Brewing Cafe Success on Military Discipline

From flipping burgers to running the company: It sounds like the classic American success story, but Vladislav Dudakov has experienced something like it here in Moscow.

In just over 15 years, Dudakov, 35, has risen from the bottom rung at McDonald's to become general director of the Coffee House cafe chain.

Born in a tiny Penza region village, Dudakov said he never dreamt of becoming a Russian version of Starbucks' chairman Howard Schultz.

"As a child I did not differ much from my classmates," said Dudakov, in an interview at the new Coffee House cafe on Tverskaya Ulitsa, near Pushkin Square. "My dream was to become a truck driver first, and then an officer of the Soviet army."

Even then Dudakov had an entrepreneurial streak, however. After school, he and his friends would go to the forests, gather pine cones and sell them to forest guards.

"Our hands were always dirty with pitch, but the sum that I got from those cones -- 100 rubles -- allowed me to buy a new bicycle," he said.

After completing high school, Dudakov was drafted into the army and sent to the Kremlin regiment in Moscow, where he got his first impressions of the capital while on duty near the Arsenal and Lenin's mausoleum. Compared with the quietness of Penza region, bustling and noisy Moscow seemed like a different planet.

"I saw people driving beautiful, expensive cars, wide and crowded streets, and realized that I wanted to become a part of the city," he said.

Once his army service was over, he got married and faced the challenge of providing for a family, but was not sure what he wanted to do. He did not want to continue his army career, and none of the Soviet enterprises attracted him.

Everything changed in 1990, when he happened to step into Moscow's first McDonald's, near Pushkin Square.

"It was like a ray of light in the gloom and decay of the perestroika period," he said. "Clean and bright rooms, neat and polite personnel -- that is how I saw the place where I wanted to work."

The competition to work in McDonald's was fierce, but after two interviews he was appointed a crew member and assigned to wash the floors and work in the kitchen. The strict discipline and long hours seemed tough to some, but not to Dudakov after his military experience. "I was used to punctuality," he said. "Being late even by a minute seemed a crime to me."

He was soon rewarded by being named the best worker of the month -- his first stepping stone to a successful career. During the decade that he spent in McDonald's, Dudakov moved up the ranks from crew member to regional director. He managed restaurants in Moscow, Yaroslavl and St. Petersburg, conducted the chain's expansion into Kazan, and then was sent to McDonald's Hamburger University in Chicago.

"That was my first visit abroad, and it seemed like a dream," he said. "The Russian team studied together with our Chinese and American counterparts. The training proved rigorous and the methods were totally different from what I saw in the late Soviet Union."

But still, after 11 years in McDonald's, he felt he had reached his glass ceiling. "My work started to seem too easy and thus no longer interesting for me," he said. "I needed a new challenge."

In 2001, after actively job-hunting for six months, he met Coffee House owner and founder Timur Khairutdinov. At that time, the business consisted of five cafes. Dudakov had already been offered the position of development director at the 36.6 pharmacy chain.

"36.6 offered more lucrative compensation, yet I was attracted to Coffee House," he said. "After I met Timur, I felt something in common with him. Moreover, the chance to develop an independent project filled me with excitement. That was the thing I missed in McDonald's."

So Dudakov embarked on a new project. The work schedule was tougher than at McDonald's -- at the start he didn't take a break on weekends or holidays -- but in five years he has expanded Coffee House into a chain of 105 cafes.

"Coffee House is like my own child that is constantly growing," he said. "So it will never become a case like McDonald's, where I reached the ceiling and lost interest to the job. Here it is impossible to reach the top and there will always be room for improvement."

Asked whether he planned to write a book like his celebrated colleague from Starbucks, Dudakov said he doubted it.

"Still, I love to use catch phrases and slogans that should be written down at some point," he said. "One of my favorites is, 'We always have to stay young, hungry and aggressive to be able to achieve more.'"