Every Second Entrepreneur Makes These Mistakes. How to Scale and Avoid Burnout by Building a System

My business journey began from scratch in Kyiv during the chaotic, crazy 90s. Together with a couple of friends, we started a typical old-school offline business and began selling Apple computers. Therefore, unlike many who start with information business or training, I am familiar with the situations many of you are currently in.

Our only assets were a table, a chair, and a kettle. But in addition to that, there was a great hunger for money and a lot of energy. Eventually, we succeeded, and in 4 years, we organized a company that became one of the first official Apple dealers in Ukraine. At that moment, I first tasted money, income, and the freedom that comes with owning your own business. I thought it would always be this way.

How Euphoria Led to Collapse

I wanted the business to grow and invested heavily, perhaps too heavily. I pressured my partners, and at some point, I pressured them too much. They started sabotaging my decisions, and it became impossible to negotiate. Everything was also complicated by the market situation. Windows 95 with a graphical interface appeared, and the margin that Apple set for its distributors dropped from 32% to 8%. Ultimately, all our internal disagreements came to the surface.

One morning, I came to the office as usual, and the partners said: "Sanya, why don't you get lost." In one day, I left the company I had dedicated several years to, with a computer under my arm and a couple of thousand dollars in my pocket. Everything I had built for four years ceased to be mine.

When you lose what you dedicated four years of your life to in a single day, especially when it's your first business and a dream, it is deeply upsetting. But it was then that I realized that without a system, any company is fragile. Any success can crumble overnight.

Emotional Decisions and Distrust After the First Failure

Besides anger and resentment, I realized that I no longer wanted to invest effort into something fragile that could just disappear. I decided to build only what would last a long time, something I could rely on.

Of course, due to the falling out with partners, there was another, more primitive conclusion: "They screwed me over." I decided I would never have a business partner. Fortunately, I abandoned that decision after some time. But back then, I thought no one could be trusted. I understood the true reason for the collapse later.

I intended to do everything myself and chose a conservative niche—the production of badges, awards, and medals. My competitors were "grandfathers" who had been doing this for 40 years. And although they were technologically savvy, I was like a rocket compared to them because I knew how to do marketing, organize sales, and manage the company's work. It was like taking candy from a baby. The business quickly took off without a system, relying on common sense, ingenuity, and an engineering background. I rested on weekends and left work at 6 PM. It seemed that I had deciphered the matrix and understood how everything worked in business.

How We Merged Two Competing Businesses

But even in this business, I hit a ceiling. At this moment, a bold and unusual strategy for those times was born—to merge two competing companies. I understood it was a risk, but the benefit would be colossal, as my potential partner and I had different, complementary skills.

I had learned lessons from my previous experience, so we immediately agreed on who was responsible for what and signed a written agreement. I was responsible for the business side (management, marketing, sales), and the partner for design, artistry, and technology. It seemed we would have an amazing balance. This decision became a test: would my business withstand scaling, or would it break under its own weight?

As entrepreneurs, we often know what strategy would be winning for our business. We generate cool, bold ideas, but we don't always have the strength, time, and resources to implement them. This is because we understand that any next-level strategy will bring new questions and problems that we most likely don't have answers to. Furthermore, there is the current income, which is quite scary to lose. Often there's simply no time to pursue these ideas, and they remain in the plans forever.

But back then, despite the fear, I managed to take this step because luck favors the prepared. At that time, I had a well-organized business; I wasn't killing myself with it 24/7; I had the time, resources, and strength to do something new. We can implement the coolest strategies when we feel we have something to lean on. That's when the courage for the next leap appears.

Why Intuition Stopped Working After the Merger

But after the merger, chaos began. We didn't just double the number of employees (from 30 to 60); the number of orders became disproportionately larger—4 times more. It was a success from the commercial side, but a complete failure from a management perspective, as everything started to fall apart before my eyes.

My intuition and the approaches that worked in a small company stopped working in a large one. I was at work for 14 hours a day, practically without weekends. Despite colossal efforts, control was lost: we forgot about paid orders, quality dropped, and deadlines were missed. I ran around like a squirrel in a wheel, but the problems only increased. The next-level strategy brought problems I was completely unprepared for.

At some point, in the midst of all this chaos, a bright thought occurred to me: the problem wasn't with the employees, the customers, or the market. The problem was with me. I realized that I was the main bottleneck in my company. My manual management and lack of a system were the cause. I began to analyze my journey from the first business to the merged company with 100 employees. And then I discovered another important thing: despite business growth at all stages, I encountered the same problems. Certain symptoms were present, which I want to share so you can conduct a personal self-diagnosis.

• You Solve All Problems

I was the main "problem-solver." A demanding client calls? I have to deal with it. The cargo is stuck at customs? I solve it. All non-standard issues were resolved by me, even though employees were already hired.

