When Passion and Courage Personify Altogether | Ruslan Desyatnikov

Ruslan Desyatnikov: When Passion and Courage Personify Altogether

The journey to success often starts with struggles accompanied by some unpredictable situations. In order to climb the ladder, one has to cope with various failures and face the inevitable circumstances. The entrepreneurial journey of Ruslan Desyatnikov, the Founder and CEO of QA Mentor, exemplifies such a struggling dilemma. Emphasizing the courage to pursue passion, CIO Look brings to you the triumphant journey of an avid entrepreneur, Ruslan.

Ruslan started his career 22 years ago as a junior tester. He was struggling to find his first job after graduation, while many of his college peers found their jobs very quickly. One job he was offered was in a junior tester position. At that time, he didn’t have any knowledge about testing or the role of a junior tester because for the most part everybody was going into development programming. He took this job because he had no other choices. And since that time, he has never regretted his choice because he it led to something he loved.

Throughout these 22 years, Ruslan spent much of his time stepping into leadership roles in the quality assurance and testing field, up to and including the start of his entrepreneurial journey back in 2010. Prior to starting his own company, he was working in different capacities and at different organizations and companies, such as HSBC and Citibank, where he held a senior management role managing several teams of over 100 people. After that, he felt he could help other companies around the world to improve quality by starting his own company. And that is how QA Mentor, a leading QA provider, was conceived.

QA Mentor supports various industries and technologies. In order to make its offerings appealing, the company has a number of unique services. It offers 32 different quality assurance testing services in the quality assurance domain and covers nearly all angles of the service offerings. In order to attract its potential customers and clients, it offers a number of on-demand services which allow its customers to utilize the company only when they need it. For instance, companies don’t need to have a long-term contract or many resources billable throughout the whole year. QA Mentor has options where if there is no requirement, it can stop, pause the engagement, and then re-engage when the work is there. This allows its customers and clients to save a lot of resources.

In addition, the company is unique in its own space in terms of providing strategic directions and consultations. So basically, it is not a body shop where many organizations just provide resources to do the tasks. QA Mentor provides coaching, training, guidance, and that’s how the name ‘QA Mentor’ came about. QA is all about mentorship, guidance, and strategic support. It is not only about testing but also providing recommendations on how to establish better, more streamlined processes, and how to take an immature QA organization to the next level.

Along with the service offerings, QA mentor also provides expertise and expert services which can help the company to build a QA department from scratch. It can build a very big testing center of excellence, which it has done for many Fortune 500 companies. It can also provide cost effective testing solutions in order for its customers to save money. The company provides on-demand solutions and various other automation testing solutions to save on the cost of the manual testers. In other words, instead of executing thousands of test cases manually, the company can automate them and can provide those solutions to its customers.

Fundraising is always a challenging component when starting a business. Ruslan started his business without any investment money. He didn’t want to borrow any money from investors or from the bank. He utilized his own money, and thus it was challenging in the beginning. Ruslan believes that the initial stage is extremely important and difficult, when you’re starting from scratch and don’t have any clients yet. It becomes very important to invest into the right marketing and advertising strategy to attract customers and clients. So, initial challenges with funds were always there to begin with for him. At one point, it became difficult for him even to pay salaries. Occasionally he had to delay some salaries by two, maybe three months, but always with the promise that he’d pay everyone everything they were owed. Fortunately, his team was on his side, trusted his strategies, and that’s why they didn’t leave him high and dry.

Though this dilemma, Ruslan learned a valuable lesson – it’s very important to have a backup plan. Something will likely go wrong, and you need to plan the budget accordingly so that if certain projects are not there, you can still survive for the six months at least. One needs to be very aggressive in terms of identifying customers and clients and establish very strong marketing strategies and techniques. According to him, without a proper go-to market strategy and sales strategy, one won’t be successful as one will not find any clients or customers. Hence, strategic investment into the marketing and advertising and sales are extremely important for the business.