Thirty Years in the Profession: From Military Financial Service to Entrepreneurship and Business Education

An essay for the “Experts Speak” section of Synergy Global Forum

Roman Viktorovich Vasilenko, Doctor of Economics, President of the International Business Academy (IBA)

A Journey That Began Long Before Entrepreneurship

Today, entrepreneurship is only one part of my professional biography. If I try to identify where it began, I have to look not at my first business project, but much further back.

In 1986, I was seventeen years old. That was when I entered the Yaroslavl Higher Military Financial School named after General of the Army A. V. Khrulev.

The school trained specialists for the financial service of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. After graduating, I spent the next eight years serving in the Baltic Fleet.

From 1990 to 1998, I served as head of the financial service of a military unit at the Leningrad Naval Base.

My responsibilities included budget planning, financial calculations, service members’ pay, working with contractors, and preparing financial reports.

The military financial system was built around strict discipline. Resources had clearly defined limits, procedures could not be changed arbitrarily, and every financial transaction required the appropriate documentation.

At first glance, this environment has little in common with entrepreneurship.

In practice, it gave me a foundation that proved useful much later.

I learned to evaluate any financial structure in terms of its real economics. You can present an investor with a beautiful idea and create a convincing presentation, but sooner or later everything comes down to money and the ability of the system to generate it.

I also learned to treat financial reporting not as a formality, but as a tool for control.

And one more principle proved particularly important: if you make a decision, you remain responsible for it.

These three things — money, systems, and responsibility — later became part of my entrepreneurial mindset.

Why I Started Over in 1998

In 1998, I decided to leave military service and retire from active duty with the rank of captain, 3rd rank.

I made that choice at a difficult time.

The Russian economy was in the midst of a serious crisis. The ruble collapsed, the banking system was facing major problems, and people had little confidence in economic stability.

Against this backdrop, leaving government service looked quite risky.

I had a clear professional status, a stable income, and defined career prospects. In exchange, I was entering a civilian environment where much was uncertain.

At the same time, I was not leaving with a ready-made plan to build a major business.

What mattered to me was something else: I understood that the skills I had acquired during my years of service could be applied outside the military.

Financial planning, resource management, budget discipline, calculations, and analysis were needed far beyond the armed forces.

This transition taught me something I still consider relevant today:

You should not measure the value of your experience solely by the position in which you acquired it.

A skill can be developed in one field and prove valuable in a completely different one.

Sometimes all it takes is looking at your own knowledge not through the eyes of your previous profession, but through the eyes of a new market.

Eleven Years That Gave Me More Than I Realized

From 1998 to 2009, I worked in various commercial organizations.

During those years, I was involved in financial consulting, investments, insurance, and personal financial planning, and later moved into management.

One significant stage was my work at a Swiss consulting company.

That experience allowed me to see how private wealth management was organized in an international environment and to work with people for whom financial management was a long-term profession.

But the most valuable resource those years gave me was not any particular job.

It was the opportunity to observe entrepreneurs.

I saw companies at different stages of development. I observed owners, executives, and investors. I watched how decisions were made as businesses grew, resources became scarce, and crises emerged.

Gradually, I began comparing the outcomes.

Some entrepreneurs built companies capable of lasting for decades.

Others lost almost everything they had built within just a few years.

And it was impossible to explain these differences simply in terms of starting capital.

Sometimes a successful entrepreneur started with very limited resources.

Sometimes a person with substantial resources made decisions that gradually destroyed the business.

This led me to the conclusion that behind every financial result there is a human system.

The ability to think long term. The ability to exercise self-control. One’s attitude toward time. A willingness to take responsibility for decisions. The habit of analyzing mistakes.

That is why I now see my years of working in different companies as a full-fledged school of entrepreneurship.

There is always a temptation to start your own business as early as possible. But sometimes several years of observing other people’s experience can teach you more than immediately trying to build a company of your own.

Observing someone else’s mistake is far less expensive than making the same mistake yourself.

From Financial Practice to Education

In 2009, I began a project that eventually became the International Business Academy (IBA).

In 2011, the academy was formally established as a private continuing professional education institution, and in 2016 it obtained a state license to conduct educational activities.

At that point, a natural question arose: why move into education when financial consulting was already an established and viable field?

The answer came from my experience.

Over the years, I increasingly encountered the same problem: having money does not necessarily mean knowing how to manage it properly.

You can give someone capital, a good project, and an attractive opportunity. But if that person does not know how to manage themselves, their decisions, and their time, those initial advantages can quickly disappear.

Another person may have far fewer resources but gradually build a sustainable business through systematic thinking.

So I became increasingly interested not in how many resources a person receives, but in how they use those resources.

That was the idea behind creating the academy.

I wanted to go beyond the traditional approach in which entrepreneurship education is reduced to a set of individual tools.

Marketing, sales, finance, and management are certainly necessary.

But there is a level that comes before all of these tools — the ability of the individual to think systematically.

How does a person set goals?

How do they organize their day?

What habits do they develop?

How do they make decisions when they do not have complete information?

How do they respond to failure?

Can they stay on course over the long term?

These questions gradually became the foundation of the IBA concept.

What the Academy Taught Me

Fifteen years of developing an educational project allowed me to test in practice many ideas that had seemed obvious at the beginning.

Real Examples Are Often More Powerful Than Motivation

The first lesson concerns trust.

A person can listen to an excellent lecture, absorb a great deal of information, and even feel inspired.

But real change begins when they start believing that the result is possible for them personally.

That is why real stories are more powerful than abstract promises.

When people see someone who has followed a similar path, the end goal no longer seems unattainable.

For this reason, we sought to bring not only academics and theorists into the academy, but also practicing professionals.

