From Naval Financial Service to Building a Business Academy: Thirty Years of Professional Experience

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

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

Where My Professional Journey Began

Before talking about entrepreneurship, education, and management experience, I would like to outline the starting point of my professional journey. Over more than thirty years of work, I have moved through very different professional environments and gained practical experience that I now consider important to share with other entrepreneurs. This essay is about those observations and the conclusions I have drawn from them.

In 1986, at the age of seventeen, I entered the Yaroslavl Higher Military Financial School named after General of the Army A. V. Khrulyov. It was one of the Soviet Union’s leading specialized institutions, training officers for the financial service of the Armed Forces.

After graduating, from 1990 to 1998, I served as head of the financial service of a military unit at the Leningrad Naval Base of the Baltic Fleet.

My responsibilities included budget planning, calculating and paying military allowances, working with contractors, financial reporting, and liaising with higher-level authorities. The specific nature of military financial service was that resources were predetermined and limited, documentation requirements were extremely strict, and there was virtually no room for deviating from established procedures.

At first glance, this kind of work may seem like the complete opposite of entrepreneurship, where independence and the ability to make unconventional decisions are valued. Yet military service became one of the most important schools of my professional life.

It shaped three principles that I continue to follow to this day.

First, the viability of any business model is ultimately determined not by an impressive presentation, but by the actual movement of money.

Second, financial documentation is never unnecessary. If there is no proper accounting and reporting system, it will inevitably become a source of problems sooner or later.

Third, responsibility for a financial decision cannot be fully shifted onto circumstances, colleagues, or instructions. A decision remains the responsibility of the person who made it.

Why I Decided to Leave Military Service

In 1998, I left active service with the rank of Captain 3rd Rank.

It was not an easy decision. A military career offered a certain degree of stability: a guaranteed, if not particularly high, income, clear professional prospects, and the possibility of eventually receiving a pension. At the same time, Russia’s civilian economy in the late 1990s was in extremely difficult condition. The country was going through a financial crisis, the ruble had collapsed, many banks were facing serious problems, and the overall level of uncertainty and distrust was very high.

Moving from the military system into civilian life under such circumstances involved considerable risk. I had neither substantial capital nor an extensive business network.

At the same time, my decision to leave was not driven by a sudden desire to become an entrepreneur. Rather, I realized that the professional skills I had developed during my years of service could be useful far beyond a single military unit.

Financial planning, budgeting, expense control, calculations, and discipline were valuable in other areas as well.

This led me to my first important conclusion: people do not always objectively assess the value of their own professional expertise. When we operate within a familiar system, we often take the skills we have accumulated for granted. It is only when we step outside that system that we can see how transferable those skills actually are.

Ten Years That Seemed Like a Transitional Period

From 1998 to 2009, my professional activities were connected with various commercial organizations. During this period, I progressed from financial consultant to company executive.

I worked on investment projects, insurance, and personal financial planning. For part of this period, I worked with a Swiss consulting company, where I had the opportunity to learn about international approaches to private wealth management.

What proved particularly valuable was communicating with professionals who had spent decades working in financial management. For them, it was neither a gamble nor a way to make quick money, but a genuine profession requiring consistency, discipline, and a deep understanding of how processes work.

For a long time, I viewed those ten years as a relatively long period of searching for my own direction. Today, I see that period very differently.

It was precisely during those years that I was able to gain an inside view of a wide range of business models, meet entrepreneurs with different levels of experience, and observe the consequences of their decisions.

Some companies became sustainable and continued to grow for years. Others went from opening their first office to a serious financial crisis or complete closure within just a few years.

I gradually became interested in one question: why, under comparable starting conditions, do some entrepreneurs build long-term companies while others quickly lose what they have created?

The answer turned out to be far more complex than simply the quality of an idea, the specifics of an industry, or plain luck.

That is why I consider observing other people’s experience to be one of the most underestimated tools for entrepreneurial development. A person who spends several years analyzing other people’s decisions has the opportunity to learn from their mistakes without having to pay for every lesson with their own money.

Many people want to start their own business as quickly as possible. That is a natural desire, but sometimes the urge to immediately “do your own thing” deprives a person of the opportunity to first gain the practical experience they need.

Why Education Became My Next Direction

In 2009, I launched a project that eventually grew into 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 educational license.

I was repeatedly asked: why education? Financial consulting was a more straightforward direction and could potentially have generated commercial results more quickly.

The reason lay in the conclusions I had reached over the previous ten years.

I gradually became convinced that a person’s main limitation is often not a lack of money at all. Much more significant is a lack of knowledge, skills, and a certain way of thinking.

Capital alone does not guarantee success. You can give someone money, a promising idea, and good starting conditions, but without the ability to manage their time, decisions, and expectations, they may lose everything fairly quickly.

Another person may be given far fewer resources but, with a systematic approach, be capable of building a sustainable business.

The difference lies not only in the amount of money available. In many cases, the decisive factor is a person’s ability to think and act consistently.

That was how the idea for the academy emerged.

I wanted to create not another school offering a standard set of courses in sales, marketing, or management. There were already plenty of educational projects of that kind.

