Scaling A Luxury Watch Business to $90M with Eugene Tutunikov

Why classic mechanical watches outlast digital disruption

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:29Bill Gallagher: So we're talking all about how do you create a fun business and get it over $90,000,000 and keep it fun. That's the subject of our show today. We've got a great guest. Stay tuned.

00:42Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. Here we are today. We've got another show for you, one of many. Our show comes to you every week. If you wanna know more, we'll tell you later. But go to scalingcoach.com or just like and subscribe wherever you are right now. In addition to our shows about growing your business, we do workshops, coaching, things like that. All that and more, scalingcoach.com.

01:11Bill Gallagher: Alright. Hey. I'm joined now by Eugene Tutunikov. Did I say that right?

01:14Eugene Tutunikov: You did. I'm very impressed. You're better than all of my grade school teachers. I'll tell you that much.

From Soviet refugees to American homeowners in seven years

01:23Bill Gallagher: Eugene Tutunikov, immigrant guy, had a whole career pivot. He's got a company. He's the CEO and founder of Swiss Watch Expo. You might see it if you like that sort of thing. If you like those fancy watches, he's got a pretty cool business around it. He's gonna tell us a story about how he grew it. Welcome to the show again, Eugene. Glad to have you here.

01:43Eugene Tutunikov: Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this all week, and I know it's gonna be a fun conversation.

01:49Bill Gallagher: Yeah. You know, in one of our past companies, we put out some watches. And so I went to educate myself because I don't have a lot of background. I went to the show in Basel, and I walked around and saw all the crazy, crazy watches that they have at the big show in Basel, Switzerland. And it was so cool. It's also fascinating to see how much they like, there's the enduring thing of the kind of watches you do, which are cool and classic and that kind of thing. And then along come folks like the Swatch company and they're disruptive and now the Apple Watch and like, there are waves of disruption. And then the kind of the enduring thing, the classic mechanical movements that is your world. Right? What got you interested? Like, where did you develop a fascination fixation for this kind of watch?

02:45Eugene Tutunikov: I'll jump into it, but it's funny that you mentioned Apple Watches because a common question I get is, you know, how much is Apple Watch eating into our business? And, you know, I love Apple Watches. I think they're phenomenal product, and a lot of our customers have both luxury watches that they're buying from us as well as they wear an Apple Watch every day. But the reason I love the Apple Watch, it's essentially a gateway drug. So the younger generation usually starts with a like, electrical watch, digital watch, and they get used to wearing something on their wrist. And if they didn't have that, they would not get used to it. So they might start with an Apple Watch in their teens. And when they get a little older, then they get influenced by the celebrities, the marketing. They learn about the market for luxury watches, and they end up craving to have something a little bit more luxury that keeps its value. The beauty about the watches that we sell is that they are timeless. I know you love your Apple Watch, but in twenty years, I don't think it's gonna be worth much or up to date or so you would probably have to replace it, whereas any watch that we sell in twenty years, it's actually gonna be even cooler than it is right now.

03:59Bill Gallagher: I have I think I have about six total watches and maybe one or two like from my grandfather as well.

04:04Eugene Tutunikov: Nice. Very cool.

04:09Bill Gallagher: And I understand. And you see a lot of young people today who like, they just rely on time from their mobile, from their handheld. Right? And that would be the danger for us.

04:22Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. Exactly. That'll be the danger, whereas the Apple Watch gets them used to having something on their wrist.

04:29Bill Gallagher: I love the I mean, I love all of it. But the idea of something of utility, but also craftsmanship. And I think that's where you get into that, like the fashion of it, like wearing a different watch for different occasions, having a collection, having something that is a work of craftsmanship and art on your wrist. I saw actually a news item this morning about a watch that can adjust its calendar over time and keep the days right with leap years for four hundred years. Right? Including leap years. Like, that's a cool.

05:04Eugene Tutunikov: That is very cool. To think that that's being made mechanically over hundreds of hours of manpower usually, it's really something really neat. There are technological innovations in their own right, and they are works of art as well.

05:20Bill Gallagher: And think about it. Like, somebody asked me recently why I don't have more, like, you know, Internet connected doorbells and locks and things like that where my house isn't more connected than it is. And I'm like, yeah. Because all those things are gonna break. They're gonna get hacked. They're gonna become obsolete. The company's gonna go out of business, and it won't work. But my old door lock on there that is an innovation of a technology of a time will work a hundred years from now.

