The Truth About Balance
Today, a person's worth is measured not by achievements but by the ability to remain true to oneself. Evgeniia Romanenko, managing partner of TR-Project, a provider of trade marketing services and IT solutions for major retailers and FMCG companies in Russia, the CIS, and the UAE, explains why genuine success begins with rejecting imposed roles, and why business becomes a source of energy when you are honest with yourself.
I have always been irritated by conversations about balance, when someone says with unshakeable certainty: "You must be both a muse and a woman, but being an achiever is rather unfashionable now. You need balance, don't you? Have you been to yoga?" After such words, a person loses their bearings, unable to understand where to go next: towards the clever or towards the beautiful. We have spent far too little time working out what truly matters to us, understanding something important about ourselves. People only began identifying their values in the last few years; before that, they simply took on roles that seemed right to others and carried them like crosses. Whether this burden was truly one's own, whether it corresponded to a person's inner nature, nobody bothered to examine. At a certain stage, catastrophe strikes: a person suddenly realises they have been living someone else's life all along. Then they drop everything and leave for Bali, whilst those around them shake their heads: entrepreneurs either work themselves to exhaustion or flee from reality.
When I begin work on a company's strategy, the first thing I ask the owner is: what is your truth? Who do you see yourself becoming at the end of this journey? Not many things make a person happy, and one of them is the possibility of living in dialogue with their authentic values, even if they seem uncomfortable or don't fit conventional notions of success. The more time passes, the clearer I understand a simple truth: the only path to real happiness is being yourself, rather than appearing to be someone or depending on others' expectations.
I started in business at eighteen; there was no time then for existential questions. Like any young entrepreneur, I simply wanted to earn money, reach my first heights, prove to myself and the world that I was capable of more. I was driven by excitement and a mathematical instinct for the conjuncture of the moment: the ability to see patterns where others saw chaos. In the mid-2000s, a real revolution occurred in Russian retail: national trading networks began transitioning to direct supplies from manufacturers, abandoning distributor intermediaries. The entire system of division of labour was changing, logistics were being redesigned, marketing was transforming. I understood that this was a moment demanding decisive action, because such windows of opportunity open rarely.
Being a mathematician by education and temperament, I saw precisely how the entire chain from manufacturer to end consumer was being restructured. All trade marketing — merchandising, advertising materials at points of sale, below-the-line activities — required fundamentally new approaches. Many didn't believe that a regional company headed by a woman could compete for budgets running into billions of roubles. But I was saved by the very lack of background that experience usually provides: I simply didn't know at which stages one should be afraid, before which obstacles one was supposed to stop. We moved forward with a simple question: why not?
By 2015, more than 1,500 people worked in the company; we covered all of Russia, then expanded into CIS markets. Today, at twenty years old, we provide manufacturers with comprehensive services on retail platforms, collect and analyse enormous data arrays for management decisions, and hold an SFA licence for software development. Alongside the core business, a creative bureau and production studio have emerged. We're now opening a branch in Dubai, where I see the same opportunities for market transformation that I spotted in Russia twenty years ago. Business interests brought me to the Emirates, along with the need to support clients beginning their expansion into the UAE. To guide them effectively, I need to understand deeply the specifics of the local market, consumer psychology, and the nuances of conducting business.
The most common mistake in understanding management is opposing control to chaos, as if only two poles exist: either you control every detail or everything falls apart. The true difference lies elsewhere, in what exactly you manage. If you manage people, their actions, if you immerse yourself in micromanagement, this isn't management in any real sense. If, however, you manage results and build a system that generates correct decisions on its own, then your work acquires space for creativity and strategic thinking.
Linear strategies used to exist, when we would sit down at the negotiating table and say: we want to sell a hundred times more, then methodically execute pre-planned actions. Today such an approach no longer works. We set a goal — for instance, to capture a certain share of the bottled water market — but we don't know in advance exactly how. The market changes too rapidly; new players, technologies, and consumption trends emerge. Turbulence has become the norm, not the exception. Yet we have a system, a framework within which correct tactical decisions are born in response to any changes in the external environment.
When people come to me for strategy development, we begin with substantial research: analysing competitors, studying the market, understanding the consumer, assessing the impact of new technologies. Everything is translated into concrete measurable indicators: units, boxes, square metres, roubles. But this is merely the first layer of work, the foundation upon which building must occur. Then the most interesting thing emerges: very often the owner doesn't aspire to development in the sense accepted by the business community. He wants to earn comfortably here and now, and he's simply awkward about admitting to himself that he's not that ambitious lion yearning to conquer new markets and regions.
Here we encounter the power of unwritten rules. In our culture, achieving at any cost is the norm, and this applies doubly to women: on one hand, you must be a muse, a source of inspiration; on the other, successful, but preferably not too much, so as not to eclipse male achievements. And definitely in balance, at yoga, in meditation. A person doesn't manage to work out what life fulfils them; they take on someone else's role and carry it until internal catastrophe strikes. Beyond figures and market analysis, I ask the owner to answer the main question: where is your anchor point? Because what makes a person happy is the possibility of living in dialogue with their own deepest values, even if they contradict conventional notions.
