Andrey Zakharchenko, Head of Tradest (Standard Trade), reflects on lessons drawn from his company’s journey — explaining why true leaders shouldn’t fear their mistakes and how to navigate through prolonged periods of crisis.
How to Survive a Crisis When You Feel Like Giving Up. A Three-Year Story of Struggle
Andrey Zakharchenko, CEO of Standart Trade, shares his story — one that stands apart from thousands of other businesses that faced challenges during the pandemic.
… The goal was not just to make a short-term dash lasting a few months, but to sprint toward the finish line of a marathon. Read on to learn what helped him make it through.
How It All Began
I founded the company in 2012…
In short, what we (although calling it “we” was a bit of an overstatement when the company consisted of just me) were doing back then was this: a client would come to us needing to import, say, LED modules from China. I would find a factory, send the payment, handle delivery and customs clearance, and the client would receive the goods at their warehouse without having to worry about a thing.
The perfect scheme — for the client, but not for me.
But more on that later.
In July 2016, I finally reached the point where “we” truly meant “we.” I rented our first office and hired two employees. Within six months, we set up advertising, attracted new clients, and — or so we thought — started to take off. In December alone, the company’s gross profit reached almost 1 million rubles, with expenses (excluding my own salary) of 250 thousand.
We began 2017 with expansion: there were now five of us, we had an entire floor in a Stalin-era building near Krasnye Vorota, and we aimed to work with China only directly, without involving third-party import companies.
But in August, a partner let us down, and we lost 900 thousand rubles in net profit. Just a couple of months later, our main client’s supplier shipped defective goods worth 1.5 million rubles.
We entered 2018 with a new concept: to work only with complex, high-margin projects. No more chasing the cheapest factories producing clothes or phone accessories. No more middlemen — only end clients.
But that concept didn’t work either.
For the first time in years, I went home to Bryansk to celebrate New Year’s and didn’t leave the house all holidays except to go to the store. It was almost like I was preparing myself for the coming coronavirus…
How We Started Emerging from Our Own Crisis
In 2019, we finally decided to stop searching for factories in China. In both 2017 and 2018, we had clients who already had their own Chinese suppliers, and we handled only the logistics part — taking care of customs clearance and delivery to their door, without being responsible for the choice of supplier or product quality.
I never took such projects seriously — they seemed too simple, and I couldn’t see our real value.
But suddenly, I realized that over the years we had learned two key things: first, how to negotiate with factories and spot potential pitfalls; and second, almost incidentally, how to professionally handle international logistics for any type of cargo — from complex machinery to hazardous chemicals.
And this concept (our fourth one) — where the client chooses the factory, and we supervise production, translate specifications and drawings into Chinese, and ensure proper transportation and customs clearance — finally worked.
2019 was the first year we operated at a profit. We were almost out of crisis when, in March 2020… yes, coronavirus hit.
Why I Decided to Tell This Story
In Russia, it’s somehow not customary to talk about failures. If you’ve failed, you’re expected to show how heroically you bounced back and what lessons you learned — something in the spirit of “I fell ten times but got up eleven.”
With all due respect to Jon Bon Jovi, when your business is struggling, the last thing you want to hear is how great others are doing and how well they’re coping.
I started writing short posts on my personal Facebook page — about fatigue, about where we get our energy from, and about whether it’s sometimes useful to feel like a failure. And I began to get responses from my friends.
Back in 2018, at the peak of my own crisis, Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things really helped me. It was the first book I could remember that wasn’t about “success stories,” but about real company problems (though with very specific cases).
And surely, not everyone — especially now, while the pandemic continues — wants to read stories about someone who fought for two months, suffered, drew conclusions, and now is on top again. Simply because many people right now are not on top.
For three years, I myself went through — and sometimes still go through — a state of exhaustion and lack of will to keep fighting. And that’s not laziness. Laziness is when you sit and do nothing. But here, you do a lot — and see no results.
Time after time, you try something, and it doesn’t work. Then you try something else, and that fails too. By the fifteenth attempt, you’re just worn out.
What Helped Me Hold On All These Years
Read Ben Horowitz, read *Even Geeks Do Business* about Fyodor Ovchinnikov. Understanding that your problems are not unique helps you get unstuck when the light at the end of the tunnel has long gone out. Successful stories of others only make you believe that something is wrong with you.
It’s important to focus on yourself — on what you can control. Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky once said that stress is defined by two main factors: uncertainty and lack of control. What used to feel normal — number of leads, deal conversion, total sales — suddenly starts to drop. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
My advice: focus on what you *can* do — define your circle of influence and your circle of concern.