05:45Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's reliable.

05:48Bill Gallagher: It won't be made obsolete like my first iPhone.

05:51Eugene Tutunikov: Just like most of the watches we sell, they do not have a battery, so they do not stop running. As long as you can move your wrist to power it, they will keep on running.

06:01Bill Gallagher: Alright. If you could go back in time and buy any watch from any period at its original retail price, what would you go buy?

06:10Eugene Tutunikov: Oh, I would definitely go ahead and buy some of the early Daytona watches, like, the Paul Newman age. I think his Daytona went for auction at over $16,000,000. But any Daytona, I think the original retail at that time was probably a thousand dollars or so for the Daytonas they were making. Granted, that's the one that he wore, but any Daytona from from that era could easily fetch seven figures.

06:40Bill Gallagher: Think how you think about something with history and heritage around it. I've driven a few, like, Jaguar E-types. Right? And and there was a time when they were neglected because they have terrible brakes and they overheat and they but it's a stunningly beautiful car and it's enduring and some people have fixed some of those aspects of it. But even with all its faults, like to have one today in pristine condition is a fantastic nostalgic kind of an indulgence. Right?

07:09Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. And it seems that the wealthy clientele, or at least a lot of them, do want something that brings nostalgia back to them. They're craving a historic item that can't be reproduced now. And, you know, as long as they're willing to buy them the value of these pieces, whether it's art, classic cars, or vintage watches, the value will continue to go up. There's a trend in the world where a lot of wealthy consumers want something that's really scarce.

07:45Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that's probably why the valuation of NFL teams is going through the roof because you can't get more scarce than that. But, you know, if you're a billionaire and you can only spend so much on watches and cars, but what do you get? You get an NFL team.

08:03Bill Gallagher: I was on a private island a few weeks ago. That's pretty good too. You could, although it could be lonely. I don't know how many people are on there with you, so it depends. We were with about 55 friends and family, so it was awesome and way more staff than we needed. It was a fantastic luxury experience. There was nothing remotely lonely about it. It was beautiful and awesome and without being bougie, without being pretentious, like whatever you want, but also like out of the generosity of one of our dearest friends. It's fantastic. What an exceptional kind of experience. I think there are lots of different ways that you could spend your time and your money, and that connection to something special and unique I get. I have a couple objects that I don't think about every day, but they're like, I have this little glass jar that I bought in Israel that's thousands of years old. That's a really special thing to connect it to something so ancient. Somebody created that for somebody at a moment of a life event, and now we have it. We'll never know exactly where it came from.

Entering the watch business felt like the right moment

09:16Eugene Tutunikov: Right. We've seen a lot of our customers reaching out and they're looking for a birth year watch, so the watch that was made the same year they were born. That's a very common trend. When they're turning 60 or 70 years old, they're reaching out to us and they're looking for a watch of the same year production as when they were born.

09:39Bill Gallagher: Yes. I'd like to have, I've looked at and frequently look at different '64 cars because that's my birth year.

09:45Eugene Tutunikov: There you go.

09:50Bill Gallagher: Okay. So let's share some of your stories. So you come from an immigrant family, right? You were saying in the beginning. Talk about that experience of coming in, what it was like, just that experience, and then how you see, tell us the story of that and how it relates to starting your own business.

10:14Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. I really feel that my family and I have absolutely lived the American dream. We're very patriotic. On our immigration anniversary every year, we toast to America, and we've been doing that since we moved here, so we love the country very much. We came over in 1989 as refugees from the former Soviet Union with just a few $100. We settled in the Philadelphia area. It was me, my parents, and a lot of their friends also came over around the same time, so we had a whole community of us. First few years, everybody's on food stamps. I was only six years old. My parents were 26. They had me when they were young. And them as well as all their friends were professionals in the Soviet Union: teachers, doctors, engineers. And then they came over to the US without any language and no money. So very humbling for them. I was just a child witnessing all this. But the biggest inspiration for me was within six or seven years, pretty much everyone we knew went from food stamps, dirty large apartment buildings to living in the suburbs, owning their home with a Lexus or Mercedes in the driveway. And that was all done by them without asking for handouts or anything along those lines. And it was very, very inspirational to me because at that pivotal age in life, seven to 12 years old, I could really tell that anything's possible in this country as long as you work at it. The opportunity is there. So yeah, we're very proud Americans.

