What strategies help you survive a crisis?

Simply cutting costs during a crisis is not enough for many companies. Changing a strategy radically is scary and expensive, and in the short term it can result in a decrease in income, but many entrepreneurs see no other option.

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Photo: Leonid Firsov

To adapt to a changed world, companies have to come up with non-obvious moves

Photo: Kommersant / Alexander Miridonov / buy photo

Anastasia Yakoreva

Export instead of import

The Evans real estate agency is more than 20 years old, and all this time it has been mainly engaged in renting housing for foreigners. “In the early 1990s, new embassies, large foreign offices were opened in Moscow - PwH, E&Y, branches of international banks,” recalls Evans managing partner Anna Levitova. “Foreign technical assistance agencies also appeared, for example USAID, or organizations that paid scholarships for nuclear scientists so that they would not move to North Korea and Iran. Or companies working on programs for the safe disposal of Soviet bacteriological weapons. And everyone needed apartments.” Until 2008, Evans dealt mainly with corporate orders, but since the previous crisis, the number of qualified foreign specialists has decreased, and after the annexation of Crimea, foreigners stopped coming to work in Russia altogether.

“We used to conclude 30-40 contracts a month. Since the beginning of 2015, only 10. Already in the fall, it became clear that we needed to change the strategy,” says Levitova.

Now the agency's main clients are not foreign companies, but Russians who want to buy real estate abroad. In general, the agency had worked in this direction before, but only one employee dealt with such orders. “In January, we had an incredible increase in revenue from the sale of foreign real estate,” says Levitova. “For a business located in Moscow, this is an unrealistic volume.”

As a rule, those who previously rented an apartment through the agency turn to the agency to purchase housing. More than half of the clients choose the most expensive relocation option - London, the rest go where it is cheaper - Berlin, Barcelona, etc. Now all Evans employees are learning to sell foreign real estate. Several specialists are also involved in the sale of apartments in Russia: clients living abroad or in two countries have begun to look closely at cheaper Moscow real estate. “Now for $150 thousand you can buy an apartment in Khokhlovsky Lane,” explains Levitova. “Previously, for this money you could, at best, buy something in Khimki.” Levitov does not disclose his income, but says that, having refocused on selling real estate to Russians, the agency plans to reach the financial results of the pre-crisis 2013.

The extreme travel agency L'Aventure changed its strategy in a similar way. Before the crisis, the company sent Russians to New Zealand and South America, and after the ruble fell, it quickly restructured and began transporting Englishmen to Lake Baikal, Buryatia and Yakutia. “Due to currency differences, this type of activity is 30% more profitable,” says L’Aventure founder Dmitry Kiselev. “Russia attracts attention, the main thing is to be able to sell,” he is sure. “The British, for example, react perfectly to the word “photo-ethnotour”.”

To a private owner and from a private owner

It is much easier for companies in the service sector to change strategy than those in the real sector. However, if production workers are faced with the choice of changing strategy or closing their business, tectonic shifts are inevitable.

Mozhaiskoye Highway, Moscow City, Afimall, tunnels in Sochi, new Moscow metro stations - the Swiss manufacturer of construction chemicals, the Sika company, has participated in many notable projects in recent years, and to implement the project in Sochi even opened a representative office in the city . But times have changed, after the completion of the Sochi project, government orders began to noticeably wind down, investors either do not build new business centers and logistics parks, or it becomes unprofitable to participate in construction.

“Now a tender for the construction of any investment project turns into a terrible crush, price competition goes beyond reason, and a price reduction is a road to nowhere,” Dmitry Kunis, director of the general contracting organization STEP, describes the situation.

But, according to the calculations of Sergei Zyuzi, general director of Sika in Russia, the private construction market should grow. “We observed the same situation during the last crisis,” says Zyuzya. “Back then, at the height of it, it was impossible to park near construction hypermarkets. People invested money in repairs. And just yesterday I was in one of these hypermarkets and spent a long time looking for parking.”

Therefore, the company decided to switch from the falling b2b market to the budding b2c market - selling tile adhesive, grout, waterproofing and primers to private owners. Until now, private traders have occupied a ridiculous share of the company’s revenue structure: in 2014, they brought the company only 150 million rubles, while revenue from large orders amounted to 2.7 billion rubles. To operate in the new market, last fall Sika began building a new plant in Lobnya, into which about €2 million will be invested (half of the annual investment program), and negotiations are underway to purchase another plant.

“This year we will sell twice as many mixtures to private owners as last year. In five years it will be more than 1 billion, or even 2 billion rubles,” Zyuzya is sure. “We have a consumer society, B2C is the future, and the professional market will finally shrink. It may not happen tomorrow, but we are a company with a hundred-year history, we have nowhere to rush.”

During the crisis, Easy Finance, a service for managing personal finances, decided to switch from private citizens to the b2b segment. From the point of view of service owners, individual users in a crisis noticeably prefer free products, and banks, which are abandoning offices en masse and going online, buy the product more often.

Porridge instead of lobsters

Prim premium Japanese restaurant "Ginkgo" on Varvarka with an average bill of 3 thousand rubles. Since the beginning of the year, it began to rebuild into a democratic institution. Previously, all products, including sugar, were brought from Japan, but now it is too expensive, and Ginkgo switched to Far Eastern fish. A bar counter was installed in the hall and a mixologist was hired, who mixes trendy Singaporean cocktails for visitors. The menus in heavy leather folders were replaced with cardboards: on one side is the kitchen, on the other are the drinks. On the sign the word "bar" was added to the word "restaurant".

