Convermax CEO helps local small business to excel
For the past two months, Alex Sherbachev mentored two young entrepreneurs at a local small business accelerator “Firon”. The goal of the program was to help small businesses grow and handle the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The fall’s batch housed 20 small business owners that have been in business for at least two years. The program offered lectures on business development, sales, marketing, hiring, venture funding, and strategic planning.
The second part of the program aimed to help participants differently - by connecting them with seasoned business veterans so they can learn from them and have someone to solve problems with. Alex and the other 9 mentors each had two mentees with whom they met several times per month for one-on-one meetings.
Alex has been mentoring a web-development studio Art-int and youth robotics and programming learning center Optimus. Both companies faced challenges in scaling their business and bringing it to a new level.
Youth robotics and programming learning center strives to encourage children to learn science, introduce them to engineering, and help them acquire useful skills. Optimus learning center used to have three branches but was forced to close two of them due to the corona crisis. That was a hard hit for Valentina Grigoryan, the founder of Optimus, that she took resiliently. As a countermeasure Optimus expanded online both in number and variety of courses offered and classes held every week. Alex and Valentina worked on refining the financial model, customer acquisition cost, LTV, checked the effectiveness of sales channels and marketing initiatives – to find what can be improved. As a result, Alex and Valentina identified a few points for rapid growth and came up with an action plan on how to increase LTV.
The founder of web-development studio Art-int Artem Saga faced a different challenge. Artem wanted to pursue an opportunity to pack the expertise and industry knowledge his team earned by working on numerous projects for news organizations into a product that he can sell repeatedly and predictively. Artem and Alex worked on a comprehensive go-to-market strategy for this upcoming product.
Another important topic was the pricing strategy for a web development company. Artem and Alex are both technical founders and both tend to undervalue the services they provide due to modesty and not valuing money in general. Pinpointing Art-int core expertise and the added value wasn’t a difficult task but it helped to change the mindset and re-evaluate the overall approach to pricing and sales.
Being an entrepreneur is hard. Only another entrepreneur can understand the struggles and doubts of a fellow entrepreneur. The Firon program was great as it gathered together real entrepreneurs with real businesses and real challenges. Not just those who dream about quitting their job one day, but those who actually have a running, profitable enterprise. They just need a little help and a small push to propel them to the next level.
Alex had a business mentor in the late 2000s as well. Working as a mentor nowadays wasn’t just about giving back, but also about helping co-minded people to succeed. He keeps in touch with his mentees and tries to help them to the best of his ability so together they can build a better future for everyone!