11:56Eugene Tutunikov: So I went to high school in Pennsylvania, then I went to NYU for finance, economics, and math. And I thought I was gonna spend my whole career, professional life, on Wall Street. I was a math nerd, and I got a really coveted job out of undergrad on a trading desk. I stayed in that business for ten years. During that period, my mother, who was still in Pennsylvania working as a computer programmer, moved to Atlanta, Georgia and got together with my stepfather who is a trained Rolex master watchmaker. So think of it as a watch mechanic. So he knows how to take the watches apart into hundreds of small pieces, put it back together, authenticate them, and he's really, really good at what he does. He was managing a Rolex service center in Atlanta, and on the side, him and my mother would buy watches and sell them on eBay. This was in 2008. And as they saw some potential there, they eventually opened up a little local storefront. So they had a local storefront and an eBay business. I was still working in finance in New York. I was 25 years old. I invested in the business. Never thought I would really get involved, but they would start telling me stories of, hey, somebody flew in from Florida to buy a watch. We shipped the watch to Texas. And I was getting excited. I was like, well, you know, if they could sell one or two watches a day, it seems like this could be a really, really big opportunity for us.

13:31Eugene Tutunikov: And eventually, I joined the business about eight years ago to really build a name for ourselves online. So not just in the local market and eBay, but really cement ourselves as a leader in pre-owned watches. There's a lot of worry from consumers when they're making such a big purchase online, especially if it's a pre-owned product. So eventually, over the years, we've kind of built a reputation. We've grown over 10 times in the eight years since I've joined. We now have a 36 person team. We have 13 people on our team are part of the watchmaking department, which my stepfather still runs, and they are absolute masters at their craft. They take a two or twenty year old watch. First, they authenticate it because there's 40,000,000 fake watches a year being sold.

14:26Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's crazy. To be honest, having touched a few of them, I could like, I think you could tell, like, right away. Like, they don't have the same heft. They're maybe they're, yeah.

14:40Eugene Tutunikov: That's probably 99% of them, but there's also what are called super fakes. And they're not cheap to make, and it's very hard to tell them apart unless you actually open up the watch and get in the movement and you see how the movement was made. So we open up every watch. We authenticate it. Refurbish it. We do all this work in-house. We get it to as close to new condition as possible, and then we sell it locally and online. Over 90% of the business is online, and it's been an awesome ride. We've started the business from scratch, never took any investment. We surpassed $90,000,000 in sales last year. We'll easily surpass $100,000,000 this year, which will be an amazing milestone. And I think within the next handful of years, we'll go to $200 to $300,000,000 a year.

Timing and COVID delivered two lucky breaks

15:31Bill Gallagher: What would you consider your luckiest break that you've had so far in with this business?

15:38Eugene Tutunikov: I think there was a couple lucky breaks. If we did this business ten years before, ten years after, I don't think we would have succeeded. So the timing is a lucky break. The timing was just perfect. When I joined in 2016, summer of 2016, and there was right around that time, there was a huge shift in consumer sentiment in terms of consumers are getting comfortable buying luxury goods online.

16:11Eugene Tutunikov: So that's when it really started to pick up. In 2006, very few consumers would go online and put their credit card down on a $10,000 item. But 2016, we saw that really pick up across all categories, whether it's jewelry, watches, handbags. Consumers were shifting more and more of their luxury purchasing online. And we were at the same time really developing our e-commerce business, figuring out our SEO tactics, our paid advertising tactics, how to build a brand online, etcetera. So we were there.

16:50Eugene Tutunikov: And then the second very lucky break, as you can imagine, was 2020. We were already positioned. We already had the e-commerce. We were already running a lot of paid advertising, investing in SEO before COVID. So we were pretty early to that. And then when COVID happened, it was lucky for the business. I wouldn't say it's a lucky break, but it was lucky for the business because a lot of consumers ended up stuck at home with a lot of discretionary income. They couldn't go out to dinner. They couldn't travel. And they were online and they were looking for interesting ways to spend their money, especially in products that hold their value well or increase in price. So when they went online, they would run into our business, and then a lot of them became customers for life, and they give us a lot of referrals. So we captured a lot of customers in that 2020 period.