Among the Russian and international speakers we invited were Alan Pease, Andreas Wince, and other experts.

Discipline Is Necessary Even When Education Is About Independent Thinking

The second lesson concerns the format of learning.

Today, a great deal is said about the value of flexibility: learning whenever it is convenient, choosing only the topics that interest you, and setting your own pace.

However, complete freedom without structure does not always produce good results.

If there is no clear path, commitment, or way to measure progress, learning can easily become just another form of consuming content.

That is why I believe a good educational system should combine freedom of choice with discipline.

People need to understand where they are and where they are expected to go.

Scale Requires a Change in Format

The third lesson came through public speaking.

You cannot simply enlarge a small lecture a thousandfold and expect to get a successful mass event.

Speaking to several dozen people and addressing an audience of 30,000 require completely different approaches.

At Gazprom Arena, you have to structure attention, pacing, the presentation, and interaction with the audience in an entirely different way.

I developed this experience gradually, speaking at different venues, including the Rossiya Concert Hall and the Synergy Global Forum in 2017.

What the Book Gave Me

In 2021, Peter Publishing House released my book The Success Hunter: How to Achieve Your Goal.

By that point, I had accumulated a great deal of experience observing entrepreneurs, executives, and people who had achieved significant results.

I decided to bring these observations together into a system of twelve principles.

I did not want to create yet another story about how to get rich quickly.

My goal was different: to show recurring patterns that can be found across different stories of success.

The book was later adapted into a film of the same name. During the production, I had the opportunity to record an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For me, this project was primarily an opportunity to preserve the practical experience of a well-known individual and make it accessible to a Russian-speaking audience.

The book achieved significant distribution.

However, its greatest personal value for me turned out to be something else.

Writing the book forced me to structure my own views.

And that proved more valuable than I had expected.

When an idea exists only in your head, it seems complete.

But once you have to put it on paper, questions arise: Why do I believe this? What is this conclusion based on? Is there evidence from real-world experience?

That is why I encourage entrepreneurs to put their own principles into writing from time to time.

You do not have to write a book for publication.

You can simply try to formulate your own system of beliefs for yourself.

It quickly becomes clear which beliefs are genuinely grounded in experience and which exist simply because you have become accustomed to thinking that way.

Four Rules I Consider Important Today

Over the years, my attitude toward entrepreneurship has changed considerably.

Some things that seem obvious today are things I would have viewed very differently twenty-five years ago, when I left the fleet.

Experience Must Be Turned into Value

The first rule is not to take your own knowledge for granted.

If you have been doing something for many years, you may start to assume that everything you know is equally familiar to everyone else.

That is a mistake.

A skill that has become routine for you may represent significant value to someone else.

That is why it is important not only to acquire experience, but also to learn how to structure it, explain it, and turn it into a clear offering.

Discipline Is Stronger Than Occasional Effort

The second principle concerns daily actions.

Major results are rarely created by one heroic act.

Much more often, they are determined by what a person does consistently.

Lack of sleep, broken promises to yourself, procrastination, and the absence of a system may each seem insignificant on their own.

But over the years, these small violations can create a substantial difference between people.

That is why I do not see discipline as a matter of character or morality.

It is a practical resource that directly affects results.

A Business Must Understand What the Customer Is Paying For

The third principle relates directly to the business model.

An entrepreneur must be able to explain clearly and without unnecessary complexity what problem their product solves and why the customer is willing to pay for it.

If the business owner themselves struggles to answer that question, the problem lies deeper than marketing or advertising.

The sooner an entrepreneur tests the clarity of their business model, the less likely they are to have to fix fundamental problems later.

Public Visibility Is Not Only About Opportunities

The fourth principle is something I understand particularly well today.

Public visibility allows a person to expand their influence, but it also increases the number of people who evaluate them and their decisions.

And that evaluation may be incomplete or unfair.

Once a person becomes a public figure, their professional position gradually becomes part of how their personality and reputation are perceived.

That is why public visibility requires a willingness to accept long-term responsibility.

This does not mean avoiding attention.

But it is important to understand the price that comes with having a large audience.

What Connects All the Stages

If I look at my professional biography today as a single line, it is quite an unusual sequence.

At seventeen, I entered a military financial school.

I then spent eight years serving in the Baltic Fleet.

After that, I moved into the civilian economy, working in commercial organizations and becoming involved in financial consulting, investments, and management.

In 2009, I began developing an educational project that grew into the International Business Academy.

Then came the book, the film, and extensive public work.

At the beginning of each of these stages, I could not know where the next step would lead.

But today I can see the overall logic much more clearly.

Military service gave me discipline and financial responsibility.

The commercial sector allowed me to see how businesses actually work and to observe a wide range of business models.

Observing entrepreneurs helped me understand the importance of the human factor.

Education became a way to systematize the knowledge I had accumulated.

The book forced me to formalize my own methodology.

Public work taught me to understand the cost of having a broad audience.

If I had remained in the military in 1998, my life would almost certainly have turned out differently.

But I do not think it is useful to compare real life with a hypothetical alternative.

What matters much more is this: every stage of your journey can prove valuable, even if you do not yet see its future significance while you are going through it.

That is why entrepreneurs should not only plan their next step, but also learn to make use of the experience they have already gained.

Do not dismiss periods that seem transitional. Sometimes they are precisely what develops the skills you will need to move forward.

My main conclusion after more than thirty years of professional work is simple: long-term results are not built through a single decision, but through a sequence of actions, discipline, and a willingness to learn from every stage of the journey.

I wish everyone building their own business and career the clarity to see their goals, respect for the experience they have accumulated, and the inner resilience needed to keep moving forward even when circumstances turn against them.