American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. The following story comes from internal at IBA and features IBA’s Hospitality Industry Transaction Division Director and the Lead Representative for IBA’s Wenatchee Office, Oliver Kotelnikov. IBA is blessed to have many successful entrepreneurs among its team of business sale intermediaries and corporate management. Guidance that comes from a place of knowledge is valued. However, professional counsel from a party with relevant academic knowledge and field experience is superior.
The Story of Oliver Kotelnikov (IBA’s Hospitality Industry Transaction Division Director and the Lead Representative for IBA’s Wenatchee Office)
By Nesha Ruther
Born in Estonia, Oliver Kotelnikov arrived in the United States at the age of 12. Like so many immigrants before them, his family immediately got to work. For the first few years, Oliver worked odd jobs in landscaping, construction, and restaurants in addition to going to school. In 1992 when he was 16, his parents opened a Russian bakery which they called Piroshky Piroshky, named after the classic Eastern European pastry, filled with a variety of ingredients from savory meats to sweet seasonal fruit. “It was just a shoestring business,” Oliver says. “My dad was a baker by trade, but for everyone, including him, there was a lot of inventing on both the culinary side and the businesses side. It was a massive experiment in trial and error for many years.”
Back in Estonia, Oliver’s father had worked in the premier restaurant and coffee shop in the city center, Café Tallinn. He had joined as an apprentice, and over years of working the night shift, became a critical part of the restaurant’s ecosystem. “It really was a school of hard knocks, they had very high standards because, in Central and Eastern Europe, the expectations are very high. People take baking as seriously as medicine,” Oliver says.
Oliver’s family moved to the US in 1988, and four years later opened Piroshky Piroshky in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Their first location was a 350-square-foot hole in the wall. Oliver’s mom, who had been an attorney, took over the paperwork and the administrative side of the business. Oliver and his older sister Anna handled customer service. For the first few years, it was the embodiment of a family-run business.
While the rough-around-the-edges aspect of Piroshky Piroshky was a challenge for the ownership, it also gave something unique and desirable to the customers. “It had this authenticity, we were able to generate a unique and authentic brand because [the business] was such a melting pot,” Oliver says.
Oliver began working at his family’s bakery from the time he was 16. He accumulated an intimate knowledge of the techniques, procedures, and protocols of running a business, as well as a skill for baking. Eventually, his father even allowed him to begin developing his own recipes.
While the starting point was always Russian cuisine, Oliver and his family knew they wanted to do something different. They began creating fusion pastries that used the classic form of Piroshky’s to implement new flavors and fillings. “My philosophy has always been that if you are passionate about something, you should contribute to it versus skillfully replicating. I didn’t want to be the rockstar cover band, I wanted to play originals,” Oliver says.
These fusion-style dishes ultimately became the staple of Piroshky Piroshky and a favorite of customers. One of their most popular dishes was a Piroshky with smoked salmon filling. “Salmon was not a key ingredient in the Soviet Union or traditional Russian cuisine,” Oliver explains. “It wasn’t something you would quickly recognize or associate [with Russian food], but the dumpling was shaped like a fish, and it really embodied our brand. At first, people had complaints that it wasn’t traditional, but ultimately, people accepted many of these items as something new and positive to their own culture.”
For Oliver, the bakery was not just a bakery but his family’s legacy. He bought out his parents in 2005 and took over running the business full-time until 2018, when his ex-wife, with whom he had ran and grown the business. bought him out. By the time Oliver sold the business, it was no longer a scrappy mom-and-pop shop, but a chain of six locations with 70 employees.
Oliver took that time to reap the rewards of his hard work, he visited his grandmother in Estonia, went to Dubai, and even attended the FIFA World Cup and the World Series of Poker. “I had worked holidays and weekends from 5 am to 5 pm,” he says. “So, it was nice to take some time to harvest a bit of fruit off the vine.”
When Oliver returned to the US, he met began contemplating his next steps. One day, he spoke to a friend who recommended he go into mergers and acquisitions. “I had the owner-operator experience and having bought and sold many locations, I understood landlord relationships and purchase and sale details, he nudged me in that direction and put me in touch with Gregory,” Oliver says.
The pair met and immediately connected. In the fall of 2018, Oliver brought his knowledge and experience to IBA as a broker. “IBA is an accomplished group of individuals,” Oliver says. “We have accountants, attorneys, former business owners, and a synergy of personalities. It’s a great fit for me.”
For Oliver, one of the most appealing aspects of working for IBA was the opportunity to have Gregory as a mentor. “His experience and the convictions he has about how transactions are to be conducted and the high standard of care for the clients had a lot to do with [the decision to choose IBA],” Oliver says.
Oliver’s experience having both run and sold his family’s business directly contributed to his success as a broker. “It’s a large decision for somebody to sell a business,” he says. “It’s their nest egg, it’s what they built, and so they look for multiple touch points of credibility [in a broker]. If you understand the experience of owning a business, you are able to relate on another level. It’s important to be able to talk numbers, but also important to relate to the personal and emotional aspect of selling a family business.”
Oliver’s personal background also provided him with another avenue for connecting with small-business owners. The Puget Sound area contains a significant Eastern European population, many of whom are entrepreneurial. “There is a unique resourcefulness that comes from a lack of resources,” Oliver says of this phenomenon. “In the Soviet Union, you didn’t have product selection. There weren’t 85 versions of everything from a bicycle to a phone, to a car. Every little operation of life required a lot of knowledge, ingenuity, and creativity.”