17:52Eugene Tutunikov: I mean, we would get these letters and emails of people like a woman in Long Island in her sixties. She's like, I buy watches for all my grandkids all the time. I collect watches. I always go to the mall. Because I couldn't go to the mall, they showed me how to shop online. I FaceTimed with their team. I bought a watch, and she's like, oh my god, I'm never going back to the mall again to talk to that jeweler. You guys are the best because you guys have much better selection and better prices and so forth. So we won a lot of customers over during COVID just because they couldn't go back to the habits they were comfortable with, so they were forced online.

18:18Bill Gallagher: Were disrupted. Yeah. And did people, were there other people who sold because they were cleaning up or needed money or that kind of thing? Did that play in as well? Give you inventory?

18:37Eugene Tutunikov: Not so much because it was interesting. You would think that, but for whatever reason, consumer savings actually went up quite a bit as compared to a natural economic recession. So in 2008, 2009, yes, a lot of consumers were selling to us. We were being able to buy inventory at really good prices compared to before. During COVID, it was more net buying than net selling. Consumers seemed to have the money, and they were sitting at home. They were looking for ways to spend it.

19:05Eugene Tutunikov: So that drove prices up. Our prices went through the roof, and it was actually quite difficult to buy inventory. There were trade shows that we were buying at before COVID. They shut down. Consumers were comfortable buying watches from us online, but selling a watch to us online, which we have a process for, was still uncomfortable for many. They want to go take it somewhere physically, locally, and get paid on the spot. They were scared to put it in a FedEx box and send it to us. So there was actually a shortage of inventory that led to a sharp increase in prices.

19:51Bill Gallagher: As somebody who in my past has shipped gold, silver, and diamonds and other gemstones all over the world, I understand sometimes the anxiety, and you're looking at a parcel stuck in customs in a weird country. You're like, oh, I need to unstick that. And then how about a moment where it felt like you might lose everything or things were caving in on you?

20:20Eugene Tutunikov: Well, when everything was shut down during COVID, it was very scary. Our business dropped over 35% year over year for a couple months, which, thankfully, we were in a good financial spot. But we're lucky we have a very dedicated, hardworking team. And in Georgia, an e-commerce business, it was considered an essential business. So we had to shut down for local customers.

20:53Eugene Tutunikov: Georgia had a very interesting reaction to COVID. The first businesses they opened in Georgia to the public were bowling alleys and nail salons. I don't know why. They had a really interesting reaction to COVID in some ways. But in any case, me and my parents, my parents are still every day in the business and amazing partners to me. But we were in the office, and we didn't know how many of our employees would be willing to. We couldn't, by any means, force them to come in, but most of our employees still came in, and we kept the business running. But sixty to ninety days were pretty much hell. Everyone's in masks. We don't know what's going on with the world. Our doors are shut to local customers. We could not deal with local customers at all, but we were able to fulfill online orders. But it was hard for us to buy inventory. People were getting sick in the office. So it was a very scary time because we didn't know what was going on.

21:56Eugene Tutunikov: A lot of companies had the luxury to go work from home. We have to buy watches, fix them up, and then sell them online, pack them up, and ship them, and that has to be done physically. We're selling a physical good. It's not like everybody could just be at home. So the watchmakers had to be coming in. The operations people had to be coming in. Salespeople were working mostly from home. But yeah, it was definitely very nerve wracking. And like I mentioned, we dropped 35% for a couple months in a row. And then it rebounded. But leading up to COVID, we were growing at 50% year over year consistently. So it's a big swing. When you go from 50% up to 35% down, that's a huge swing in sales.

22:42Bill Gallagher: So what's your competition like? Who do you compete with in this market online, and how do you compete? What is it that makes you special?

