New Elance Millionaire: featured in Elancer

Elance has published an interview with Yuriy Bannov. We publish here its full text. You can also find it at the Elance page.

Yuriy Bannov is founder and co-owner of Sibers (Elance username: HireRussians), a programming and web development company located in Siberia.  HireRussians has completed over $1.1 million in Elance projects.  We asked Yuriy how HireRussians achieved their remarkable success.

Q. How did you get started?

A. We began our outsourcing business in 1998. At the time there were just five of us. We joined Elance in 2000 after we lost our main customer, 3COM, due to the recession in the U.S.  We struggled for a time; the Internet boom collapsed and most businesses in the U.S. and Western Europe cut IT spending dramatically.  We chose Elance because it was the most developed virtual outsourcing platform – and we’ve stayed because it remains to be.

Q. What did you do to grow your Elance business?
A. We knew we had to build a great reputation, but we knew that would take time.  In the beginning we worked almost for free just to get some feedback and build our portfolio. I’ll be honest, there were some ups and downs, but we just did the best work we could and it paid off over the long term.  From the beginning of talks and negotiations we try to build friendly and trusting relationships. We become friends with our clients, which makes them come to us again and again – not only with new projects, but also just to visit us.

Q. You’re thousands of miles away from your clients, yet you’ve met some in person?

A. We meet with our clients on a regular basis. We’ve traveled to the U.S., Istanbul, Moscow, and Bishkek. (We have an office in Bishkek.)  Also, clients have visited us in Novosibirsk – the skiing is fantastic!

Q. Have you built long-term business relationships?
A. Absolutely!  In fact, over one-third of our Elance clients engage us for new projects.  Eye-Fi, Inc. is one of the companies we’ve worked with on a long-term basis. They built a product and a service offering that will change the way consumers take and share photos.  There’s a tremendous amount of buzz around what Eye-Fi is doing, and we have been instrumental in helping them build their technology.  Eye-Fi has a superb team of engineers and architects that we’re working with to achieve a faster time-to-market schedule.

Q. What advice can you give to Elance providers?
A. Our success is due to our communication and attitude towards our clients.  Clients want to see you are real people with real emotions thoughts, and ideas.  We’ve organized ourselves so clients can chat with our representatives anytime, they can check out our blog, they can see photos of our team… they can get to know us as people.