Death of "Business Molodost": how two Cheboksary residents built a company worth a billion and why the most scandalous information business in Russia is being closed

The attitude of society towards the "Business Youth" project is ambiguous. Some consider him a well-organized "scam", others - a real opportunity to change their lives. Who is right?

Business miracles don't just happen in movies. An ordinary loader can become a millionaire overnight. A simple 38-year-old Muscovite is to launch her own fashion brand, which the whole world will know about. And a businessman who was experiencing difficulties with new ideas for his project is able to break out of the "swamp" and earn 8 million rubles in 11 hours.

In the list of cases from the program listeners within the project, there are success stories in various fields: housing construction, selling gadgets, photography, holding parties for children and organizing exotic weddings. At the same time, they all have one thing in common - a real quantum leap in business profits that happened to entrepreneurs after passing a series of courses, trainings and master classes on promoting their business.

The Business Youth Project: How It All Started

Investing in yourself, in your skills and abilities is a good option for how you can spend money profitably. New knowledge over time will not only return the entire amount, but also bring good dividends. Many educational projects for business people are built on this rule. One of them and, perhaps, the largest today is Business Youth.

The creators of the project promise their listeners a quick and powerful effect, and even the most diligent students are given guarantees that they will become millionaires. Most surprisingly, the promises are not unfounded. Already more than one thousand listeners of the project can boast of wonderful cases.

The company was launched in 2021. Then two young people (they were not even 25 years old) - natives of Cheboksary, Pyotr Osipov and Mikhail Dashkiev - came up with a general educational business, which had no analogues in Russia at that time.

When the project was created, its founders were not yet 25 years old

The fateful conversation of the future companions happened in one of the capital's restaurants. Ambitious young people who have tried their hand at business and amassed a decent number of big shots decided to make money on coaching. Dashkiev was to be responsible for the practical part, whose track record includes not only the Higher School of Economics, but also his own marketing agency, a tuning studio, work in a company producing LED lamps, organizing courses for owners of travel companies, as well as promoting fur coats and plastic windows , with flowers and plumbing to boot. The biography of Pyotr Osipov was less eventful: at the age of 13 he got his first job as a janitor, then worked as an advertisement sales manager, was an assistant to a deputy and, finally, became a coach-trainer.

As conceived by Peter and Mikhail, the Business of Youth course was intended for aspiring entrepreneurs, the most important for whom was to overcome fear, believe in themselves and learn how to do business. The seminars had to take place in one breath, as easy to present as possible, not boring and inspire the listener to try to realize their “success story”. In addition, Dashkiev and Osipov hoped to create an educational pyramid: each participant of the seminar, reaching certain heights, had to become an example for at least a couple of novice businessmen who were also ready to become students of the BM course. And so - further along the chain.

Seminars within the framework of the "Business Youth" project are intended for both beginner entrepreneurs and business owners with experience

The very first seminar was held soon. On the stage of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, there were both authors of the project, radiating optimism and confidence that everything would work out not only for them, but also for the people gathered in the hall.

The main topics for the training programs at the first stage were:

Reading time: 30 minutes No time to read? No time?

Oleg Tinkov in his book “I am like everyone else”, which was published in 2021, complained that there is no high-quality business education in Russia. Already a successful entrepreneur, he specially traveled to the United States to study business.

The USA is the cradle of modern business. The uniform rules of the game in this country were formed already at the moment when emperors ruled in Russia, and the landowners' fields were cultivated by serfs.

Two centuries was enough to collect the experience of entrepreneurship into a single methodology and package it into a doctoral course in business and science.

In terms of education in the United States, business is the same specialty as any other: a doctor, a process engineer, or a school teacher.

What is taught in American business schools? Management, law, history, economics, social studies, accounting, tax system are important and necessary disciplines. After mastering fundamental knowledge, practical ones are added to them. In business schools in the United States, entrepreneurs and managers from well-known companies lecture and conduct seminars.

Graduates of business schools leave the walls of educational institutions grounded not only in theory, but also in applied knowledge that can be applied in practice.

Famous US entrepreneurs Donald Trump and Warren Buffett studied at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Trump has created a billion-dollar construction development business, and Buffett is an investor, one of the richest Americans, with a fortune of $ 64.7 billion in May 2021.

In Soviet Russia, business education did not exist for an obvious reason: entrepreneurship was a criminal offense.

In Russia, 1990-2021s. business was associated with speculation, shuttles and criminality. The image of an entrepreneur caused negative emotions in people.

In the 90s, a new generation grew up in Russia, which no longer remembered the Soviet distributive economy and joined the new model of economic relations. None of the new entrepreneurs studied business at the university simply because there was no such education in Russia. Almost all of them acted on a whim, learned from their own mistakes.