Competing against marketplaces with hands-on video sales

22:54Eugene Tutunikov: I'd say our biggest competition are marketplaces such as Chrono24, which is the biggest in the watch space, and also eBay. They still get a lot of traffic online and still get a lot of business. But we're able to continue growing faster than them because we offer a much better experience. When you go on a marketplace, you don't know who you're buying from. You don't know the quality of the inventory. It's not necessarily graded all the same. You don't necessarily have the same customer service experience. So we do all the repairs and servicing in house. We're selling the best quality of pre-owned product out there because our watchmaking team, they see some little nick, and they refuse to ship it out. It has to go back to the shop, and I'm like, I don't even see it. They're like, no, this has to be perfect, or it's not going out the door. They are like obsessive artists with their craft, which is amazing. But when you go on a marketplace, you're dealing with multiple sellers. The quality of the inventory is not consistent.

24:07Eugene Tutunikov: You don't really know what kind of authentication was being done, have they actually opened up the watch or not. We know we price fair. If you go to the marketplaces, you have prices that are all over the place for the same watch. So there's a lot of work for the consumer to figure out who to buy from and if they could trust this person. Whereas if they come to us, they know they're going to get a consistent quality and very fair price. We own all our inventory. People sometimes list things on marketplaces they don't even own. They'll sell it, and then they try to find it somewhere to fulfill the order. So they'll play games like that. And they know if there's ever, if they buy a watch from us, if there's ever an issue, we'll take care of it right away. They could just ship it back to us. We have a warranty. So the marketplaces are very inconsistent experience.

25:03Bill Gallagher: The marketplace difference is they're trying to just be a middleman, but not really own the inventory.

25:10Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. And they never touch the inventory. It's just, you could go in those marketplaces personally and sell a watch to somebody in Texas. Well, that person in Texas needs to trust that Bill knows enough to ensure this watch is authentic. And you could tell him it's great quality, but when he gets it, he might say, well, this is not good quality. It's all beat up.

25:34Bill Gallagher: These days, I really hate buying anything from a place like eBay because I just have no idea how it's going to go. I have a family member who sells quite a bit through eBay in what they do and some friends and stuff, but it's not a place as a consumer. It feels like, to me, you need to know what you're doing there.

25:56Eugene Tutunikov: The way we do most of our sales is I have a seven-person sales team here, and they spend most of their day on video calls with customers all over the country. They show, it's a very amazing experience. We have an awesome showroom. We have a 5,000 square foot showroom. The whole building's over 7,000 square feet with the office space. But during that FaceTime, we kind of give them a tour of the showroom. We have an actual police officer here at all times in uniform, so they get to meet the police officer. He'll say hi. So right away, that builds a lot of trust. You're not going to question if their business is legit when there's a police officer on the video saying hi to you. You get to meet members of the sales team. You get to usually see me and my family on the FaceTime. Then you get to see the watchmakers working on the watches in real time. And then our salesperson that's working with you will have watches in his hands that you're considering, and he will show them to you live. He will educate you on them, answer any questions about them that you may have. So it's a very hands-on sales approach, and it leads to a very loyal customer base, especially once they get the watch and it's pristine.

27:09Eugene Tutunikov: So it's funny. A lot of people in e-commerce and people have approached us to invest. They're like, well, how do you get fewer people to contact you and just buy on your website? And we're like, well, we don't really want that because you're not going to, it's not going to stick in your mind as much as it does if you go through the whole video sales process. You get that watch, and then you're going to go, what do watch collectors love to do? You're going to wear that watch with your friends to dinner, and next thing you know, you're talking about, wow, this was a really cool experience. You guys got to talk to them. They've got 3,000 watches. You could see them all in showcases. I saw the watchmaker that worked on my watch. The space is really cool design, and then they don't play games, and then they overnight the watch, and I was wearing it for dinner the next day.

27:57Bill Gallagher: I imagine there's a shift that happens. So people go from thinking about it and browsing. I've been on your website. You have all kinds of stuff there. And people probably have certain ideas like, oh, I like the Submariners and the Seamasters and the GMTs, and those are my sort of style of classic sporty watch. But I also kind of like to browse around the sort of, I don't know, weird ones that are less well known and the unusual and stuff. Not necessarily buy them, but I think there's probably a whole bunch of romance. And then at some point, I get to having a video call or two where I start to think more seriously about it and what am I really going to, where, how does that inflection happen in your world?

