Today, in the section of "Entrepreneurship of the post -apocalypse" the history of Dr. Guber and its founder Nikita Malykhin, who jokes that he "gathered from a printing machine". Nikita explains why people do home alcohol, how to build a business on this and how to convince buyers that moonshine is safe and exciting. Thanks to our friends from the button for help in preparing the heading!
This heading has a sponsor thanks to the button for love for good texts button “Germans burned well, they had a lot of bread, stew and garlic,” recalls Nikolai Bondarev. When he was still a very small child, the native village of Khokhol-Trustyanka in the Voronezh region, where he lived with his mother and two brothers, occupied German troops. They occupied the Bondarev’s house, they had to move to the woven barn and sleep there with goats and sheep. The memories of Nikolai’s soldiers were not the most pleasant, and both about the German and the Russians, because at first one, and then the others - when the occupation ended - forced his mother to dig trenches from morning to night and bombed the village.
There was very little food, and the family was saved in many ways due to moonshine. Not in the sense that his mother and three sons used him. Just the Germans in the evenings often drank schnapps. And when he ended (for some reason he was always not enough) and they really wanted to drink more, his mother brought them beetroot moonshine-there was a lot of him in the house. The soldiers in joy drunk and lost vigilance, and in the meantime the woman collected from their table what they did not get, and brought her sons to the barn.
Moonshine also often saves a Russian person. For example, farmer Dmitry Zamyatin transferred his tractor to moonshine in the spring of 2016, and now he does not need to buy an expensive diesel fuel. According to the farmer, many neighbors, seeing such savings, decided to follow his example, and the production of moonshine in the village has grown sharply, but people, on the contrary, have become much less. After all, you need to save fuel. True, not all tractors are starting from moonshine, but only those that were produced at the Lipetsk factory almost fifty years ago.
Moonshine is both the joy and sadness of the Russian man. On the one hand, driving it is cheaper than buying alcohol, on the other hand, many, trying to illegally sell it, make their own problems. As, for example, one resident of the Pskov region who accidentally sold a party to the moonshine by a police undercover. Now a criminal case has been instituted against her. But be that as it may, this traditional drink for us is so firmly associated with everyone with a mysterious Russian soul that even at Russian airports Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo you can now buy it.
Nikita Malykhin - the founder of the company "Doctor Guber" - is not one of those who leave for the village and secretly drives moonshine from everyone to sell it. He was engaged in quite legal business - designed and built different equipment, mainly for printing houses. But once, in 2007, he realized that it was time to change something.
“I had a good position and a good salary,” Nikita recalls. “But I'm tired.” Despite the brilliant track record and good ties in the production sector, I decided to go nowhere. After all, I was young and I wanted to move on. And where I worked at that time, I was constantly restrained, put my ideas and suggestions for later or questioned. I wanted "either pan or disappear." This is later, having already matured, I understood my previous leaders and learned to calculate the risks. And then it seemed useless.
Nikita had small accumulations, and he could afford for some time not to look for a new job, but to relax and do something interesting. In order not to waste energy, Nikita decided to prepare a gift for his friend: his birthday was nearing, and he dreamed of starting to cook his own production in his dacha.
“I knew how to make typographic machines,” Nikita explains. - And various other mechanisms. So why wouldn't I do food? My experience quite allowed me to learn how to do this. I studied a bunch of literature and compiled a three -dimensional project of an automated installation for the preparation of strong alcohol. Then he broke this project in various types of work and gave it to several contractors, and collected the control system for himself, in his corridor.
Everything was ready for a friend’s birthday. Both the apparatus and the whiskey made with it liked everyone so much that Nikita thought: the manufacture of such devices could now become his profession. So in the same 2007, he registered the company, came up with a brand and wrote a site for his store.
First, only one model was presented there - the same as Nikita gave a friend for his birthday. Its cost was 52,000 rubles, and it was sold for 150,000.
The first customers were mostly quite wealthy people - the owners of country houses who wanted to drive moonshine in nature.
According to Nikita, his clients are generally people who are primarily interesting to the process itself, and not alcohol consumption.
Nikita gave the production of devices to outsources: according to his drawings, the St. Petersburg plant for the production of metal structures made the iron part of the devices. In another company, parts were cut out, in the third - painted. But the entrepreneur always gathered the management systems himself. In 2008, he rented an office so that customers could come to see the equipment before buying it.