Olga Dydyko, the founder of the Tula construction company VSGROUP, raised her hand at one of the trainings “Business of Youth” (“BM”) in 2021 in response to the task “to set a material goal for myself” and said: “I don’t need a cool car or a Birkin bag, I'd rather buy an excavator for the company. " The leader of the training, co-founder of "BM" Petr Osipov, according to Dydyko, summoned her to the stage and "publicly dismantled" the case. “He said that I do not receive love, so I do not set myself material goals and am afraid to move forward. I burst into tears right on the stage. It was trash, ”Olga recalls.

Her experience, judging by her dissatisfaction with courses on the Internet, is not unique: “Business Molodist” has been criticized for many years both by representatives of the business community and by the clients themselves. But despite the wave of hate, the courses were in enviable demand, and in 2021 the total revenue of the main legal entities of "BM" reached 1 billion rubles.

For the first few years, according to Osipov, he and Dashkiev “burned with the project”, but later “the fire began to go out.” At the beginning of 2021, despite the successful financial performance of the previous year, Dashkiev left the company. Osipov closed the year with a loss of 27.8 million rubles, and in August 2021 announced a complete stop of the business, never recovering from the pandemic blow. However, some experts believe that the announcement of the closure is just a marketing ploy, and in fact, the courses will be reborn "under a new sauce" in the near future.

Forbes spoke with Osipov and Dashkiev and learned how two 20-year-old Cheboksary residents managed to build an info-business empire, bring revenue to 1 billion rubles, despite tons of criticism, and whether Russia will really be left without Business Molodost.

-year old teachers

Petr Osipov and Mikhail Dashkiev were born and raised in Cheboksary, studied in neighboring schools, but they began to communicate closely only in Moscow, where both entered universities (Osipov - at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Dashkiev - at the Higher School of Economics). Osipov consistently built a political science career: while still a schoolboy, he began working in the campaign headquarters of local deputy Yevgeny Slepov, then got a job as an assistant to the State Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Andrei Bronitsyn.

Even then, he developed an interest in oratory: Osipov organized deputy speeches for 100-150 people, but Bronitsyn did not always attend them. The student "replaced" him - and learned to "behave on stage."

The election campaigns took place in the summer, so for a stable income Osipov got a job as a sales manager at the FTK company, which offered additional education for schoolchildren. At first he "went to schools and sold courses," but later he began to teach courses in public speaking himself.

Carried away by the topic, in the last years of the university he got an internship at the Oratorika company (trainings on business and personal effectiveness). “He was a fairly active student, he was constantly interested in new information and tried different approaches,” - Irina Kireeva, the owner of Oratorika, recalls the experience of working with a future competitor. Thanks to Oratorika, Osipov, in his own words, got private clients for public speaking: as a fifth-year student, he consulted “for some top managers of small companies”.

“Instead of business knowledge, I got a few lessons in qigong and boxing, talks about chakras and parenting”

During his studies, Dashkiev managed to work at the Arsenal management school, as a marketer at the training company Pinta Lab, and also to launch, together with his friend Dmitry Krutov (the future co-founder of the online educational project Skillbox), the Mokselle marketing agency and the store energy-saving lamps "Energy-saving systems".

Osipov and Dashkiev, who were already in close contact by that time, were so inspired by the fact that in their early 20s they earned “100,000-150,000 rubles a month” that they decided to write a book “about the importance of goal setting ”. But the book is not a quick matter, so they decided to share their thoughts at the student event of the HSE business incubator. The master class, which took place in the summer of 2021, was called "Business and Youth" (later transformed into the current version - "Business Youth"). In the course of it, the students were promised a "step-by-step plan for the first breakthrough" in their careers. Several hundred participants came to the event, according to Osipov.

“If we perform, we need to sell something,” Osipov and Dashkiev thought then and decided to talk about the “club for those who are interested in self-development” that had not yet been created. Students were offered to attend weekly meetings for 5,000 rubles a month, where young coaches will “analyze their cases” - help to create a website, set up advertising and convert applications into sales. 30-40 students signed up for the meetings - "guys 18-21 years old who wanted to do something, but did not understand where to start."

Where a large number of adventurers have gathered

In recent years, more and more start-up entrepreneurs have been trying to find relevant and useful information about business development, about where to invest money most effectively, as well as how to quickly attract customers to their business. There are a large number of sites and communities on these topics, as well as channels on YouTube and other social networks. One of these communities is “Business Youth” or “BM” for short. Visitors to their website, as well as training participants, are promised a surge in the flow of customers, which will contribute to business growth tenfold. At the same time, it should be noted that trainings for children are far from cheap: from 11,000 rubles to 1 million. What do all these people pay for and do they get the result that Ostapy Bendery promises?

