Suvorov & business. Everlasting lessons from the russian master strategist

Alexander Suvorov, Russian military general, is known to have spoken seven languages, including Turkish and Finnish, was an expert in military history, a brilliant mathematician, and never lost a single battle.

Wisdom of the distinguished strategist and tactician of military art can find practical application in any business. Suvorov’s strategy is the key to success.

Some ideas of the famous general will be considered in this book through the prism of the business environment. I hope that entrepreneurs will appreciate the parallels drawn and will learn many useful lessons from Suvorov’s covenants.

– Yury Yavorsky

Charge at a bear with a heavy hunting spear

Here is my take on these instructions: an entrepreneur should be very particular about disguising their plans and the tactical scheme of their future business moves aimed at conquering the market. Also required is a clear perspective on the size, capabilities, and behavior of adversaries. A completely different course of action is necessary for each of all competitors: some you would charge head on with a bear spear, with others you would choose to elegantly outmaneuver.

Do never flush a wolf with no surround ready

Over my twenty-five years in business, there were many cases where I had to deploy a whole range of methods when bringing a single new product or service on the market. I have learned for a fact that the ways of an entrepreneur should be akin to the ways of a hunter who is out in the dark in the vast expanse of a wood or mountains. He never knows what the “beast” -competitor has been plotting, or what surprises are there in the “thicket” of the market, or whether the vision of the “hunting” entrepreneur will “feed” him, his family, and his team, or whether he will be able to get enough “meat” to last him until the next fortunate “bag of game”.

Trap with a decoy

Baited snare

…In the 1990s, my company manufactured dashboards for passenger vehicles. Browsing car spares at a marketplace, I once stumbled upon a seller who had on offer assembled dashboards complete with a full set of instruments, including the wiring for all requisite connections to other car parts. Then I wondered how many elements there are in a dashboard anyway? The answer was just over a hundred. The next step was to get quotes for all those component parts individually. (That was the time when vendors sold spares in the open, literally in a field, laying out their merchandise straight on the ground or on small tables; quite similar to what one sees at flea markets today). When I added up all the prices, the grand total came to 400 rubles, no higher, whereas a complete dashboard sold at 800 rubles. I procured all the components, assembled a dashboard at home, and sold it having doubled my capital. It would appear to be an ultimate success story. However, I came to realize that everybody was doing just the same: that marketplace had four other crews. So I decided to use the principles of supply chain management and barter economy, or take a “holistic approach”, as they might call it today.

I found out that dashboard clocks were supplied from Minsk (1,300 km), speed meters came from Vladimir (200 km), and so forth. In short, all the components had to be shipped from other cities, as there was no local production in Nizhny Novgorod. Having asked around at various factories, I saw I could “trim the fat” off the dashboard cost down to 200 rubles. Then, at the marketplace, I offered vendors who carried speed meters to swap two meters for one clock; I was getting those clocks by going to Minsk myself. I arranged with other sellers to exchange plastic parts that I was buying in a town near Nizhny Novgorod for rubber parts, which some sold by weight, not by piece. My partners were able to expand their product range with no additional investment, and I was able to drive the dashboard cost down.

At a cost of 100 rubles, I started selling the dashboards for 400 rubles at new sales outlets that bore no relation to me at all.

This made all four of my competitors cease assembly operations. I understood that they would need two to three months to regroup and resume dashboard production. I decided to go with the four-hundred-ruble offer for a bit longer and, at the same time, to limit the supply to one or two units per day, forcing sellers to take pre-orders and create lines, what people today might call “generating deferred demand”… After one month, I started raising the price by 100 rubles every week. Even at a 1,200-ruble quote, I was getting a few months’ worth of pre-orders.