The backpacking ceo the moscow news
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© Courtesy of Anton Permogorov
Business
The backpacking CEO
by Tim Wall at 09/07/2012 20:27
Anton Permogorov had just finished his threeweek trek in the Himalayas when he got a
Skype call that changed his life.
Permogorov, an impishlooking thirtysomething, had gone on a worldwide trip for 80
weeks after a decade of working in the consumer electronics retail industry, first for M
Video and then for Eldorado as an expert in ecommerce.
One day, he said, he decided to change direction and pace, and gain a more international
perspective.
“I got tired of all those TVs and washing machines, having to deal with them all day,”
Permogorov said, sipping a latte on the outside terrace of the Belorusskaya branch of Le
Pain Quotidien last Friday.
“Now I’m still working in ecommerce, but working to promote an active lifestyle.”
The call in Nepal, where he was trekking with his wife, came with an invitation to join
heverest.ru, an online retailer of outdoor activity, sports and adventure clothing, footwear
and equipment. It struck him that the link to the Himalayas’ Mount Everest, the world’s
tallest peak and every mountaineer’s dream, was no coincidence.
“It was a good sign,” Permogorov said. “The second sign was when I came to the Heverest
offices, and I found it was the same building, the same floor, and even the same door.
Exactly the same place I’d been working before for four years for Eldorado, but now with a
different company.”
Now Permogorov is a CEO for the first time, and he described the experience as a “reallife
MBA – every day you learn something new, dealing with human resources, corporate
governance and venture capital.”
Dressed in a casual shirt, jeans and moccasins, and carrying a backpack, Permogorov was
jotting down notes on paper (not a laptop or mobile) when I joined him at the cafe. Over a
warm turkey salad and a second large latte, he explained how going around the world
trekking had changed his outlook on life, even before the call came from the sportswear
startup.
‘Talking with the universe’
After leaving Eldorado, Permogorov and his wife lived in New York for six months. “I felt
that I had to improve my English to get the kind of job I wanted,” he said.
There, he took various businessrelated classes at New York University, and then he and his
wife took off on their adventure. “We moved to a new place every two days, and in 14
months we went to five continents and 33 countries,” he said.
The places included locales as eclectic as Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Nepal, Laos and Borneo.
“I had time to analyze myself,” Permogorov said. “when you have just two weeks’ vacation,
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- 2. you don’t have enough time to think about everything.”
His favorite trekking destination has to be Nepal, he said, adding: “You feel your mind
talking with the universe.”
When he came back from Nepal and met major shareholders in Fast Lane Ventures, the
company behind heverest.ru and a bunch of other Russian Internet startups, he found they
were more interested in his life experiences than simply his resume in ecommerce.
“He said, ‘I don’t care about your other work – you went around the world, you’ve seen
different things.’ That’s why they hired me,” Permogorov said, adding with a grin: “I hope
they’re satisfied.”
Heverest sells more than 10,000 branded goods online, “everything for people who like an
active lifestyle – sports, hiking, tennis, fishing and hunting,” he said.
Buying online
Permogorov said he chose the LPQ cafe (a favorite hangout, apparently) as our meeting
place to make a point about how Russia is changing.
“Five years ago, you wouldn’t see pavement cafes like this,” he said, comparing Moscow
now with European cities. “Also, Russia is now a more sporting country. A lot of people
now ride bikes, and people now spend more money on sports shoes.”
Although Permogorov thinks Heverest doesn’t have a direct online competitor, it’s main
terrestrial competition comes from Sportmaster, which has stores across Russia.
But he believes that there’s room in the market, estimated at $6 billion by RuMetrika.ru in
2010. According to Fast Lane Ventures’ forecast, the sports and leisure market is likely to
reach $12 billion by 2015.
Part of this change, Permogorov said, is down to the government’s support for sports.
“Putin always shows he’s a sporting guy,” Permogorov said. “He helped us to get the
Olympics in Sochi and the football World Cup, and a lot for money will be spent to improve
sports infrastructure.”
Consumers’ behavior is changing, he believes, in favor of online stores.
He cites figures that 60 percent of Russians don’t have a sportswear store within 100
kilometers of where they live, so buying online is more attractive.
A good salesman
It was Permogorov’s background in computers and retail management studies that got him
into ecommerce. After graduating from the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, and a stint
writing for a computer magazine as a freelance author, he got his start first selling
computers, then managing a store, for MVideo.
“I spent six months as a salesperson in the IT and computer section, and was fortunate
enough to win Employee of the Month every month,” he said. “The key is not be pushy, but
to try to understand what the customer wants to achieve, and what he really needs. Back
then, many people were quite uneducated about computers, so you had to work out what
they were trying to explain.”
This approach helps Permogorov now, as he tries to work out what visitors to Heverest’s
website want.
“When someone buys his first backpack, he thinks it has to be big enough to carry a lot of
stuff.” But when you’ve been trekking in places like Peru and Nepal, he said, “you realize
that in fact, the smaller the backpack, the better. Five kilos is all you should really carry.”
Marathon runner
As well as a planned trek with friends and colleagues to Kilimanjaro next month, he said
that now he’s going one step further, and getting into running, training five or six times a
week in preparation for the Istanbul marathon in November.
Naturally, as befits a salesman, Permogorov said that he bought his running gear from his
online store.
He also believes that his sporting hobbies help him in his work.
“You have to do lots of challenging things outside of work,” he said. “It’s very good for a
CEO. It helps you to change your mindset, to remind yourself that work is just a part of life,
not all of it.”
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