By: Svetlana Khachiyan

Valentin Vasilevsky is the co-founder and CEO of the Business Booster accelerator, the x100 Strategy mastermind, and the Business Booster Platform, an IT platform for business management. Since 2012, Valentin has been an entrepreneur in the field of online education. He built a Business Booster company, where more than 200 employees work remotely.

Valentin, Business Booster employs more than 200 employees from 25 countries. Tell us why you created a company with a remote team? Did this turn out to be a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, or did you anticipate the future trend of remote work?

I have started building remote teams since 2012. I didn’t want to live in Omsk, where I lived most of my life, but I still didn’t know where exactly to live. I was on the team of a startup that failed and decided it was time to create my own business as the founder. My choice fell on an online school. I needed to make a team. But since it was completely online, and I did not have a permanent living place, I worked from home and hired employees online. Everyone worked from home because it was cheaper that way.

When money appeared and the opportunity to have an office arose, I realized working online had more advantages. As a result, when I started creating the Business Booster team in 2018, which now employs more than 200 people, I built it on the same principle. 

The pandemic wasn’t a consequence of me building remote teams because I started doing it 8 years before. With the outbreak of the pandemic, the pros of this approach were evident, because we did not stop working for a single day.

We have become a beneficiary of Covid. As a result, our business has grown fivefold in 2020-2021. In fact, it was a foresight that such a work model is more resilient to the difficulties that may arise.

What benefits of remote work do you see for both employees and the company?

When you work online, you have access to talents from all over the world. The absence of office expenses makes the business more competitive.

This is often a great advantage for employees too. Like-minded people began to come to the company, who found it more important to have the possibility to travel than wasting their time on trips to offices.

It is believed that working in an office is more efficient than working remotely. What do you think about this?

In fact, working online, if built correctly, is more efficient than offline. Studies are showing that a 40-hour work week turns into a 30-hour one, because 10 hours, a quarter of business time, are spent on smoke breaks, small talk, and communication unrelated to productive activities. When we work online, we don’t have it. Therefore, online work is an honest 40 hours a week.

How did you organize the work of more than 200 employees from different countries completely remotely?

We use not only IT tools but also a framework, a certain approach to working on top of these IT cloud-based services. Using only cloud-based services doesn’t make your company ready for efficient remote work. This is why many American companies in 2022-2023 started to limit remote working and then called their employees back to their offices because they couldn’t handle it, and couldn’t make this work efficient.

Firstly, we use management tools and practices, which are our know-how and technology that we pass on to our customers. For example, in Business Booster, all employees know everyone who works in the company, because we have the functional structure of the Business Booster Platform available online.

Secondly, it is a certain video call system that ensures coordination of plans and mutual understanding between different departments of the company. For video calls to be effective, it is necessary to have the right call structure and preparation for them.

The next important tool is a system of metrics which is available online. Business is measured by a system of key metrics. These metrics are filled in weekly, and any manager can see the state of affairs and the state of the company in the Business Booster Platform.

One of the difficult decisions I made back in 2015 was the use of time trackers that take screenshots of an employee’s desktop. Using a time tracker with desktop screenshots is not a lack of trust, on the contrary, the presence of complete trust between the company and each employee. The idea is this: when you start working, you turn on the time-tracker, and it means that you seem to be sitting in the office, and everyone sees what you are doing. If you’ve finished work, then turn off the time tracker and do your business.

In the future, I think the importance and ability to work remotely will increase, given the challenges we face.

What makes you move towards success?

For me, the greatest value in life is development. I imagine myself and every person as a seed that does not know what can grow out of it. Life is a process of discovery, of learning who you can become and what you will achieve, what abilities you will receive. And I admire that. 

I enjoy working with people who have outstanding abilities or have developed those in themselves. To work with such people, you need to match them. I want to become such a strong and competent person that talented and capable people want to work with and create new products, making this world safer, healthier, and happier.

Published by: Khy Talara