On stage of world: From the dormitory to a multimillion company

by Lara Eisermann

When we visited Russian Pointe, Aleksandra Efimova, the founder, not only gave us an insight of how she does business but also of how she started the company and made it a real success. Although questions like “How do I pay my bills?” or “How do I sell my ballet shoes?” played a major part at the beginning of Russian Pointe, Aleksandra followed her dream and made her passion, the ballet, a working business. What made her succeed, were the things she learned from dancing: Discipline and the power of endurance. And those things are what she represents as a leader today. This plays a major role for her messages’ credibility. It seems clear to me that she is still very passionate about her company as well as about dancing itself. Therefore, it is easy to believe when she talks about the company’s core values as she still reflects the same kind of discipline today. During her presentation, she mentioned some challenges she faced especially at the beginning of Russian Pointe. The most important message of this, was the fact that she was never afraid of failing but regarded everything as a challenge. Mistakes are necessary in the process of learning and help you to improve in the future.

What differentiates a successful business from those who failed are not money or strong competitors. It is a lack of a clear and communicated vision and mission. “A strong leadership that defines a clear mission and vision is the foundation of success. Leadership without a clear mission and vision is like going on a trip without knowing what your destination is.“ The company’s mission as well as its vision have to be precise and easy to remember. If you   cannot remember it by yourself, you cannot expect your employees or your customers to remember it. This is something my team struggled with at the beginning of our project. Although it might sound simple to invent an easy and insistent mission and vision statement, it proved to be hard to formulate these statement short and in a way your employees and your customers can identify with. What I learned from Aleksandra is the way you have to embody your mission and vision statement in order to create a certain kind of credibility.

“Inspired performance- anytime, anywhere.”, that is the company’s slogan. For me, the slogan does not only represent Russian Pointe’s products but especially the style of leadership of Aleksandra. Her standard “What can be measured, can be improved”, shows how she sets clear goals and constantly improves her company. Therefore, it is necessary to ask yourself how success looks like in every single part of your company. The results are accountability and excellence. Informing your employees about your goals is aimed at creating a friendly and open-minded organizational culture. This gives me the impression that Aleksandra leads her company with a strong focus on her employees. There are no high hierarchies structures and the communication ways work quickly. For me, these are key factors for a well-functioning organizational structure.

Another advantage resulting from this kind of organizational structure is the fact that companies with a highly-developed organizational culture spend less money with fixing mistakes than poorly developed ones, as the Harvard Business Review pointed out. In other words, it is the employee-focused and customer-friendly atmosphere Aleksandra implemented in her organization that drives the company’s success. In the case of Russian Pointe, it is necessary that the staff can identify with the elegance and discipline the company is providing to its customers. This creates customer benefit because the employee is focused on the individual needs of each customer and therefore can deliver a great advisory. Creating the most possible sense of well-being and comfort for each ballet dancer, is the reason for Russian Pointe becoming a unique success.

For our own project, Foodentity, the organizational culture should not differ much from Russian Pointe’s since our company is very customer-focused. We want to deliver unique products that fit to our customers’ individual needs and conditions. Therefore, we also want to implement a low hierarchies management structure and we want to be close to the customers’ need. What might differ from Aleksandra’s strategy is the fact that we aim at creating a special blog for our customers where they can share their experience and propose new recipes that we can implement as well. So we might focus even more on our customers’ individuality than Russian Pointe.

As a conclusion, I have to say that I learned a lot from Aleksandra on our trip. She inspired me with her courage to start a business in a foreign country and especially at such a young age. What I can implement to our own business, is the necessity of a clearly-defined mission and vision statement. The leader has to define the KPIs and communicate them to every employee of the company in order to create transparency. Another important aspect to add is the necessity of leadership emphasis, employee empowerment and peer involvement. Especially the last one, the peer involvement might play a major role in our company because I regard it as very important that our cooks as well as our customers themselves always come up with new innovative ideas in order to provide our customers a variety of fresh and healthy meals. To sum up everything I learned about organizational culture so far, I would say there is not only one leadership style or organizational culture. As Paul Frehling, a successful lawyer from Chicago, pointed out: You cannot judge a company’s culture. You can question it, but never judge unless you take your time and get to know it.