My reflections on 2022

Preparing to transition to a New Year is always a cause for reflection for me. We were blessed this year by the best gift of all — new life — adding a little Alister Hugo to our family! There’s nothing better than the cosiness of a fire in the winter months with a loved one in your arms.

There’s a lot of pain and horror happening very close to us, in the heart of Europe. Ukraine will win this battle and in 2023 we will drink coffee in Kyiv with our friends. My heart is with Ukraine.

But let me introduce myself shortly before diving into the business side of my life. I was born in a small Estonian town in a mixed family. During the Soviet times, I had to accept two parallel realities. My grandparents invested a lot in raising me during my early years. My parents were always busy, working several jobs, and trying to provide the best they could. Except that for children LOVE translates as TIME. I got almost unlimited time from my grandma and grandpa. She was a communist, he was a liberal with a background of the local bourgeois. I am not sure how they made this model work. My grandma was listening to the Moscow radio stations, singing along to all the revolutionary songs while me and and my grandpa were spending all evenings in the small workshop down in the cellar, listening to the Voice of America. It was a cognitive dissonance, being a Soviet pioneer and longing for freedom to see the world at the same time. Later came Solzhenitsyn and Akunin. The overall family model I grew up with was eclectic and words like “love” and “appreciation” were not too common among my relatives back then. My dad was a driver with businesses on the side. He was one of those street-smart neo-capitalists who didn’t get their seats at the high table, hating commies and loving “The Beatles”, American denim and French brandy. Unfortunately, he passed away when I was 17. My mom, who always relied on him, couldn’t build her own career after this loss and eventually lost most of her charm and glamour. She was the only one using the L word with me.

I made my first sales at the age of 14. I bought a bunch of Finnish music magazines “Suosikki”, cut them to pieces and sold posters of famous bands while creating smaller badges with the black&white profile pictures of famous musicians. I sold these to my schoolmates, making 200–300% profit on each magazine. Certainly, my time was cheap back then.

Years later, my business became more advanced. I was selling locally produced fabrics to underground factories in Russia and they paid me with counterfeit training suits with some famous labels that were successfully sold on the local black market. That was still a pre-independence era and entrepreneurship was not regulated yet in post-Soviet regions.

During my first year at the TalTech, I was travelling on weekends to Leningrad by train, buying baby strollers, and filling them with some exotic liqueurs. This was a period of total deficit and business was good. Later, we started to import computer parts, building ZX Sinclair Spectrum computers and selling them at the university dorms.

This was my “business school”, with zero theory, pure experience and gut feeling as a strategy generator, monitoring the demand and being solution-oriented. Zero empathy. Pure business.

Meanwhile, I met the most beautiful woman in the world and proposed to her on our second date. There are those defining moments that change the direction of our life. I never knew how important it is to marry well. I have learned it over the course of years and she has been my tender teacher. Her family had become a role model for me, as her parents expressed love and kindness and her dad was a big dreamer and an athlete. I also learned from them to respect private property and hard work.

In the early days of “cowboy” capitalism, I joined a company in the wood industry. This was my worst working experience ever and only later analyzing it all I choose to be grateful for this experience. This company’s way of conducting business, treating its employees as tools and sticking to low moral values was so unethical and poor that I was able to experience the Dark Side pretty early in my career. The owner of this company was later shot and killed by somebody bigger in the food chain. I still consider him my teacher.

If you have a pure heart and empathy as your values, you can learn from anything. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”

Years later, I co-founded a wood processing plant and it was almost a 10-year-long career, full of very different experiences, a lot of international travel and networking. It ended suddenly one day when I realized that I stopped developing and evolving. I sold my shares and left overnight.

Our two sons were born during this period and my wife was teaching them love and compassion while I was working. I believe that our relationship was good and was based on mutual respect and love. But boy, what did I know about love then?

When I left my company, that was when I became ready for being led. I never had a mentor before. I was 32 years old and looking.

In 2004, we started a joint venture with my wife. It became one of the most popular interior design brands on our market. That was her “baby” and I am extremely proud of her and her team’s commitment to her customers’ satisfaction. I saw how a young lady without any business background through love and passion was growing into the brand. My functions there became mostly supportive and as I felt a recession coming up in 2007–2008, I was looking for a plan B, to secure our family finances and lifestyle.