In this article we will try to figure out what is the uniqueness of this project and why this project will not be able to help in the development of your business, and perhaps even drive you into debt.

Just make a reservation that if you are an ardent follower of BM, then it is better not to read the article, otherwise it will cause a storm of indignation.

Also, it should be noted right away that BM is interesting only to those woeful entrepreneurs who absolutely do not understand entrepreneurship and its fundamentals, as well as to those who are very lazy and do not like to read foreign literature, in which everything is written that the founders of BM read there and retell them to their "clients" for money.

So, let's start with the history of the formation of this project.

The founders of the project are Peter Osipov and Mikhail Dashkiev. Peter was an ordinary office worker, even worked for some time as an auxiliary worker (janitor), salesman, after which he finally lost his job. Mikhail Dashkiev worked in the advertising business, while having previously graduated from the Higher School of Economics. After working in the company for some time, he leaves of his own accord and also becomes an ordinary unemployed person.

One fine day for them they meet together and after a while they get to know the idea to teach others how to develop their business. We decided to start with students of one of the city universities. After the first attempt at teaching, a couple of students were able to achieve results. Naturally, two unemployed ascribe these successes to themselves, after which they have a global idea - to create courses on entrepreneurship training. The guys are actively beginning to lead a group on social networks, a channel on Youtube and fly to all cities of Russia to popularize themselves (as Petr Osipov later admitted in one of the videos, he actually lost his health on these flights).

As surprising as it may seem, in all cities they resonate with aspiring entrepreneurs who love such parties. In Ulyanovsk, one of the journalists noted at all that the guys are simply amazing in their business - "they are not shy about taking money from clients without cashier's checks and any kind of accounting." So, after 2 years, the project gets a great response and the number of new clients begins to grow exponentially. At the same time, as the founders said in 2021, their turnover amounted to almost 1 billion rubles. But, in fact, it turned out that the guys received a turnover of only 400 million rubles a year. If you subtract taxes, operating costs, rental costs, salaries for the huge staff and accounting, then there is a negligible amount.

Second point. Maths.

Good day everyone, friends! I would like to share with you the experience of passing the new brainchild of one of the founders of the well-known company "Business Youth" called "Units".

"UNITS is a 2-hour session with an instructor using a special technique, after which you leave with a specific result on hand, as well as a new skill."

-as the authors themselves state

I watched the free broadcast with stories about how effective, effective and fast innovation is, thanks to which I can get the result already during the two-hour training. By the way: together with my friends for 5 years I have been developing bicycles and promoting our common brand without any explicit advertising. Assistance in mass events, provision of equipment to travelers, equipment and other word of mouth. But at this stage I wanted to test myself in a fashionable craft called "SMM" and "Targeting". General concepts and reading articles gave an idea of ​​how it works and in which direction you need to dig. However, having recently opened an online store selling knives and having played a little with the Vkontakte advertising office, I decided to seek advice from people who know a lot about this.

Now about the process of passing and its results in order:

I typed the required address in the browser, chose from all the available "Units" one of the necessary ones under the name "Targeting" Vkontakte "", issued a remote passage and began to wait for the manager as I asked, the message that appeared after confirming the choice. After a certain period of time, a polite young man contacted me in the What`s app who, as is customary in such companies, is rather blurry and incomprehensible, by the method of discarded videos once again misled me how great all this is, but the 2-hour course I chose still requires a "cosmetic" revision for a period of one week and if there is no urgency, he will notify me when he is fully ready. “No rush,” I replied, and waited a week.

the same "blah-blah-blah" about how great it is "

The manager was both silent and silent. "Well, nothing! Let me remind you!" I thought and made another application. This time, a second manager contacted me to whom I explained that I needed to undergo training and pay for them on the account of the individual entrepreneur. The guy answered me that all this is now possible, asked for the details for exhibiting and sent another "blah blah blah" to my What`s app. In response, I sent him my details and received a link leading to the resource from which this account cannot be downloaded and a request to throw off the screen of the instruction to speed up the process. "Something suspicious" I thought, looking at the account that cannot be downloaded. I made a screenshot for everyone and paid by sending the screen in the appropriate direction, and began to wait for the connection with the support department, which will contact me within 3-5 days and select the appropriate time and date. I must admit that in parallel with all this action, the previous manager contacted me and said that "it is not quite ready yet" and to my question "does this affect the quality of training?" replied that no.

another blah blah blah from the second manager

what the payment dialog looked like