Moscow, March 2008. Without doubt the single most mouth watering, challenging and daunting business trip that had ever landed on my desk. Three colleagues tasked with closing one of the biggest deals in regional history, four days to do it in, the complexities of using interpreters, and the likelihood that we would have to fire an employee by the end of the trip.
It didn’t start too well. Our key hardware negotiator Ashish had to withdraw at the last minute due to Visa issues, which left just Pearce and I. And this this type of deal wasn’t really my forte. Of course, I was delighted to be along for the ride, but I was feeling more out of my depth with each passing hour.
First Impressions
This was a city I never dreamed I’d get the chance to see, even though I’d always wanted to. On first impressions, I wasn’t so sure why. The journey from the airport was grey, wet, and dull. There were bruised and battered Lada’s everywhere, trams dating back to the 19th Century, and apartment blocks and offices resembling soviet union army barracks. I suddenly panicked about our hotel, but thankfully it was fine. And so it should have been. Rooms at the 5* Golden Ring Hotel were a whopping $500/night.
Then I opened the curtains of the hotel room. One of Stalin’s Seven Stars was staring right back at me (see below.) These are a series of incredibly fearsome and imposing towers dotted around the city, designed me to put fear into the locals that they were always being “watched.” Gulp, it worked.
24hrs to Explore
The day we arrived was our only real opportunity to take in any sights so we changed quickly, got wrapped up and set off on foot for the Kremlin and Red Square. I was lucky having my boss Pearce with me, as he used to live here so knew his way around, and some basic Russian. We arrived on the outside of the Kremlin first, and whilst it has more of a a ceremonial role nowadays, compared to its ruthless and infamous past, it still looks incredibly daunting. We then headed further on to Red Square. There were hoards of tourists everywhere, but it didn’t take much to imagine the high kick marching soldiers, and hundreds of tanks creeping slowly in impressive formation. Those were the images from the 80’s that had always stuck in my mind.
Pearce was proving to be a masterful tourist guide, with his encyclopaedic knowledge and witty commentary. We moved onto Saint Basil’s Cathedral (or Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed) which is to this day the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen, and that list includes La Sagrada Familia, Notre Dame, and St Paul’s. The colours, turrets and domes are breathtaking. We then wandered down to Moscow river, and back to the hotel. Dinner for the evening was in one of Moscow’s finest restaurants, and it well and truly lived up to its billing, it was delicious.
Working in Moscow
The Moscow team were a little wary of us, and the first day in the office was awkward. You had to feel a little sorry for them to have two guys fly in to close a deal on their behalf with some of Russia’s largest retailers. It must have felt like a kick in the teeth. It was my first experience of holding meetings with an interpreter, and incredibly bizarre. It feels like the interpreter becomes the most important person in the room. Where do you look? At the client, who is speaking to the interpreter, or at the interpreter who is speaking to you? The first day was intense, a 13 hour working day that proved to be the shortest of the week. We had around 72 hours to close the deal, and it felt like this was going to go down to the wire. Each working day was rounded off by drinks in a bar with our Russian team where we slowly began to warm to each other. Vodka does that I found.
In between meetings we were dealing with the issue of deciding whether to sack one of the team. Pearce and I carried on the conversation over dinner, and it was clear that we had to take action with this guy for being in bed with one of his distributors; at best a clear conflict of interest; at worst he was possibly corrupt, and pocketing funds. In the early days of post communist Moscow, it was normal for expats to have armed bodyguards. Even now in 2008, Moscow was still controlled by the local mafia everywhere, even if bodyguards were no longer the order of the day. The truth was, this guy could have been a middle man to a larger mafia group and so Pearce nervously warned me to be diligent, adding it would “only cost a couple of hundred US dollars to get us whacked.” I have never watched my back as much as I did until we left Friday afternoon….
Wednesday came and went. We had agreed the deadline to close the deal was Thursday night, as we were flying out Friday lunchtime. Pearce was nervous we wouldn’t get there in time, and that we should stay over the weekend. I wasn’t on board. I wanted to get out of there in one piece as soon as possible. We agreed not to sack the dodgy guy. It would cause too much trouble. By 10pm we still hadn’t heard back from the other side. Then a call from Pearce to say we had agreed to meet them in a club downtown at 11pm. At one point there were three bottles of Vodka on the table, phone calls to three continents, and lots of hard core poker face negotiation. Pearce played a blinder, I was merely the supporting cast. The deal was shaken on at 2am. We left as quick as we could…
The End
Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised that between leaving our hotel and arriving at the airport, the Russians back tracked on their deal. To the tune of a few million dollars. Pearce and I didn’t want to come back, so after some urgent calls to Global HQ, we agreed to the new terms. We’ll never know exactly what happened, who had interfered, whether it was an inside job or whatever. But the Russians clearly knew how far we would go on the deal, and pushed us all the way down there. We both had our suspicions. But then we both left in one piece.
This trip was from March 2008, memories captured in a travel journal.
9to5explorer 