Younger collectors treat watches like tradable assets

28:46Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. That's exactly the process. We have right now, we're doing over 600,000 unique visitors a month on our website. And most of them are just browsing. I mean, I have personally, I have friends that are, they will text me inventory that we list before I even know. They're like, oh my god, this watch you just listed an hour ago. I was like, what? I mean, people are, a lot of people are obsessed. Not because they're going to buy it, because they're just, I mean, they bought watches before, but they're not intending. But they're, watch collectors are absolutely obsessed. So we have a lot of browsers that are just browsing. But then, yes, when they get more serious, I don't really know any other company that does this. On every product page, there's a little button that says request FaceTime. And that to us tells us you want to see this watch live. I don't know, you can't do this on any other, you can't do this on Saks Fifth Avenue.com or anywhere else as far as I know where you could just say, I want to see this live in FaceTime. But we offer that, which is pretty cool. Especially, it's got a lot of extra little features, buttons, dials, bezels, and things like that and all that.

29:59Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. We have beautiful product photography, but nothing beats seeing it live. And also, you're not just seeing it, we have a non-commissioned sales team of a bunch of watch nerds. They work here in very long hours, and then they go home and they read watch blogs for fun. So they are never trying to upsell anyone. They don't get paid commission. They work as a team. But when you do that FaceTime, you're now interacting with somebody in our sales team, and they will give you so much information about the history of the watch, the features, comparing the different models, and so forth. So it's a very neat experience.

30:40Bill Gallagher: That's really cool. So where's, what are the trends that you're seeing now, and where is the business going now?

30:50Eugene Tutunikov: I think the trends are, I think the consumer is realizing that there's an issue with the proliferation of fakes out there. And it's interesting. We had a lot of small competitors appear in 2020, 2021, a one or two person operations that would try to probably get some credit line and try to list some watches online and try to compete on razor-thin margins, but they didn't have the expertise to really authenticate watches in-house. There's only a few firms out there that have the scale to do it. I mean, we're going to sell over 10,000 watches this year. That's a lot of watches to open up. That's a lot of watches.

31:33Eugene Tutunikov: You have to open every one of them up. 65% of them get serviced. That's a lot of work. I think consumers are finally realizing that that local jeweler with 12 pre-owned watches, while he might, meanwhile it's not necessarily that he's malicious, he may not know any better and sell either a fake watch or a watch with a swapped movement. We had a customer try to sell us a two-year-old Nautilus with a 1995 Patek Philippe calibre movement in there, which is both made by Patek Philippe, but destroyed the value of the watch by over $60,000, which our watchmaking team caught, but your local jeweler would never catch.

32:10Bill Gallagher: Because it's a Frankenstein watch?

32:10Eugene Tutunikov: It was a Frankenstein watch. They were actually shocked that he was able to get it working on a mid-nineties calibre movement on a Nautilus model somehow. But for $60,000, people will play all kinds of games. So consumers, I think, are waking up to the fact that they can only trust really established players like us, which is great. So there's a lot of consolidation happening in the space. The other big shift I would say is the mentality of a younger customer. Before, all the marketing for all the luxury brands is you're buying a watch for life to pass it down to your kids. Well, the consumer under 40 is not thinking that way. They have a very high velocity in their collection. They will buy a watch, they will wear it for six to eighteen months, and then they will come back and trade it in for something else. And if you, the idea of them keeping a watch for life doesn't even cross their mind. They just have a completely different mentality. So it's interesting to see that, and they're also very digital savvy. They don't necessarily want to go into some store and spend six hours flipping through a catalog while they're drinking champagne. They actually want to find something, see it on video, and wear it to dinner tomorrow. And that usually, if you go to one of those official dealers, you're then going to wait for the watch for another six to eighteen months while they order it for you. It's on a wait list. They don't want to do any of that. They want to see it, they want to buy it, and they want to have it on their wrist for dinner the next day.

33:42Bill Gallagher: If you go back to your younger self, step back in time, what advice would you give yourself? What would you do over?

34:06Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. You learn so many lessons as a business grows. Hire slower, fire faster, I'd say. I think a lot of people have gone through that education process. Be patient with results. Sometimes things take time. Don't, you need to be impatient with actions, but yeah, not everything happens in the timeline. The results don't always happen in the timeline that you wanted, but they could still happen in the future. And know from the outset that you're going to be all in for a number of years, and you're going to have to make a lot of personal sacrifices. Because I think at first, I was kind of trying to pretend I didn't, and then I just realized, look, this is going to be number one thing in my life ahead of relationships, some years health, friendships, this and that. And I think for all businesses, there's a certain period of time where you just got to go all in, commit to it.