“In the same period, I acquired a virtual multi-channel line with a number starting at 8-800,” says Nikita. - In general, he created the illusion of a large company. He wrote a site, rented an office and responded to calls by federal number. I did this so that customers start trusting me, because few people want to buy expensive equipment from a freelancer, and it doesn’t matter how good it is. But still there was no deception, after all, many people were really involved in the case, they just did not sit in my office. And my company eventually turned into that very large company very quickly - now about a hundred people are on the staff.
By 2009, Dr. Guber has already had the first offline store in St. Petersburg. As Nikita recalls, the most difficult at this stage was to fight the stereotype, as if to drive moonshine is some kind of marginal activity. I had to come home to customers, cook moonshine myself, demonstrate the quality of the product.
“I showed customers that it is safe,” says Nikita, “both from a scientific and everyday point of view.” In the store you can sell fake alcohol, but not only that a person has prepared a drink and knows how and what he did, he can also make this drink the way he wants. For example, buckwheat vodka or rye bread wine.
In the same 2009, Nikita decided that it was time to expand the assortment, and developed another device - a small one that can be used on a kitchen stove. This idea turned out to be very successful, today about 90% of the attitudes that Dr. Guber sells are exactly the same, kitchen.
Then hops, malt, barley, corn and other raw materials for making moonshine appeared in the store. In 2010, when contractors often began to supply defective parts, the entrepreneur decided that it was time to open his production: he rented a production workshop and began to gradually buy equipment for the manufacture of devices. Today, the products of the Doctor Guber are almost completely gathering there, only small fittings have to be ordered abroad.
Now Dr. Guber is selling not only moonshine devices, but also mini-pivo coupling. At first they were supplied from Germany, but then Nikita began to make devices of his own production - specially for this he went to study at the Department of Biotechnology in ITMO.
Having studied brewing, the entrepreneur realized that in fact, the moonshine can be very easily redone in the brewery, and now you can buy a special perforated mesh in the kit with the moonshine installation - such that beer and moonshine on the same apparatus can be made with its help.
In ITMO, Nikita met students who studied cheese, and thought about starting to produce devices for cooking cheese. Having studied in several additional courses, he got down to business, and in 2016 the first such installation appeared in the assortment of Dr. Guber-it immediately acquired a convent in Yoshkar-Ola. Now the company is selling cheese men of three types: there is the easiest set for non -professionals for 12,500 rubles, a cheese man with a water heating for 23,500 and a professional installation for 128,000 - for the first few months of sales, Nikita received fifteen orders for such devices.
“To be the boss to himself, starting your own business is not as easy and great as many may seem,” Nikita believes. - If you are the owner of the enterprise, then you always have a very big responsibility. Before employees, clients, partners. And the risks are also large: at first it is not clear whether you can earn money or, conversely, you will go into a minus. Not every person is able to become the master of his craft. And not everyone needs it. Moreover, qualified hired managers are also highly appreciated in the market. For example, I now have hired leaders, and they do not earn much less than me. But still, it seems that I am one of those who can do their own business, and I like it. At first, when you leave the stable work just like that, to nowhere, it is scary and anxious. But still, I never once regretted my decision. However, in order to be successful in business, you need to work a lot and constantly study. You can’t think that entrepreneurship is such a field of miracles in the country of fools where you can plant two coins and grow a money tree. And you also do not need to expect help from anyone - including from the state. To everyone who takes on their job, I advise you to count on their own forces exclusively.
PS:
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This heading has a sponsor thanks to the button for love for good texts button “Germans burned well, they had a lot of bread, stew and garlic,” recalls Nikolai Bondarev. When he was still a very small child, the native village of Khokhol-Trustyanka in the Voronezh region, where he lived with his mother and two brothers, occupied German troops. They occupied the Bondarev’s house, they had to move to the woven barn and sleep there with goats and sheep. The memories of Nikolai’s soldiers were not the most pleasant, and both about the German and the Russians, because at first one, and then the others - when the occupation ended - forced his mother to dig trenches from morning to night and bombed the village.
Text Julia Dudkin Moscow 
Illustration Natalya Yamshchikova St. Petersburg 