FOUNDER OF UNIUS LEARNING TELLS HIS STORY...

Experience starts from your school years. Victor Potapov made his business his love. At school, he fell in love with an idea that made his business today...

In 2005, Victor was sent to study at Bromsgrove. He had a room with 12 other students who did not speak Russian or English. It was very difficult and the school rules were very strict. Some of the punishments included rearranging all the benches within the church, cleaning the Director’s dog’s waste or being gated within the school premise for 2 weeks.

Victor was not like the ordinary students, instead of completing his homework, he began developing ideas for some of the biggest companies such as Google and Apple. Some ideas included in-ear headphones that allowed interested customers to frequently change the colours based on their preference and the iGoggle which was designed as a sporting equipment that tracked the number of laps and speed of activities.

In 2008, the young businessman was preparing for exams, and noticed that the system for the digital storage of teaching materials at the school was far from perfect. They had access to the materials, examples of examinations from previous years, but it was disorganised. Moreover, if one of the students changed something or deleted the file, no one was aware of its existence. The school had computer rooms with waiting queues. He often watched as people used messaging services and played video games rather then finishing their homework. That's where he got the idea to combine collaboration and studying, making a portal for schools, teachers and students to communicate with each other and use the portal to organise the training materials.

With this idea, Victor graduated from high school and enrolled in business management at the Queen Mary University of London in 2009. The first year went in the student fun, but when exams approached, Victor realised that the University’s internal training systems had familiar problems to his school in Bromsgrove.

He started to collect access to the systems of different universities. Some of them included King's College, UCL, LSE, Oxford and Cambridge. Friends sent him their login details and passwords so that he could analyse the systems for improvements. By coincidence, in 2010, his own university began to look for a provider of an educational system and announced a tender for £3 million. Victor decided to take part in this tender opportunity and received an invitation to tender document that was 200 pages long. He was only able to understand 40% of the information provided. He immediately went to volunteer as part of the focus group and started testing proposals, while telling everyone about his idea. As a result, Professor Simon Gaskell (President and Principal at Queen Mary University) decided to support his initiative and sent it to the Head of E-learning at the University, who promised to look at the prototype. The University chose “Mahara” as he would have been required to go through the full tender process. “For universities it is important to choose the supplier with the lowest risk,” said Victor, “But it was a blow for me.”

Between 2011-2012, Victor tried helping other universities by offering them his idea, but no luck was on his side. He later moved onto real estate which gave him experience around duediligence and the preparations of proposals.

The second blow was the failure of his business visa. In addition, Victor received a letter of refusal and had a couple of days to pack up and leave the country. He lived here for nine years and was denied of a business visa four times.

But there was a blessing in disguise. At home, Victor found his first client Electronmash and soon after the project, interested the Russian Yellow Pages, who were looking for a system that would allow them to train their employees. They wanted to hire new staff within the regional offices where 100 salespeople were to be trained for a month.

In 2014 (Attempt number five), Victor filed for a business visa again, and finally got it! On his return to the UK, he registered his company Unius in April 2014. He took part in several start-upcompetitions which brought a lot of traffic to his website and offices but there were still not many sales.

They had to leave their offices in Canary Wharf in order for them to cut their costs. He remembers a time when he sat on the floor, holding his head and did not know what to do. He was later advised to take part in tenders because they had good experience in participating within competitions. After a couple of months, they won their first tender with a large Irish company Coilite. This company chopped wood, treated timber and prepared forms for furniture factories and construction companies. One of their recent projects was in London for the Canary Wharf Crossrail.

When Unius received this order, all of their eight employees threw up their hands. It turned out that the factory had a lot of equipment for wood processing. In order for their employees to become compliant, they were required to complete training every six months in order for them to receive a certificate as evidence. “Can you imagine 8,000 people every six months carrying out training?” says Victor. Preparations took almost a year for them, but in January Unius launched their platform for one of their first few clients. “Of course, most companies have separate folders from their past experience, but we had to get everything from scratch. We have an internal corporate social network, and we had to understand that, if you put a person in a box with educational materials, it would be like to giving him a link to Dropbox”, says Victor. Therefore, Unius created a Dropbox folder in order for them and their clients to share information required for the system.

To learn something, you need communication between pupils, a corporate trainer, online brainstorming and other interactive tools. There are a thousand learning management systems, but Unius’s main aim is the customers' needs. There are large companies that have a standard product. Unius believes they have a different approach. If they do what the customer wants for free, they will do it well for him ensuring they improve their product. They may be needed in the next tender, where they would be asked whether they have this integration, however, for them it is now not a cost but an investment. Earlier this year, Unius won their second tender with Liverpool Mutual Homes. “We have reached the point where there are not enough hands” says Victor proudly. Unius are now also looking for programmers in London, or remotely (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, with the possibility of moving to London). They are looking for an investment that would not just take people to work, but to serve 10 large-scale projects in the year, and grow so that they can undertake 10 projects in a quarter. As they tackled several tenders, they have several experiences to share with people from other countries. “If experience will help someone start a business, I'm glad to help”, says Victor. Victor lost a few of his friends who did not believe in him and said that it's time to drop everything and go to work in a bank. But I think that people should not listen to anyone and stop focusing on the money. You need to think about whether you want to bring your dream to the end. Victor wanted to and said, “If not Unius, I would have baked cakes in his bakery!"