The goal was different: to create an environment in which people could consistently work on their mindset and behavior — learning to set goals, develop useful habits, make financial decisions, interact with others, and maintain the ability to work toward long-term results.

What Building the Academy Taught Me

Over the fifteen-plus years of IBA’s existence, I have learned several lessons that could not have been fully anticipated when the project began.

The first is that the need for education is always there, but content alone is not enough. A person must believe that the promised result is personally achievable for them.

The strongest motivation in this regard is often not theory, or even personal ambition, but a concrete example.

When people see someone with a similar starting point who has already traveled a certain path, it becomes easier for them to imagine themselves reaching the same point.

That is why, from the very beginning, we sought to invite not only teachers and theoreticians to the academy, but also people with real-world practical experience — both Russian and international experts. They included Alan Pease, Andreas Vins, and other well-known experts.

The second conclusion concerns discipline.

An educational environment without rules and commitments can quickly turn from a tool for development into a form of entertainment. Learning “when you feel like it,” without clear requirements or accountability on either side, generally produces weak results.

This may run counter to the popular idea of making education as flexible as possible. But my experience has shown me the opposite: people do not need absolute freedom; they need a clear structure that allows them to see their own progress and understand what the next step is.

The third lesson concerns scaling.

An educational product can indeed be scaled, but to do so, you need to understand exactly what is being scaled and how the format of interaction with the audience changes.

Speaking to several tens of thousands of people at Gazprom Arena is fundamentally different from teaching a class of thirty people. Even when the topic remains the same, the way it is presented, the dynamics, and the communication tools need to be different.

I did not understand this immediately. I gradually developed this understanding through speaking engagements at different venues — from the Rossiya Concert Hall to Synergy Global Forum in 2017.

A Book as a Way to Test My Own System of Beliefs

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

In it, I attempted to systematize twelve principles that I had repeatedly encountered in the stories of people who had achieved significant results.

My goal was not to formulate yet another “formula for wealth.” I was more interested in identifying patterns that can be observed across very different life stories.

A film of the same name was later made based on the book. As part of that project, I had the opportunity to record an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For me, this was primarily a way to preserve and share his practical experience with a Russian-speaking audience, rather than simply a marketing tool.

The book achieved a notable print run by contemporary business-literature standards. But today, what matters much more to me is not the number of copies sold, but the process of creating it.

Writing the book forced me, for the first time, to set out my own methodology systematically in written form.

I consider this a useful exercise for any entrepreneur. Try putting your own principles down on paper — even if you have no intention of showing them to anyone.

You will very quickly discover that some beliefs that seemed obvious and unquestionable turn out to be much less convincing when you have to explain them consistently and logically.

Four Thoughts I Would Like to Leave with the Synergy Audience

The Synergy audience consists of people who are unlikely to be impressed by a set of standard pieces of advice about working harder, setting goals, and believing in success.

So, to conclude, I would like to share four lessons that, twenty-five years ago, when I was leaving military service, would not have seemed obvious to me at all.

First — people often underestimate their own experience.

Something a person has been able to do well for many years eventually begins to seem completely ordinary to them. But outside their familiar professional environment, those same skills may have significantly greater value.

That is why it is important not only to acquire expertise, but also to know how to present, structure, and explain it properly to others.

Second — discipline is an economic advantage, not merely a personal quality.

Over the years of observing entrepreneurs, I have repeatedly seen situations in which failure was caused not by a lack of capital or knowledge, but by a series of small disruptions to their own routines.

Broken promises to oneself, chronic lack of sleep, the absence of a system, and the failure to develop the habit of finishing what has been started gradually create a cumulative effect.

The result five years from now is often determined by what a person does every day, rather than by one major decision.

Third — a business must be able to clearly explain the value it creates.

Any business model remains viable as long as it can answer a simple question: what specific benefit does the customer receive, and how does the product create that benefit?

If an entrepreneur cannot give a short and honest answer to this question, it is better to acknowledge the problem as early as possible.

The longer a person avoids having this conversation with themselves, the more expensive it may become to correct the situation later.

Fourth — visibility comes with a long-term cost.

Stepping into the public eye creates opportunities, but at the same time, it makes a person and their decisions subject to constant external evaluation.

And that evaluation is not always objective.

If a person chooses to take a public professional position, they need to understand that responsibility for it does not end when the speech or publication is over.

Public visibility becomes part of their ongoing professional biography. There is no need to avoid it because of possible criticism, but its consequences need to be considered in advance.

In Conclusion

More than thirty years ago, I began my professional journey as a financial service officer in a military unit of the Baltic Fleet.

Today, I have a doctorate in economics, a published book, an educational academy that I founded, and experience working in business and public-facing environments.

I cannot know what my life would have been like if, in 1998, I had made a different decision and continued my military career.

But I do know one thing: every stage I went through ultimately became part of the body of knowledge and experience I have today.

That is why I do not consider any of those periods accidental or wasted time.

I wish everyone who reads this essay the ability to clearly see their own professional trajectory, understand the reasons behind their decisions, and find within themselves enough strength to continue on their chosen path even when circumstances are not in their favor.