Four years to make a step.

Four years.

The idea came to me in 2018, but it took me until 2022 to take the first step.

Four years. In that time I interviewed a few hundred engineers, moved to Houston, moved back to Sakhalin Island, moved to Moscow, built a department from scratch, got promoted twice, and thought about this idea roughly once a month without producing a single actionable product from it. No clients, no strategy, no plan written down anywhere. Just a thought I kept confirming to myself was a good one.

What eventually ended the four years was not a decision I made. Some call it luck, but I have my own definition for it. Luck is when you have been working towards something and shaping the environment in a way that increases the chances of that thing happening.

For me it was a WhatsApp message at 09:20 on a Thursday in June 2022, from a man I had once hired, apologising for taking up my time and asking if I had 5 to 10 minutes to talk.

I actually went looking for that screenshot this week because someone on LinkedIn asked me how I got my first clients. He assumed it started with an online presence, an audience, an offer. It did not. It started with someone else's question and me being available for a short chat.

Some years before that.

The idea came from the wrong side of the table. Once I moved into my first engineering leadership roles I was interviewing people constantly for my team, and the same thing kept happening. Strong engineers, people who had genuinely done the work, would sit in front of me and fail to say it. I could extract the evidence from their CV and from the implicit signals, but it came out in the wrong order, buried under lists of responsibilities that could have belonged to anyone. I could see it, but they just could not present it.

I remember mumbling in interviews myself, and how uncomfortable I felt: a strong background, and no way to explain it that people understood.

So I did what I could from where I was. I asked the same question three different ways until the answer came out of the person in front of me. That was my entire contribution for years: quietly pulling answers out of people who were already in the room, while thinking that someone should probably help the ones who never got that far.

Then, going through a McKinsey process I badly wanted, I hired a career consultant myself to sharpen my own CV. That was the first time it occurred to me that this was a thing a person could do, and that I might already know how to do it.

And then nothing happened for a long time. Houston. Sakhalin. Moscow. A new department to build. Weeks and months with no time left in them. The idea did not die, it just stayed in perfectly good condition, unused, and I kept mistaking having it for doing something with it.

Ten minutes.

Nikolai wrote on 2 June 2022. I had interviewed him myself a few years earlier for an engineering role, and I hired him. His CV had no famous international names on it, nothing that would make a recruiter's morning. What he had was engagement and curiosity, and enough nerve to sit in a room and take the chance he got.

By that June he was still at that company and I had already left it. He said he was looking at alternatives, not necessarily unhappy. Just aware that the next thing was not going to arrive on its own.

We spoke the following day, 20:00 his time on Sakhalin, early afternoon for me in Moscow. I had no framework, no toolkit, no course behind me and nothing to sell him.

So we did, in a rougher form, exactly what I now do with every client. His goal. What he actually wanted next. How realistic that was against the background he had. What the market looked like for it. Then the CV, then LinkedIn, then how he would talk about himself out loud, then a mock interview.

Every session he left with a better sense of how to position himself and what his competitive edge was, while I left with a framework for how to do this again with others.

Win-win.

Then he started applying, and I stayed with him through it.

For three or four months, nothing converted. He was frustrated, and I could hear it. We had done the work properly and the market did not care. In September he went quiet, and I assumed I had cost him a summer.

November.

Then a message in November that made no sense to me at first. He said he had just resigned. As far as I knew, without an offer signed anywhere else.

Here is what had happened. Earlier he had taken two weeks of holiday, and during that fortnight two former colleagues called him, a day apart, to invite him into their companies. Neither needed to assess him. They knew how he worked. His interviews were not with recruiters, they were with the people running those units, and the conversations were about how he would best fit into the team rather than how he fitted a role they already had open.

He already had an offer signed by that time.

A second offer arrived soon after and he turned it down.

When the third came in, everything had been agreed except paperwork sitting with HR in Moscow, and a friend inside wrote to ask where he was, because his nameplate was already on the door.

This third one was his favorite.

On 1 December: "Vitalii, hi. They sent the offer. Going to look at flights now."

A year later, in 2023, he came back, paid this time, to work out where in the Middle East things were actually being built. That research became the geographical mapping of companies and projects I now start every client engagement with. Then in 2024, by which time I was in Sweden, he messaged again. A senior role at a top-tier EPCM company, moving to the UAE.

Two top-tier international projects in Russia first, then that, from a CV with no recognizable names on it.

The wrong order.

I took the proper career consulting course after my first practice with Nikolai. But it just confirmed what I was already doing and gave it some more structure. Useful, but not the beginning.

That is the part I would have got wrong if I had planned it. For four years I held the idea and it produced nothing, because the idea was never the asset. It carried no value until one specific person was in front of me, and what put him there was not my big following, a website, an offer or a certificate. It was ten minutes that neither of us thought was a beginning.

I had four years and did not start this. He had one question, and it did move the needle.

This week.

Take the thing you have been carrying, the move, the business, the conversation you keep almost having, and put one real person in front of it this week. Ten minutes. Unpaid, unofficial, unprepared if you have to be.

Just someone you can test it with. That is the whole conversion step, and it is a great deal smaller than four years of thinking about it.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

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