In my case: I can’t control monthly revenue — it depends on dozens of factors beyond my reach (client business conditions, competitor actions, factory shutdowns, canceled tenders). But I *can* go through all ad campaigns with my marketing manager, rework the keywords, test new ads, and discuss with our sales team the situation with each existing client.
It’s crucial to let go of metrics you can’t directly control and concentrate on your actions. It’s harder than it seems — your thoughts keep coming back to the falling revenue. But it’s worth remembering that, physiologically, thinking about a problem and solving a problem are two different processes in the brain.
At the end of 2019, after an incredibly hard year, I went climbing Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America.
We ended the year with a solid profit, though it didn’t fully cover the losses of the previous two years. But that trip — which had nothing to do with business — inspired me deeply.
Climbing to 6,962 meters, and doing it in an accelerated mode without proper acclimatization (a storm was approaching, so we had to move three days earlier than planned) — that’s something to be proud of. It helped me believe in myself again.
I called this kind of motivation “achievement motivation.” It’s something entrepreneurs with steady growth already have. But if your business is declining — you need to find something else to be proud of.
During the pandemic, when the euphoria from the climb faded, I started going to a sports clinic and working on my back. After a couple of weeks, when I began seeing visible progress in the mirror, I also gained more motivation to tackle business challenges again.
The key is to see tangible results.
You can go to the gym — but you need to *see* the muscles growing. You can start running — and see progress in your first 3 km. You can even learn to play guitar. It helps you stop focusing solely on business, take a step in another direction, and see the bigger picture.
In Conclusion
You have to keep fighting no matter what. I didn’t lay off a single employee during the crisis, though I was tempted to (I even gave one of the managers a two-week trial period after which I planned to let him go). In the end, we closed the half-year roughly at break-even — but by July, we started growing again, partly thanks to competitors who didn’t make it through the crisis and gave up.
I believe that any problem eventually ends — as long as you don’t stop and keep working.
Why Leaders Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Their Mistakes
So, we’re engaged in foreign trade outsourcing and production outsourcing. In 2017, our company entered a crisis that lasted for three years. And now I’ll explain how exactly this crisis helped us. It helped — but at the same time, it was an extremely tough and painful experience that nonetheless tempered us and made us stronger.
My Background Working with China
I started working with China back in 2010. After half a year in ICX (note — Incoming Exchange, a program for hosting international interns), I decided to go on an internship myself. China surprised me from day one: instead of teaching the basics of ecology in English, I ended up teaching the basics of English — in English.
The internship, overall, was quite amusing. The Chinese sent me an invitation that allowed for a visa of only one month, saying: “Don’t worry, Andrey, we’ll extend your visa once you’re here.” When I arrived, I didn’t see the local team for two weeks, and when we finally met, they told me that extending the visa was “really impossible, we are so so sorry.” I didn’t want to change my non-refundable tickets, so I went to Hong Kong to renew the visa. On the way, I stopped in Guangzhou, bought seven Vertu phones at a local market, shipped them to Russia, and after returning to Moscow, sold them — earning my first money “from China.”
After saving up, I went again that winter, in 2010, this time purely for purchasing goods — and ended up 50,000 rubles in the red.
Still, I didn’t want to lose the experience I’d gained working with the Middle Kingdom. In the fall of 2011, I joined Ivanna Evtukhova at Futurra, dealing with imports of promotional and souvenir products from China. When I joined, Ivanna was working alone; a year later, when I left, there were five of us — and I had a strong desire to start something of my own.
Starting My Own Business
The business model I came up with for my company was to find a suitable factory in China for a client, place an order there, and deliver the cleared goods to Russia. The business launched on a high note: in 2012, through personal connections, I found two clients and earned 800,000 rubles in just four months. Success!
However, I didn’t start taking it seriously until 2016. Before that, I found clients for Standard Trade mostly through word of mouth and was essentially “playing business” while finishing my master’s degree.
The realization that it was time to stop juggling things like kite festivals, park food stalls, and a pizzeria in Bryansk came in 2016. I finally rented an office, hired two employees, and set up proper lead generation.
The Beginning of the Crisis
The business took off: clients loved working with a company that handled everything “turnkey,” taking on all risks related to the factory. We built a solid client base. But ironically, that very business model ended up being our downfall.
We finished 2016 on a high note and decided that a 20-square-meter office and three people were no longer enough. We rented an entire floor in a Stalin-era building at Krasnye Vorota, hired two more managers, and even opened a second legal entity — this time with VAT (back then, I still didn’t understand that the difference between 15% simplified tax and 18% VAT was not just 3%).
