How to Scale your Business with Smartsourcing – in Just 7 Minutes with Alex Lyhovez

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One of the things I used a lot is I used 'letters'. Of course, there's LinkedIn and such but I also send letter. I write down with my handwriting and send letters to people. You write and send it out to postal and it works wonderful.

Summary:

Alex Lyhovez is a web entrepreneur, storyteller, blogger and VP marketing and biz dev at YozmaTech, a hub of top-notch developers from Ukraine that empowers startups worldwide.

With over ten years of experience in global markets in the market-tech industry, He helps companies develop and implement marketing strategies and build sales teams engaged with your company or product.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

00:57 Alex’s ideal Client: For the sake of our listeners, Yozma is 'initiative' in Hebrew; taking a proactive approach. Alex’s ideal client could be either a start-up of a 1 person that has an idea and has a vision or it's a well-established company with let's say 100 employees that does processes in a smarter way and cost-efficient way.

1:50 Problem Alex helps solve: He helps entrepreneurs or companies, for example the cost of arbitrage of developers. He outsources for them through other companies or other countries. The business where smartsourcing comes. Alex said that it's not just out staffing or taking a person and put him in the right slot. It's taking the process that can save their time, resources, and money.

3:17 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Alex: Alex helps entrepreneurs and company owners having the same symptoms; they have a dream and they take this dream, and they hold it tight with their heart and they say "ok, then now what?". Then they start developing this product, this service, this SaaS, etc. and then they realize the hard truth that nobody will wait for them; the market is not waiting for their fancy schmancy product. They started to face the hard reality that they spent so much money and then one day, realizing that the money is gone, or they just burn it on processes or taking the wrong people along the road or paying them too much or too high because you think they deserve it.

5:22 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Alex and his solution: Alex admits that he’s not a web developer but he’s a great storyteller and a great marketer. And if he will try to learn it, he’ll lose a lot of time. While giving it to someone else who's good at developing but is not a marketer. So, one of the common mistakes he sees is that you think you can learn it to save money, but you're actually losing money. "I will just learn it, I will squash it later. I can teach myself to build a website, I don’t need someone who can build it." And then you really do teach yourself how much money, how much time you invested in this while giving a talent who really knows this and within 2 or 3 days, he'll build a great website rather than one month. Another thing is he thinks that we all have this idea that 'fast, fast, fast'... "let's do it fast, let's go through the market, let's shoot this post…” you work too fast and you're not really thinking about something holding up. You're just doing it like patches on your pants when it has a hole. They are always looking for shortcuts, which Alex says is a very common mistake which he highly recommends to avoid because it will cost you a lot of time.

7:43 Alex’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Alex really appreciates the American culture with its power of networking. He doesn’t see it as a one-sided communication. If you hear what they have to say and ask questions, he believes that people will be willing to help.

9:23 Alex’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): One of the things he uses is writing handwritten letters. Nowadays Alex says people are still accustomed to opening their emails, they're not accustomed to open a letter, and they only receive bills. Sending your appreciation to the someone you want to work with, they will surely acknowledge this gesture.

10:26 How they go out from a circle can help you build up your next startup, your next idea, or how to meet with other people in the IT industry?

Alex believes that you just need to ASK. He stated “All of these people are mentors, they're people that sold their companies for millions of dollars. Some of the entrepreneurs sold their companies twice and have done several exits, and CEOs, VPs, Venture Capitals... there's a lot of brilliant people that just want to share their knowledge and help other people to achieve success.”