Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders (Part 4)

Vladimir Gendelman: We also included a lifetime warranty. We are the only printing company that offers that. The standard is your order, you get it, and then you have 7 to 10 days to inspect it. If there’s a problem, you can contact the printer, and they’ll take care of it.

We had a situation where a customer ordered a bunch of folders and they were green folders with a foil stamp. The customer contacts us and says, “We have 15 folders where the stamp was crooked.” She called us nine months after she bought it. I said no problem. I can refund those or remake those. She wanted to place another order, so we applied the credit.

I started thinking to myself. If you order 5,000 orders, I can’t expect you to go through them all in a week or two. It doesn’t make sense. We instituted a one-year warranty. If there is a problem, pull it to the side and let us know at the end of the year. Sometime later, why a year? What if it takes you three years to go through the folders? We just went with the lifetime.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Talk to me about the backend. You had this printer that you were working with. This printer does the printing. Is that still the case?

Vladimir Gendelman: We produce our own. I partnered with somebody who we would do it together with.

Sramana Mitra: This SEO story was great. You don’t learn as much from successes. Is there anything else that you can share that illustrates that philosophy?

Vladimir Gendelman: At the very beginning, we didn’t have any processes and procedures. We didn’t have goals and deliverables. We were just doing things. For that reason, my way of making sure that people were working was to see them on their computers doing something. Every time I saw them not on the computer or doing something not work-related, it made me micro-manage people. That culture was not a positive culture.

Sramana Mitra: Not positive and not scalable.

Vladimir Gendelman: And not pleasant at all. We put in procedures, processes, and deliverables in place. Through that, my mindset shifted from I don’t care what you’re doing on your computer all day long. As long as everything you had to do is done or if the customers are taken care of, what difference does it make?

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is a very common founder mindset. Founders have a tendency to micromanage. Very few founders have the discipline to set up processes right away and be able to create systems and processes that are scalable. It is almost always a hindrance to scalability.

Vladimir Gendelman: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? What’s happening in the business at the moment?

Vladimir Gendelman: We’re pretty much around the same growing 20% to 30%. We are currently working on the next version of the website that will hugely elevate customer experience, and hopefully, marketability.

Sramana Mitra: But you’ve figured out the strategy with which you can deliver 20% growth without any outside financing.

Vladimir Gendelman: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Congratulations! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Bootstrapping to over $5M: Vladimir Gendelman, CEO of Company Folders
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