the founder and his associates are persistent enough, receptive to new things and in their personal growth keep up with the growth of the project, then at some point he breaks through the ceiling of viability and becomes a resource himself - that is, he finally turns into a business.

“Disconnected from values, money can indeed be a source of all kinds of evil, but if it is effectively linked to social goals, it can become a source of new opportunities,” these are the words of Ben Cohen, the former American hippie who founded the Ben and Jerry ice cream empire. He called his activities caring capitalism, and he became a rich man without the slightest desire to get rich. He just needed funds for his social projects, he did not know how to ask, so he decided to earn money himself. Not at the beginning of the same path is the hero of this book, Anton Kuchumov? He just decided to develop a culture of street fitness in Russia and opened a Workout related goods store for this, the revenue of which has already reached 25 million rubles.