Without inner strength, it's impossible to create a business, attract people, inspire them towards ambitious goals. But competencies must join this strength over time, and they come only through experience, through a succession of victories and defeats. At the start of the journey, an entrepreneur of twenty-five sincerely considers himself the cleverest person in the room, knows better than anyone how waiters, nurses, and shop assistants should work. He's frightened of delegating because he's certain nobody will do it as well as he does. Besides, there's the question of self-regard: up to a certain stage, he lives in the paradigm of a king requiring constant recognition from those around him.
When the arrogance of youthful maximalism recedes, the most important moment of maturation arrives: you must acknowledge that you physically cannot possess all the competencies necessary for building a serious business. You must remove the crown of the cleverest person in the room and begin assembling a team. But this requires developing certain personal qualities, working on yourself. Entrepreneurs often fear bringing strong people onto the team: what if they take the business, what if they undermine you, what if they poach clients? This demands serious internal work that most prefer to avoid.
Charisma is often confused with some magical gift, an innate ability to charm and lead. Empathy, charm, the ability to be liked — all this is, of course, important. But a leader's true strength lies not only in the ability to attract people but also in the capacity to live through crises, to fall and rise again. A strong person isn't someone who always smiles and remains invariably in good spirits. It's someone who can pass through themselves in full measure both the joy of success and the bitterness of defeat, experience the entire spectrum of emotions, and after this, stand up and continue moving forward.
During scaling, absolutely everything breaks, and this must be accepted as fact. Old working methods cease to function, whilst the company isn't yet ready for new ones. The ground literally shifts beneath your feet, and the leader often doesn't understand what to grasp first. Hoping this process will pass easily and painlessly is naive at best. Much will need redoing; part of the team will leave or be replaced; processes will change beyond recognition. I always tell my clients: if you've conceived scale, start preparing in advance, long before launch. Because if you currently run two restaurants or three shops, where will the readiness to manage fifty locations come from? First, you need to establish perfect order in what already exists. Make everything in the existing two shops or clinics work flawlessly, so you understand every cause-and-effect relationship: what affects profitability, where process efficiency can be increased, which bottlenecks hinder development. Only after working this out can you speak of readiness for scale. And to understand this deeply, the leader must temporarily become a student, and this is psychologically one of the most difficult stages. People will begin saying unpleasant things, pointing out mistakes, explaining why something doesn't work and why growth cannot continue like this. If you prepare for this in advance and think through scenarios, you can navigate the scaling journey without catastrophic losses.
Every leader on the path of growth cannot avoid a serious restructuring of their own role. When we start a business, we're like assembling a prototype spacecraft in a garage: with our own hands, with enthusiasm, full of faith in success. Then this craft must be launched into orbit, and here the real tests begin. At each new stage, the leader's role sounds completely different. First, you're an inventor and inspirer, burning with an idea and infecting others with it. Then comes a period of defeats, collisions with the harsh reality of a market that isn't obliged to match your expectations. Here you must hold positions, not break under the pressure of circumstances, and the role changes: from romantic inspirer to pragmatic operative, a person of action.
The next transformation occurs when you, having survived all crises and withstood fate's blows, decide to scale. Then it becomes obvious that continuing to extinguish all fires yourself is physically impossible: the system simply hits the limit of your personal time and energy resources. You must reach a qualitatively new level, become a strategist and visionary, see the overall picture instead of individual details. At this stage, you must give up much, learn to delegate properly, not just for show. If you manage large numbers of people, your decision, descending the hierarchical ladder to the fifth level, can be understood and interpreted quite differently from how you originally intended. Execution will be different. You must reconcile yourself to this internally, because it's impossible to worry about every trifle as acutely as you did when assembling that prototype in the garage.
I've passed through all these stages through my own experience. When we were building the business, I sincerely considered myself the most competent person on all questions and didn't believe anyone could handle a task better than I could. Hence chronic overload, inability to delegate, absence of personnel reserve. I couldn't find deputies because I unconsciously didn't want to search for them: I feared losing control. Then a serious crisis occurred: we lost a significant volume of business, and I faced the necessity of making harsh management decisions. Perhaps that was when I truly matured as a leader. My internal stability allowed me to bear heavy loads, cope with current problems, but when a large-scale one-off crisis arrived, this proved an entirely different test. I needed not simply to withstand but to stand up and act, moreover to act quickly and decisively.
Then I understood it was time to separate the business from myself as a person. Many entrepreneurs say about their companies: "These are my children," and this contains a large trap. Business must be released into open waters; you must stop holding it at your skirts like a frightened child. This is the second critical stage of maturation, when you begin perceiving the company as an object of management rather than an extension of your own ego. This came hard, because I had to deal with enormous internal resistance, with pride, with the habit of being indispensable.
