The "Cold East"

by Matthias
(East Ukraine)

The Russian Spirit.
STMC goes East.

With Matthias Henze


Actually this Story started in 2001 when I went for the first time in my life to Moscow. At this time I had already been working nearly six years for a distributor and I had tried for quite a long time to get a foot in the door with Russian customers by telephone and contacts at several trade shows like CeBIT, Remax and World Expo. At this point my success rate had been practically zero.

During CeBIT a young guy from Kiev visited me on our booth and was very interested in our Products. After a long conversation he closed our discussion with some advice: “If you want to do business with us, you have to come and see us.” Suddenly it all became clear – there was no other way – I had to go east. I thought about the cold war, stories I have heard from people who had been ripped off….. But I decided to go and to make my own experience. To cut a long story short, this was one of the most beautiful business trips I have ever made.

The Russian spirit jumped on my shoulders and I went back as often as I could. Not just to Moscow but also to St. Petersburg and Kiev in the Ukraine. The friendship and hospitality I found cannot be explained with words or pictures.

One of the highlights has been the honor of talking at the DPM Conference about STMC. As you might know, I decided in February 2005 to leave the company I worked for and took over as the CEO of a remanufacturing company . This meant that nobody was in the Russian region anymore to follow up the STMC idea I had started. But one of my former colleagues Petr Kulakov and I had a meeting and created the idea of the first Russian STMC trainer. We wanted to convince the STMC committee and the ITC www.i-itc.org to certify Petr as the ONLY OFFICAL RUSSIAN STMC TRAINER. This we achieved and Petr is now also working as a consultant for APM and Hip KIU in HongKong.

I am sure Petr will follow through the ideas of STMC and I would be very happy to meet my friends from the “cold east” very soon. And believe it or not the EAST IS NOT COLD! I am proud to call a lot of the people I have met there my friends.

Надеюсь увидеть Вас очень скоро, мои друзья.

Маттиас.