Compound slowly and focus on one business model

35:03Bill Gallagher: If you were, so we have a big range of business sizes in our audience from early stage to much larger than your company. If you're talking to somebody who's sitting there between 5 and 10 million and looking at you trying to get to 90 million, what advice do you have for an earlier stage company trying to scale up?

35:32Eugene Tutunikov: The biggest advice is don't focus on too many things. Try to figure out one plan of action. Don't experiment with multiple product lines or business models on the same business, which a lot of people do. The other advice is really make it a step function. I think everyone thinks like parabolic growth is very sexy. You raise money, you throw money at a problem, and oh my god, it tripled in a year. Well, I would hate to triple in a year. I think there's a lot of things that break and actually oftentimes makes you a worse company further down the line because you grew too fast. So I think compounding is the strongest force in the world. I read a fact today. It's Amazon Web Services, when they started it, when they launched it the first year, did 20 million in sales and now does 20 million every hour and a half. So, and it's been over twenty years since I think they launched it. But the point is, if you can get a business that grows, you know, 20, 30, or 40% a year, even if you start very, very small, you give it ten, twenty years, it's going to be very, very big because compounding is a very strong force.

36:50Bill Gallagher: All right. So you work with family. How have you made that work? I've worked with family. We have lots of people at family businesses. How do you make that work? What's your advice for a family business?

Making family business work through trust and boundaries

37:03Eugene Tutunikov: Well, first of all, I think there's nothing more rewarding than building something great with people that you love. It's, yeah, especially in my case, while family dynamics can be tense and tricky at times, the one thing that we've never questioned is the trust, where I think some business partners could have backstabbing or, either, you know, with us, that never crossed their mind. And I think in most family businesses, that's usually not a concern. There's other concerns that make the dynamics more complicated. But when we were a very small company, it was kind of like we were all in each other's space, and now we've kind of tried to divide the different areas between us and not necessarily day to day try to influence the day to day work of each other, and that's very helpful. And this isn't just for a family business, but I've learned that success seems to lower tension all around with whatever business partners you have. When you're small and you're starting out and everything's difficult, but when you see things really taking off, everyone's a little bit more relaxed.

38:29Bill Gallagher: Yes. But you can't always be winning. Right?

38:35Eugene Tutunikov: Yeah. For sure.

38:35Bill Gallagher: In spite of the lyric, all I do. Right? We, if you win, you have to spend time losing too. So this is really helpful things. Any last thoughts for us? We'll throw up the links. Swisswatchexpo.com for you.

38:51Eugene Tutunikov: Last thoughts, Bill. I enjoyed the conversation. If you're ever in Atlanta, let's get together for lunch or dinner. I'd love to show you the operation. I mean, I couldn't think of a more fun business than buying and selling watches online. I think, you know, I pivoted from Wall Street to this, and I think a lot of what I learned on Wall Street made me a better executive in this business. Yeah. So I would just tell people, don't be afraid to pivot in your career. If you're going to start a business, know the pain and effort you're getting yourself into. Don't lie to yourself. Be ready for the road ahead, and yeah, find something that you're passionate about and you could have fun at because otherwise, twelve, thirteen hour days are going to be very difficult.

39:41Bill Gallagher: Yeah. It's a lot easier to stick it out and go through the bumpy spots if you love what you do. Eugene Tutunikov, thank you.

39:49Bill Gallagher: swisswatchexpo.com. Thank you so much for coming on and joining us today on the show, talking about your business. I'm sure you'll have some browsers, so we'll be going looking at, like, what could I get? A watch with some groovy retro vibe and, like, cool movement, right? So swisswatchexpo.com. There it is, Eugene Tutunikov. Thanks again so much for being on our show. Thanks also to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework. If you want to know more about our workshops, our coaching programs, things like that to get your business over $90 million, find yourself over to scalingcoach.com. That's our website. It has all our programs and things like that. scalingcoach.com. And to the folks, Christelle, Seth, and Cameron and the team, thank you guys for being on and getting our show ready and out the door every week. It's such a pleasure to do this part of the business. Thanks again everyone for watching. Keep scaling. Until next time.

40:52Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.