I have never looked into the direct sales industry and was even not aware of such an industry’s existence. I went to a weekend conference in Moscow to realize what has been hidden. We found an amazing community of supportive, loving, like-minded individuals willing to help and share their knowledge. The first two books our newly found coach shared with us back then were “The 5 Love languages” by Gary Chapman and “Personality Plus” by Florence Littauer. That was the very beginning of our journey through life together as a growing couple. In a few years, we have built an international business that gave us the financial freedom we have enjoyed for nearly 10+ years.

I am eternally grateful to my mentors and coaches who invested their time in us, supporting our growth and sharing their vision. I have learned to pay it forward. You can hardly achieve anything significant when building a global team of independent entrepreneurs if your values don’t inspire them and if they are not a part of your goals and vision. Leadership in this type of business is not taken. It’s given to you by those people who trust you that can take them to their goals. In a traditional corporate culture, they use people to grow businesses. In a people’s business, you use the business to grow your people, so they will grow their businesses. I have learned through my own mistakes that you can’t lead what you need and you cannot take people to where you are not going yourself. We have built our business based on four values and guiding principles: Freedom, Family, Hope and Reward.

Through the books of several amazing business leaders like John C. Maxwell, Jim Dornan and many others, I had a chance to cast my own values. Those are pretty simple to identify and execute when they are truly yours.
F.L.I.T.U.:
- Family
- Loyalty
- Integrity
- Trust
- Unity

Every time I need to make an important decision, I take it through those values. When one of those values doesn’t match the offer, I skip it. It’s a pretty simple way to model your decision-making algorithm.

Achieving financial freedom gave me an opportunity to dive into the startup world, build and sell my first tech company and become an investor and a mentor in several startup incubators. An experience that we have acquired got us into the rabbit hole of web3. Last April, together with our team we put together the biggest web3 event in Nordics, NFT Tallinn. In May 2023, we gonna organise it again, this time 4x bigger.

Quite for some time, I had a dream to build my next business together with my grown-up sons. One of them is a hustler, the other is a coder. This year, I have reached this goal and today we are building WOF Labs from scratch with me in an advising and supporting position and Sander as a CEO with Daniel writing the code. My wife and I were able to raise those boys surrounded by unconditional love and support. We have always had a framework of certain tools in our family but our kids were educated based on three principles: Freedom, Creativity, and Responsibility.

Contemporary businesses and products have different go-to-market strategies than they used to have a decade ago. With no-code or low-code tools, one can build a product in no time. This is why in my experience community comes first. When you have a strong and supportive community that shares your vision, you can create distribution and demand before even having a product.

I would say, we have reached the tipping point where engineering and coding skills are not the bottlenecks anymore. We are lacking community leaders with empathy and love towards their tribes. I have been re-reading a book by Gary Chapman “Love As a Way of Life” lately.
Chapman delivers a powerful plan for whole-life happiness, with simple yet intensive exercises and wisdom for finding the life you have always wanted. The way in which our individual lives are improved, says Chapman, is through improving each relationship in your life: with your parents your children, your coworkers, and your spouse, and for all human interactions that form the foundations of our lives. He brings out the 7 characteristics of love — Kindness, Patience, Forgiveness, Courtesy, Humility, Generosity, and Honesty.

My takeaways from that:
1. Putting your spouse before yourself is crucial to making marriage work.
2. Kindness involves sacrifice. “I’m the one who is privileged to help someone in need.”
3. Allow someone to be imperfect.
4. Love is an attitude that says “I choose you to focus my life on helping others.
5. Life is a slow journey of becoming the people we choose to be.
6. Small lies destroy relationships.
7. Generosity: In today’s culture, time is one of the most important things we can offer someone. To give someone your time is to give him a portion of your life. And it’s important thing may not be the most urgent.
8. Humility in marriage might need sacrificing a job, your first choice of how to spend the weekend, or simply the need to win an argument.
9. Accepting the help of others is one of the best and most difficult ways I’m fostering loving relationships.
10. Anger should be a visitor, not a resident.

In 2023, I will give even more time to our business communities and invest in people who have the potential to become community leaders.

And I certainly know that in the end, everything will be OK. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, dear friends!