By: Lana PRME

Valentin Vasilevsky is a co-founder of the Business Booster accelerator, which has been helping thousands of business owners to systematize and scale their companies for many years. Valentin has assisted numerous companies in implementing a business operating system into their organizational structures, enabling them to manage and scale their businesses.

Valentin, could you share how you started your business journey?

I started my career in 2005 as an engineer-researcher, defended my PhD thesis on wireless data transmission. I was working at a technical university in Siberia at the time trying to commercialize my development — a wireless data transmission system for security services. My colleagues and I won several competitions and received grant funding for our development but it  ended in nothing.

In 2011, I realized  it was time to move on and decided to join the fast-growing startup Displair and left for Astrakhan. The startup attracted several million dollars in investment. I was a minority co-owner  responsible for research and intellectual property protection, organizing business processes and automating the management system. That was the first time I realized how difficult it is to implement automation systems in a growing business. Afterwards, I left Dispair but gained tremendous experience in online education and software.

I began to advise other businesses on how to build and automate business processes in an online school. In 2015 my team and I developed an online school automation system based on a low-code platform. I have built a personal brand as an expert in systematizing and automating business processes for online education. In 2016, I consulted Konstantin Dovlatov Online School, which was the largest online school for training certified psychologists. Additionally, I provided consultation on business systematization for Sergey Kapustin and Dmitry Yurchenko, the creators of Accel Online School Accelerator. As a result of the Accel, hundreds of successful online education companies have been established.

Reflecting on your business history, what stands out as the single greatest challenge you’ve successfully navigated, and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge in business for me was building a strong partnership. I realized that alone it would take too long to move towards building a great company in the field of business systematization and automation. I set a goal to find a partner. Ultimately, I was introduced to my future partner, Alexander Visotsky who had been doing a similar business offline for over 10 years. 

We decided to create a new business together, an online program for systematizing and scaling business — Business Booster. In three years, I  built a company of 240 employees, and the geography of my clients expanded to 87 countries.  I started developing a business automation platform, the Business Booster Platform. I have been leading this development and thanks to it our company and thousands of employees work in an efficient system of process automation.

Now, Business Booster Platform is a cloud-based SaaS system where a business owner can manage several companies at once.  A functional structure of the company is created and employees are assigned to each function.  Each function is assigned products and metrics. It also manages one-time and recurring tasks, maintains the knowledge base and employee training, communicates on projects, etc.  We are expanding the functionality of the platform.

The success of our SaaS platform would not be possible without my deep expertise in business systematization training. The fact we are making EduTech and SaaS products that help businesses to be efficient and focus on creating the highest quality products and services is inspiring.

Businesses often face ongoing challenges. What does your business consistently grapple with, and how do you tackle these challenges head-on?

The biggest challenge for our business is to expand into other languages. EduTech products require not just translation, but adaptation to a new language and local market. About 30% of our business is now in Taiwan in Chinese. What’s remarkable is that everything I’ve put so much effort into works great in any market, including Taiwan. Now I am working to develop a strategy for entering other Chinese-speaking markets in neighboring countries — Malaysia and Singapore.

Can you share with us the most unforgettable story involving a customer or client? What made it memorable? What lessons did you draw from the experience?

In 2019, the owners of Ju-shih Real Estate, then a small real estate agency in Taiwan, came to our accelerator. After Business Booster, the number of people they hired in one year exceeded the total number of people hired in the last 10 years! The average productivity of each employee became 6 times higher than conventional real estate agencies. Their revenue skyrocketed and the company has now been ranked number one in their industry for four years in a row. 

This case is striking for me because an ordinary small business that had existed for 10 years at a low income level suddenly took off and became number 1 in the country. The lesson I learned is that success is always a combination of a large, growing market and the ability of the company to capitalize on that opportunity. 

Looking ahead, what are your current plans for your business when you retire?

Business is a way of life, it’s a way of self-realization. I don’t think I’ll ever fully retire. As my businesses and I mature, I’m moving more into the role of mentor, strategist, and investor taking less of a management role.

I want to make Business Booster the largest accelerator for SMBs around the world, so small businesses get working tools to grow and scale their businesses and our SaaS business management platform to help them automate processes and focus on creativity.

Published by: Holy Minoza