As a result, the average check in a restaurant decreased to 1-1.5 thousand rubles. Previously, the main audience was wealthy men over 35, now Ginkgo is also counting on young people.

“Our group of companies had two premium Japanese restaurants, in a crisis we don’t need so many,” says restaurant representative Rita Losnikova. “Plus, it’s extremely inconvenient to drive up to Varvarka by car. But now we can position ourselves as an establishment that is one step away from metro: those who don’t have a car can also come to us.”

According to Losnikova, attendance has increased slightly, but in order for a simpler audience to completely replace those who are used to dining for 3.5 thousand rubles, it should be at least twice as large. “We’ll have to wait at least four to five months for this,” sighs Losnikova.

Democratization is the most popular strategy change in restaurants. Many people are reducing prices: several establishments Ginza Project, "Prozhektor", Maxim Bar in Moscow, "Knife on the Right, Fork on the Left" in St. Petersburg and many others.

Where should a builder go?

In March, one of the largest St. Petersburg owners of retail real estate, Fort Group, announced that it intended to invest about 800 million rubles. in the creation of children's theme parks. The first park with an area of 4 thousand square meters. m under the Angry Birds brand, in which more than 0.5 billion rubles were invested, should open in April in the Europolis shopping center. Two more smaller children's parks will open in 2016: one of them will be created in an empty area in the shopping center, for the other a special extension will be made to the shopping center.

The situation with retail real estate is difficult: experts say that shopping center revenues are falling by an average of 15-20% compared to last year, and Europolis has an additional misfortune - anonymous calls about the building being mined. In March, visitors to this shopping center were evacuated 20 times; the company estimates losses from hooliganism at 200 million rubles.

“Due to a drop in traffic, the owners of shopping centers are beginning to expand food courts and come up with additional entertainment for people in the original retail spaces, from which good income could previously be extracted,” explains Veronika Ivanova, head of the project department at Astera Moscow. In the recently opened Aviapark in Moscow, a new trend island format has been launched on the third floor - essentially, trade without allocating store space, when you can rent one counter. According to Ivanova, this is not a cheap pleasure for a shopping center, since Aviapark provides retail equipment to tenants at its own expense, but such formats are popular among buyers.

The main goal of innovation is not profit, but maintaining the flow of customers, says Astera Moscow CEO Alexey Filimonov. “In the best case scenario, children’s parks can be repaid, but don’t be ridiculous to make money,” he says. “But the calculation is correct, because children are sacred to consumers, and even in a crisis they will go there.”

The Fort Group still hopes to make money and expects that one theme park will pay for itself in about six years. If the experience is successful, after 2016 the developer plans to replicate the experience in the regions.

In addition, since there will be no need to build shopping centers in the coming years, Fort Group is going to change its type of activity from development to management of existing areas. “Now everyone is short of money, and large companies that previously invested in construction on their own are no longer ready to bear such risks; they want to work according to the fee-development scheme - for a certain percentage they help other, less experienced companies manage real estate,” says General Director of Prosperity Project Management Alexey Polyakov. The elite Moscow developer Barkley and the MR Group company, which is currently completing the construction of the multifunctional complexes Vodny, Fili Grad, and Savelovsky City, are switching to fee-development. Such a strategy will give less profit: according to Polyakov’s estimates, the developer who took all the risks and financed the project could make a profit of more than 30%, fee-development will give at best 7-10%, but in a crisis this is not bad.

The poorer, the more maneuverable

For those who have no problem changing strategy, this is for startups. In September 2013, Alexey Romanenko organized the “Let’s Build” project. In general, it was a site for joint purchases, but in a year, Romanenko admits, the business model changed four times. In July, after acceleration in the Internet Initiatives Development Fund, Postroim turned into an aggregator of sales of furniture, plumbing, construction and finishing materials. It was assumed that the project would post advertisements for stock sales and earn money from advertising and commissions from sellers. For the first time during the existence of the project, turnover on the site began to grow and in July reached 2 million rubles. Romanenko was overjoyed, but then, due to the crisis, most sellers of building materials announced that they were curtailing marketing activities and, instead of sales, they would slowly sell warehouse stocks at regular prices. “We realized that the Russian market is not interesting to investors, and we ourselves are not able to work in Russia,” complains Romanenko.

In September 2014, Romanenko organized an aggregator of clothing and footwear sales in the United States, 2For1, which was supposed to make money from users, for example, selling them for $1 the opportunity to filter out all discounts greater than 75%. So far, the service earns almost nothing, but the application has 5 thousand downloads, and Romanenko is full of hope. “In Russia, before the crisis, the DIY market where we worked was $20 billion, now it has fallen to $10 billion, and in America the shoe market alone is $400 billion,” he calculates.

Now Romanenko lives in Montenegro. To develop a new startup, I sold my apartment in Moscow and my car. “We need to burn bridges so that the brain can work better,” he explains.

Everything was also radically changed by Alexander Pasechnik, who since 2013 has been developing an online service for preparing schoolchildren for the Unified State Exam and even presented the project to President Putin. “However, it turned out that the market was not ready,” explains Pasechnik. It was decided to bankrupt the company, and instead of teaching schoolchildren, Pasechnik launched the iSmashed service for repairing iPhones and iPads, reasoning that in a crisis people would prefer to repair phones rather than buy new ones.

Entrepreneurs on the brink of change