But in the summer, within a two-month span, a business partner deceived us for 900,000 rubles, and then the supplier for our main client delivered defective goods worth 1.5 million. Considering that our expenses had tripled compared to 2016, this loss set us back significantly. I covered the losses with savings from previous years, but there was no capital left for further growth.
Attempts to Overcome the Crisis
By the end of 2017, our employees left, and I basically started over with my deputy. We tried working as a duo, but by February 2018, I realized that we couldn’t stop — either we got back to our previous level and started growing again, or we’d have to close down.
After trying to cut costs, we implemented a new approach: from now on, we would take on only complex projects. No more searching for the absolute cheapest electronics, clothing, or trending products in China. We focused only on projects where we could offer clients genuine value — our expertise in working with factories, our ability to choose the right equipment, negotiate product compliance with client requirements, and organize quality control — rather than simply squeezing out the lowest price. The concept inspired everyone in the company, and my fellow entrepreneurs, whom I consulted, supported and admired our approach. Everything was great — except that the concept didn’t work. You can’t be an expert in every type of machine, equipment, or material produced in China.
At the end of 2018, a new client came to us. He needed factories manufacturing flange bending, welding, and balancing machines. We did the research, and he wanted to visit China himself to meet the factory. But before visiting the one we found, he dropped by another supplier he had discovered on his own. A typical situation for China followed: that factory bad-mouthed ours, and the client decided to go with theirs instead. We didn’t even get upset — at that time, our conversion rate from inquiry to order was about 6%. In other words, out of 16 processed projects, only one turned into a sale.
But the client came back again — this time asking us to organize international logistics (customs clearance and transport in China and Russia), and also help with communication with the factory. Since he had chosen the supplier himself and we weren’t responsible for product quality, our task was only to support the transaction. We charged half our usual commission and handled all the standard work: we organized a three-way chat between us, the client, and the factory; translated blueprints into Chinese; carried out an on-site inspection after production; prepared all customs paperwork; and even brought Chinese engineers to Moscow for installation and setup.
That was our third attempt to overcome the crisis in 2018 — and it finally succeeded. The concept was simple: we no longer took responsibility for the Chinese supplier but helped the client control production, communicate with the factory, and solve technical issues. At the same time, we still provided a turnkey service — but in the sphere of foreign trade operations: transport plus customs clearance. It might seem obvious to stop searching for factories in China and working with unknown suppliers — but it took us three years to realize that.
Since 2019, we’ve been profitable. Even the coronavirus didn’t stop us — it only slowed us down. In 2020, we nearly doubled our revenue compared to 2018 and became a truly “dynamic, growing” company.
How We Learned from Our Mistakes
In Russia, it’s still not common to talk about failures. If you’ve made a mistake, it’s considered normal to keep quiet about it outside your closest circle. You’re supposed to always look successful.
Fortunately, in recent years a different trend has emerged — a trend toward honesty. Mistakes can teach us things. Not always directly. For example, the authors of Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, argue that you should learn from victories, since the experience of failure is irrelevant. Supposedly, if you know that 2+2 isn’t 3, that won’t help you much in the future. And they’re right — but only when we’re talking about business metrics. Indeed, even if you run ten advertising campaigns incorrectly, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it right on the eleventh. The same applies to hiring, negotiations, and project execution — all these areas demand positive experience.
But mistakes are incredibly important in another way — in shaping a company leader’s personality. For me, there are three key factors:
- When you fail again and again but keep fighting, it hardens you. It hardens you in the sense that you lose your fear of future troubles. Looking back at 2018, I realize that if I survived that year, I can survive the coronavirus, temporary drops in sales, and the daily challenges every entrepreneur faces.
- You develop broad-mindedness. You’re forced to search for new approaches. Sometimes the solution is non-obvious — you do things others consider pointless. For example, we started offering internships for final-year students. On the one hand, they helped relieve import managers by taking on routine tasks; on the other, they gained valuable real business experience. It turned out to be a classic win-win. Yet most of my entrepreneur friends were skeptical about the idea.
- Your willpower and business endurance grow stronger. You’re not a sprinter — you’re a marathoner. You keep moving forward and don’t give in to fleeting emotions, fear, laziness, or the urge to quit.
In conclusion, I want to say that everything described above applies only in one case — if you don’t break. Many entrepreneurs chase after abstract “experience,” not realizing that real experience comes to those who can overcome mistakes and failures. The important thing is to reach that point where a failure turns into not just experience, but a result.
Sources: Rusbase; Andrey Zakharchenko exclusively for A.Life.
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