The ability to own one’s own business is something many Americans may take for granted, but for immigrants from the Soviet Union, who grew up without a free market economy, it remains a rare and precious opportunity. “[In the Soviet Union] entrepreneurship wasn’t a word, it was a prison sentence,” Oliver says. “The American Dream is very powerful to [Soviet Immigrants]. They have a greater appreciation for [entrepreneurship] because they can’t believe it’s real. There’s a childlike wonder and intense motivation to succeed.”
Having both been a business owner and a broker, Oliver advises entrepreneurs looking to sell their businesses to be intentional about when and why they choose to sell. “Have a good reason for why you’re doing it,” he says. “The same level of planning that was invested in starting a business should be applied to your exit. If it took you two years to start [your business], and 20 years of hard work and effort to be in it, you need to allocate the right amount of emotional capital and resource to the exit.”
Since working with IBA, Oliver has helped dozens of entrepreneurs sell their businesses. One particularly memorable business was Elger Bay Grocery, formerly owned by Josh Flickner, and also featured in the American Dream Achieved Project. What made Elger Bay so impactful to Oliver, was that it was not just a business but a fixture of the community. “It’s a community staple that had been in the family for 50 years,” he says. “It functions as an outpost of Camano Island where you can get a fishing license, find out what the weather is like tomorrow, get some gas and talk about your bad luck with the lottery tickets.”
This kind of business posed a unique challenge for Oliver because, in addition to the financial value of the businesses, there is the less tangible, community value. For some businesses, their value lies in what they sell, for others, it is a little more elusive. The value lies in a fundamental aspect of who they are. “There’s a story to that business, they’re two generations deep. You have to be able to convey to the buyer that this business has a community that will be impacted [by the sale]. They are doing something beyond the product they are selling because the product on the shelves isn’t unique, you can get that anywhere. But in this day and age, businesses that go so long without changing their identity are rare,” Oliver says.
When such businesses are sold, they run the risk of losing that magic spark under the new ownership. Oliver sees his role as finding out what that value is and naming it in a way the buyer can understand. “Part of what I do is try to figure out what the secret ingredient is. If I just say the business sells beer, crab bait, and fishing licenses, that’s not really interesting to anyone. You have to be able to talk about the profit and loss statement, but also the people who work there and how they interact with the community.”
When selling a business like Elger Bay, Oliver knows not every buyer is going to give the company what it needs in order to succeed. Having also run a business that spanned multiple generations and was a fixture of his community, he has a strong sense of what kind of buyers are right and which are not. “You’re not going to sell a business like that to someone who is buying up companies all across the country. Private equity is great, but in this instance, it’s not a good fit. You need to be transparent with the buyer about what the essence of the business is and the mindset they need to have in order to preserve that essence.”
Another business that Oliver found particularly inspiring was Winthrop Mountain Sports, an outdoor recreation outfit in Methow Valley. Methow Valley has a continental climate, known for its sunny winter days. “It’s big for cross-country skiing,” Oliver says. “There are thousands of miles of trails around the valley where people come and ski.” Winthrop provided skiers with gear they could either rent or buy and everything else they might need.
Oliver found the perfect buyer in Olympic cross country skier Erik Bjornsen, who was from the area and had been shopping at Winthrop Mountain Sports since he was a kid, giving him a unique appreciation of the business’ value. “Nobody better understood that industry than he did, and he was a recognizable face,” Oliver says.
“When you sell a business, it’s kind of like getting your blood drawn. The blood has to be a match,” he says. “You have to find that perfect fit.”
For Oliver, this is the best part of the job. “I love being a confidant to people in meaningful situations,” he says. “Being an advisor at a crossroads and being trusted with big decisions. You can view it as pressure, but to me, it gives what I do meaning. I don’t want to do something that’s insignificant and doesn’t carry any responsibility.”
While the responsibility is not one to be taken lightly, the pride and satisfaction Oliver feels in what he does is evident. “There is a powerful feeling of accomplishment and transcendence,” he says of being able to help entrepreneurs sell their businesses. “Something of tremendous value has been created where nothing existed before. A precious capsule containing all of the energy and effort of one person is passed on and entrusted to another, who will build on it. One chapter has ended, and another has begun. Business ownership is a door of opportunity for a successor and a chance to begin again, anew, and grow in a new direction.”
Oliver thrives as a broker not only because of his background and experience as an entrepreneur but because of the reverence he has for small-business ownership at large. He knows all too well that not everyone has the opportunity to create their own business, and for those that do it remains far from easy. “I think business ownership is the ultimate form of creativity and self-expression,” he says. “It’s synonymous with the core value of freedom. Sacrifice and compromise have always been a part of my entrepreneurial journey, and I’m not sure there’s a way to build a business without significant skin in the game or sweat equity. Still, I believe as long as there are human beings roaming the earth, Entrepreneurship will remain attractive.”
Oliver Kotelnikov embodies the American Dream in so many ways: coming to the United States at a young age, working hard alongside his family to build a business from scratch, selling that business, and now empowering others to do the same.
“The American Dream is the freedom to live a meaningful life by design, to erase the line between work and play and dedicate your life to something that matters. In my experience, people who have manifested the idea of the American Dream rarely know the meaning of the term ‘work-life balance’ because they get up and do what they love every day. I have been blessed to live the dream as an entrepreneur and build something new and original. Everything I am today has been shaped by this experience.”
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio, is a Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast).