Petr Zhmutsky, Dance school founder, from Almaty, 37 years old
Now living in Norman, Oklahoma, USA
I came to the States on the International students exchange Program FSA — FREEDOM Support Act, Youth for Understanding in 1998. Having graduated, I studied movies and filming videos in Kansas. Since film industry wasn’t developed there, in Pittsburgh, where I lived, I was the one who did it. So an idea to launch a company occurred to me and in 2002 I opened the production company. Since then I have been engaged in various businesses.
The film industry is unpredictable; you have either three projects a year or one project in three years. Therefore, I had to survive and made other businesses to earn money. Over the years I was engaged in various businesses: I was in a restaurant business, had two shops, a construction business, a dance school, which still works with large organizations and international companies. The cinematography and music are my passions, making my soul rejoice.
Surely, I faced many difficulties starting the business. Firstly, cinema is an intricate area, few people understand and know this business. It’s hard to find investors, since the business is specific a bit. Being unstable, the film industry is an area of great risk, in investments especially. If you’re ready to risk, your profit will be great. Therefore, you need to deal with the investors who like to take chances, but for a big prize. The difficulty was to teach people, explain how it works and make them believe in themselves, in the product they make.
Those who want to start a business here had better find out everything about the matter in America. Despite knowing what kind of business it is, you need to know how the business works in the States. Many people coming to America think that they can continue the way they ran their business. But the consumer and the market here is peculiar, it requires adaptation. It’s necessary to look at the statistics of the business you want to deal with, the way it develops, if it grows or not, if it has any potential. It’s immense risk to deal with the sphere completely unexplored and not having statistics on it.
The first — you need to know the business, the second — to know statistics, the third, it is important to know the laws. You need to have a good lawyer to help with the documents: green card registration, visas. The consultant you need is the one who went through this stuff. I was hired to consult people from Kazakhstan, from Russia, from Ukraine, from Uzbekistan and I talked about the laws, loopholes, taxes, privileges, places to launch a business at, etc. I've experienced many issues on my own for 20 years and fell myself good in this sphere.
