September 14, 1994
Tuesday
After the anniversary binge — a year since we opened! — we held a brainstorming session. The leadership of the trading house — me, Kostik, and Yura — holed up in the office, sketching strategic little boxes connected by tactical little arrows.
The old way of working had resembled an anthill. Fifty-odd managers, each handling a bit of everything, impossible to manage. Where things went and how they got sold — anyone’s guess. How to motivate growth in sales — a mystery. Second point: Vadik assured us that at any hour of the day or night, he could provide an interest-free loan for any amount denoted in dollars — even a million — in non-cash rubles, at his exchange booth’s buy rate. One condition: repay the loan in a month, in cash, at the sell rate, at the same booth.
We’ve got to take it!
The Proma free-for-all, where a division manager was responsible for the goods on the shelf and didn’t worry about anything else, was over! We set a new mandate: if the goods weren’t in the warehouse, buy them in Moscow on credit and sell them to the regions for cash. Bearing in mind Chicha’s crew, which had grown large enough to prowl not just the Moscow markets but the entire country, we allowed goods to be handed off on consignment, but at a slightly higher price. Paying the athletes’ travel expenses, putting them up in hotels, and bribing the local cops to keep them calm cost money and had to be factored into the cost structure.
Whew!
The regional line got going, at first with a creak, then briskly, and in the end in a frenzy. One Moscow wholesaler needs to repay a loan, another needs to stock up on new goods and dump the old, and a third needs to improve his statistics and raise his cash flow.
Everyone knew that «Proma» would buy back any consumer goods at a 20 percent discount with an accepted payment order. In the regions it was the other way round. The moment a shortage arose, they drove straight to «Proma». You could pay a month later in cash, the only means of payment in the regions, which feared non-cash settlement like the devil fears incense ever since the shaggy days of the Chechen avizo.
The product lineup kept expanding with Chicha’s help: a tidal wave of goods seized from debtors came flooding in. Chicha had signed on as a debt collector for a dozen outside banks and kept trying to unload industrial equipment on us, which I resisted, until Zhora issued an order:
«The plant in Khryakino is sitting idle. It needs to come back to life. Whatever solid equipment Chicha hauls in on the production side, get it running and up and operating!»
I had to scramble to create a Technical Department on the fly, headed by Pasha, who’d quit six months earlier, tasted freedom, and come crawling back. He’d spent the whole summer shuttling to Poland: hauling irons and binoculars over, tracksuits back.
With the help of the Khryakino craftsmen, recalled from a year’s leave, Pasha installed and set up a bottling line pried out for debts by Chicha’s athletes. «Proma Impex» began bottling «Proma-Cola», the best accompaniment to «Johnnyson» whiskey, the sales hit we hauled from Poland by the truckload.
By spring, four production lines were clattering away in Khryakino. In one shop they mixed up Proma-Cola; in another, they poured motor and transmission oil from tanker cars, gotten free of charge from Chicha, into canisters. He had nowhere else to put it: either dump it in the Yauza River or hand it over to us as a favor.
The plant had rail access and a siding for the tanker cars. Canisters were stamped out in the shop next door, where they’d installed an injection molding machine hauled from a Belarusian plant that had somehow ended up owing Vatrushka money. The Belarusian scrap metal was brought back to life in two weeks.
In the third shop they set up label printing on a beaten-up «Romayor». The machine managed single-color printing, which was enough to produce elegant black-and-green «Kastroil» labels. They printed with black ink on green paper. When there were interruptions in the green paper, they printed on whatever came to hand – red, orange, yellow... The main thing was that it not be white, because that came out looking like a collective farm. The managers explained to buyers that a red label meant «sport», yellow – «trial», pink – «luxury», and blue – «winter standard». Despite the fact that the canisters were filled with the same rubbish from two tanks, the auto-parts department acquired an extensive range of assorted oils for every driving regime and every twist of the weather.