• Chaos Instead of a Plan

There is a production plan, but no general activity plan. Endless chaos reigns in all processes. From morning till night, I personally sorted out difficulties with orders, payments, production, and materials. A simple breakthrough idea, for example, to produce a line of souvenir badges for retail and earn 3-4 times more, remained just an idea. It was implemented only many years later because at that moment there was no time or free resource for it.

• Burnout and Lack of Enjoyment from the Business

I fell into a trap: I hired people to relieve myself, but the opposite happened. The larger the team became, the later I left the office. I worked 10-12 hours, feeling wild fatigue. The business consumed my entire life, and I was always connected everywhere, even when walking with my wife. Physically, I could be anywhere, but mentally, I was always at work.

• Workload Grows, Not Income

The most paradoxical thing is that despite all this workload, my income did not grow. I worked like a dog, but there wasn't more money in my pocket. At some point, the thought arose that if I abandoned everything and kept only the sharpest guys, I would earn the same amount.

• Feeling Like You're Building a Complex Mechanism Blindly

I saw that I periodically hit the same point, going through these stages again and again, but I realized that continuing like this was impossible. With 100 employees, I knew I had to do something, but I didn't understand how this behemoth worked. As an engineer by education, I asked myself: "What is happening? Where is the operation manual? Where is the schematic diagram?" If I were building a house, I wouldn't build it without a blueprint. I realized I was assembling a fairly complex mechanism blindly, trying to intuitively glue the pieces together.

The Search for a "Blueprint" and Building a Systemic Business

It became clear to me that a business is a kind of single, complete, holistic system. I realized I had a big task: to find this very "blueprint," assemble the mechanism, and resolve this issue for myself once and for all. So, I set out to gather this system bit by bit.

When I started searching and reading books, it turned out that such a "blueprint" did not exist. This still sounds absurd because there are hundreds of thousands of manufacturing companies in the world, but there is no set that describes how a manufacturing company should work. I had to assemble everything myself, from scratch, making a lot of silly mistakes. These were years of searching: I attended trainings, hired consultants, read books, tried things myself, and experimented on people (not always smoothly).

Building a system without a clear plan can be compared to walking at night with a blindfold and a baseball bat in a china shop—you are bound to break something. And I did break things. Sometimes, entire departments quit.

The main reason I did all this was that I didn't want to remain a "serial shopkeeper." I realized that if I continued to work in this mode for a while longer, I would start to hate my business or proliferate small, unmanageable businesses, and with them, problems. I asked myself: "What will I be proud of when I look back?" Realizing this, I spent four years, but I did build the system. It also helped that I had no chance not to build it, because I had promised my partner that I would manage the merged company. This is how the Business Operating System was born—a structure that allows the owner to stop being the bottleneck and reclaim their freedom.

Freedom, Growth, and Scaling

Eventually, I built the system, hired a director, and left to live in St. Petersburg for a year and a half. There were no Zoom calls or opportunities to communicate globally then, but the business in Kyiv continued to work, grow, and bring in profit without my daily involvement. I realized my dreams: I bought an apartment, a beautiful Jaguar. And "Gerold Master" became the number one company in Europe for the production of awards. We made medals for royal houses and governments. Finally, I managed to crack the code for building a systemic business.

Then I thought that if it worked for me, it would surely work for others. So, I started consulting, helping to build the structure for "Ukrtekhnoprom," "Veres," "Polymerservice," "Strakhovi Tradytsiyi" (Insurance Traditions), and "Fozi Group." I saw that these principles work everywhere—in small, medium, and large businesses. This is not a unique case but a pattern. We continued doing this, created Business Booster, and over 16 years, we have helped develop the business operating system for more than 1,900 companies.

An Example of Transformation from a Forklift Operator to a Company Owner

I want to tell the story of a similarly ordinary entrepreneur who went from scratch: from an illegal immigrant in the USA working on a forklift to the owner of several companies with a turnover of $60 million a year.

Vlad Zotya came to America from Moldova as an immigrant. The only job he could find was driving a forklift in a warehouse. He worked well, and when the owners decided to get rid of a small warehousing business, he offered to buy it out on an installment plan, paying the cost from future revenues. Thus, Vlad became the owner of a small freight and warehousing company.

Now imagine his situation. Yesterday he was an employee, and today his former colleagues became his subordinates. He had to manage them, hire new people. Naturally, he did a lot himself, was a hostage to his business, and faced a management crisis.

Not understanding how to develop the company further, he came to us to start building the system from scratch. It was the system that allowed him to stop being the "main problem-solver" and become a true owner. His company's turnover grew to $18 million a year, and the number of employees increased to 45. At the same time, his own involvement in operations decreased from 8 to 4 hours a day due to proper delegation.

And you know what he did first? As soon as he built the system, it allowed him to detach from the operational work. He dropped everything and went to the Himalayas for two months to conquer Everest.

Also read the article: "What will happen to your business if you disappear for a month?"

After this, his American entrepreneur friends started coming to us, and at the first meeting with a business engineer, they would say: "I want to be like Vlad. I want to be able to go to Everest for 2 months, and the business continues to work and grow."