Our social model is about giving people a job, rehabilitation, assisted living. We create all this ourselves, and the state receives service in its purest form. Roughly speaking, if the government built the same thing, it would probably take five years and cost 150–200 million rubles. Meanwhile, we did it all with our own money. Ten assisted living cottages cost about 35 million rubles, the rehabilitation center another 50 million. That is, we did it in a year and a little less than 100 million.
How did you get to all these results?
What periods can be distinguished in your company's development?
The road was long enough. We started making wheelchairs in 2009. Four years later, we set up a public organization called the Ark, and we started employing people with disabilities – two or three people at a time. First to the wheelchair repair shops, then to the resource center that worked on creating an accessible environment, then to the beaches, etc.
Eventually we felt the need to do something more serious, because someone's wives, someone's mothers kept coming to us, asking for help: "Hire, hire him” and we just didn't have any place left to hire people. And then we made up our mind to build a factory. However, we immediately ran into the problem that many key employees did not have housing, some lived on the other side of town. For starters, we built cottages for three of our employees, and then we thought we would also need a building for the rehabilitation center.
So we went on with the assisted living idea. That is, we would pull a man out of his family, someone who had never lived on his own. For example, a young man who got disabled at 16, lives on a fifth-floor in an apartment building and never goes out. We would move him to our cottage and teach him to live independently, so that he could cook for himself, wash himself, etc. Eventually, we would start full-on rehabilitation, with physical therapy and electrotherapy.
What helped you achieve these results?
What factors contributed to this?
First of all, we weren't afraid to set the bar high. Because if you set the bar at 30 cm, that's as high as you're going to jump. If you set it at two meters, you start looking for a pole to jump with, etc. We set the bar high right from the start.