The third stage arrived when we had survived the crisis, dealt with ego, and genuinely strong people with serious competencies appeared in the team. Then it became obvious that I physically couldn't check everything happening at lower management levels. Yes, certain control points exist, but they aren't sufficient for daily monitoring of every process. I had to learn to trust people, accept their mistakes as an inevitable part of growth. This is an entirely different level of maturity, when you acknowledge another person's right to be unlike you, to have opposite competencies and approaches. My deputy might do something quite differently from how I would do it, but through his strengths he'll achieve an outstanding result. And together we'll accomplish significantly more than each of us separately. This stage coincided with geographical expansion, when we were dealing not with one market but with several countries. Here I finally decided to move into the position of player-coach: no more micromanagement, no tracking daily performance of every branch. There are strategic control points through which I understand: we're moving in the set direction or we've deviated from course.
All these transformations of a leader inevitably change one's relationship with oneself too. Numerous misconceptions exist regarding women in business, a whole code of unwritten rules about what she should be. The truth is simple: she owes nothing to anyone except herself. The only obligation is honesty about what life fulfils her. In my youth I was certain that by thirty-five I'd earn enough money and retire. I imagined a villa somewhere in Italian Tuscany, where I'd grow tomatoes, visit museums, travel, enjoy life without deadlines and negotiations. Reality proved entirely different.
At a certain point I had to admit honestly to myself: I'll never be able not to work, and it isn't even about money. In work, in the business, in the big professional game lies my source of energy and drive, my engagement with life. Even my relationship with my son is built quite differently precisely because I'm a busy mother who has her own achievements and victories. Teenagers value this: he sees that his mother has success, interesting projects; she understands how the world works, knows how to negotiate, solve complex problems. Not one housewife, however tenderly she relates to motherhood, will receive such a level of trust and friendship with maturing children. This may sound paradoxical, but it's precisely work, involvement in a great cause, that allows me to remain a woman in the full sense of the word, gives me resources for travel, time for myself, for reflection.
Of course, all this became possible thanks to a system built over years, through mistakes, crises, sleepless nights. Now I can calmly drop out of operational activity for several weeks: go travelling, dedicate time to things for which there's never space in the usual calendar. Strategic thinking, pondering long-term plans, making crucial decisions that will determine the development vector for years ahead. But the idea that one must necessarily correspond to someone's expectations — be a muse, energy source, keeper of the hearth, and simultaneously a successful businesswoman in balance — this is a false construction. Each person must find their own answer to the question of what life fulfils them. Some are genuinely fulfilled by shopping with girlfriends, long conversations in cosy restaurants, spa treatments, and caring for appearance. Others by mountain trekking, extreme off-road driving at 220 kilometres per hour, conquering new heights in both literal and figurative senses. We've grown too accustomed to wearing masks that seem correct. They need removing, so we can find our own face in the mirror, because only then do we begin to live truly: about ourselves and through ourselves.
My relationships bear little resemblance to traditional notions of family and are built on principles of equal partnership between two self-sufficient people. This is a game where nobody owes anyone anything by default. This is a space for two, where we simultaneously draw energy from each other and make each other stronger. Better together than separately: that's perhaps the main criterion of healthy relationships at this level.
I'm deeply convinced that only two accomplished people, realised in their spheres, can be happy in a relationship. It needn't necessarily be business: art, science, medicine, any field where someone has achieved mastery and recognition. But both must be equal partners, not donor and recipient. Otherwise, one will always feel like a debtor, because they're being given the most precious thing — time and life — and in return can offer only love and a young body. This is an unequal exchange that sooner or later will lead to crisis.
When I was just starting my path in business, in many situations I felt awkward and uncomfortable about being a woman surrounded by experienced male professionals. Stable stereotypes exist from which there's no escape: "Who helped you create the business? Whose project is this really?" Such questions sounded regularly, and this persists even now. Until you begin speaking, open your mouth, and relate in figures, facts, and case studies exactly what you've done and how your company works, an automatic stamp exists: girl, blonde, someone's protégée.
At first this genuinely hindered me, made me doubt myself, forced me to spend energy proving the obvious. But at a certain moment an internal transformation occurred. I simply acknowledged the fact and stopped fighting it. Yes, I'm a woman, I manage a large business. At the same time I bring up children reasonably well, love sport and travel, can today go shopping with pleasure and tomorrow conduct the most complex negotiations and launch a large-scale project with production facilities in several countries. When you feel yourself in this wholeness, when you stop being torn between "correct" roles and begin living from your nature, that's when a real miracle happens.
My path led from enthusiastic "how splendid, we'll do everything, we'll work it out as we go" and painful "how uncomfortable in the masculine business world, who'll even believe me" to calm and confident "this is my advantage". I sincerely believe that a woman in today's turbulent conjuncture is capable of achieving more than many others. She's adaptive by nature; she thinks about the future generation; comfort, beauty, aesthetics, the humanity of processes matter to her. In an era when rigid hierarchies are collapsing and flexibility and the ability to rebuild quickly come to the fore, all this becomes an enormous competitive advantage.
Happiness isn't yoga by schedule or fashionable practices. It's the capacity to live in dialogue with yourself, not betraying your nature for others' expectations. It's the ability to build a business that fulfils rather than depletes. It's honesty before yourself: the main and only currency that has meaning. If you're going to undertake something, then precisely what others consider impossible. But do it not from protest, but because it's your truth.
