When Oleg Tumarkin was a child of about seven or eight, he and his grandmother spent a summer in his family’s countryside cottage in his native Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union.
He enjoyed rowing a boat on the lake near that cottage. One day, a person asked to be ferried across the lake, and gave Tumarkin some money for doing it.
And so a businessman was born.
“I started going all the time looking for opportunities to transport people or give them tours or entertain them in other ways,” Tumarkin, 30, said in an interview at The Chronicle’s offices. “For a long time, really, my basics of understanding business I learned from doing that.”
And those basics were “doing something I enjoy, helping people out and have spending money,” he said.
Today, Tumarkin is adjunct business professor at Concordia University and Lakeland College, teaching at their satellite campuses in various southeastern Wisconsin communities; and he teaches at the ITT Technical Institute campus in Greenfield.
He also is a “business coach” with his own firm, Future Works. As he put it, “I help people start and manage businesses and advise them on their business.”
Moreover, he is a partner in a business, John Harbor’s Main Street Coffee House in Menomonee Falls, heading the firm’s “project management,” according to its founder and owner Jeremy Kuhlenbeck.
“I have about seven different things going on,” Tumarkin said. “I have a pretty eclectic personality.”
Management, not technology
But for all that, he retains his vision that business is not just about making money, but should also be about enjoying what you do and about helping people.
In fact, he is working on a book on this subject, “E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission,” of which eight draft chapters can be seen on his Web site,
This is part of why Mildred Horvath, CEO of the non-profit organization Social Rehabilitation and Residential Resources, decided to work with him. She was a student in three of his classes and asked him to help Social Rehabilitation with marketing, team leadership training, development of a Web site and financial analysis.
“We got intrigued with each other because we have similar goals when it comes to helping people realize their skills, do what they are really good at doing” and “to empower them,” Horvath said in a telephone interview.
Tumarkin and his family came to the United States in 1993 and moved to Milwaukee about a year later. He said that originally, he was very interested in computers, and wrote his first program when he was 12.
But while he was studying at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and working in the computer field, “I was realizing more and more that the sort of problems management was asking me to solve, what was needed was not more technology; but something was wrong with the way [businesses] were being managed,” he said.
“That’s when I got interested in understanding business practices and processes, and basically said to myself, ‘There’s got to be a better way to make decisions,’” he said.
So he threw himself into studying business. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in management systems and MSOE and a master of business administration degree in international business at Concordia University.
Now he is working on “developing my own methodology on how to manage a business.” He explained that there are “eight focal areas every business has to get right to be successful,” and he devotes one chapter of his book to each.
He lists them as management; manpower (or workers); means (building, facilities, equipment); method (process of doing business); market; money (cash flow, financing); managing risks; mission (having a greater purpose).
“If you look at these, each supports the next,” he said. For example, “if you don’t have the right processes [method], you will never satisfy your customers [market]. And if you can’t do any of that, you can’t achieve any purpose whatsoever.”
Point A to B
He acknowledged that all this is “a work in progress. There is a lot more to be explored and written.” But he is also working on applying his ideas “to see if it is just a theory or is practical.”
The ideas certainly seem practical to Kuhlenbeck of John Harbor’s Main Street Coffee House. “He’s exactly what I need,” he said in a telephone interview.
“Sometimes as a business owner, you need to rub shoulders with somebody who understands business at the same level.
“Unless you’re an owner, you don’t understand the magnitude of the business. Employees understand only their small part. Oleg sees the big picture. That’s the benefit of working with somebody who’s been in business and teaches business.”
Tumarkin said his work has given him insight into the current U.S. economic crisis, which is “the result of a bubble. Things were too good for a few years, now we have the natural response to when things are built on a bubble with no underlying substance to support it.”
But that is only “the most immediate crisis.” More important is the crisis in the U.S. economy of “transition from an environment of mass production to customization.”
“People worked in factories for 30 or 40 years, skilled in doing one thing. Now they are finding their skills are useless,” he said. “Manufacturing is disappearing or is increasingly automated.”
Therefore, “people need to re-qualify themselves to be engineers, designers, technicians, researchers, people that have some kind of creativity in their jobs, something that machines cannot do,” he said.
“Until that happens, you’re going to have a lot of people unemployed unless you create dummy jobs that are meaningless,” he said. “There’s a lot of jobs in big corporations, government, that employ people but don’t produce any value,” such as “a person whose job is to take papers at Point A, put a stamp on them and move them to Point B.”
Tumarkin said he is not actively involved in the Jewish community. “I don’t live in a community where there are many Jews,” he said.
Nevertheless, “I believe I’m an ambassador for the Jewish people” to the people among whom he lives and works.
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