E137 | From Soviet Roots to Entrepreneurial Success: Vladimir Gendelman’s Journey & SEO Lessons

In this thought-provoking episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams reconnects with Vladimir Gendelman, founder of CompanyFolders.com, for a deep dive into the journey of an immigrant entrepreneur who turned a simple customer request into a thriving niche business.

Vladimir shares his early life growing up in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), the cultural shock of moving to the U.S., and how the abundance of choice in America inspired his entrepreneurial spirit. The conversation explores the evolution of his company, the challenges of early SEO practices, and a near-catastrophic Google penalty that forced him to rebuild his business from the ground up.

Whether you’re a startup founder, digital marketer, or someone seeking inspiration from real-world entrepreneurial grit, this episode delivers valuable lessons wrapped in a heartfelt narrative.

🎧 Tune in now to discover how one man’s journey from gray Soviet streets to vibrant American business success can inspire your own path forward.

Watch the episode here

From Soviet Roots to Entrepreneurial Success: Vladimir Gendelman’s Journey & SEO Lessons

Hey, Don Williams here with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So sometimes you see on television where the attorney says, reserve the right to recall this witness at a later date. Today, I have recalled my good friend, Vladimir Gendelman. Vladimir, welcome to the show.

Thank you then, I’m happy to be here, again.

I’m

thrilled that you’re here again. so, Vladimir is coming to us today from Detroit, Michigan, probably. I think you’re at home. Though you started a little further east than that, you were born and raised where again?

That’s right.

So I was born and raised and left Soviet Union, the part that’s now called Ukraine, but back then it was all the same country. And as of a little over 35 years now, I’ve been living in Detroit, or suburbs of Detroit.

And Detroit.

Yeah, yep, yep. And so, um, so the, and anybody who didn’t sleep through their history class should know that it was at one time the Soviet Union is, uh, was, this big country or, um, cooperation of countries almost. And, uh, and then today that has.

become Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, and so you left 35 years ago. So Ukraine kind of in the news this week. Okay. Russia kind of in the news last week. Okay. Uh, I think president Trump met with Putin last week and Zelensky yesterday or the day before and,

Big time.

And don’t

forget about Azerbaijan and Armenia that were in the news last week or two weeks ago, which were also republics of Soviet Union back in the day. you can also think of… So you know how we live in the United States and there are different states like Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Texas. So Soviet Union was kind of the same thing.

Okay. Obviously I slept one day in history class.

in the sense that the country was Soviet Union and there were different republics such as Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and so on and so forth. Obviously functioned very different because thank God we don’t have communism in America. But yeah, lots of news nowadays too.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, in the news a lot, a lot, a lot. And hopefully with the help of president Trump, maybe they’ll move to the second or third page of the news. Hopefully they’ll move deeper and quieter. think that would be good for, just like everybody, know, everybody there, but everybody everywhere, you know. So, okay. Your company.

is company folders and we can find you at company folders.com. And so I can’t figure out what you do from that name, Vladimir. So tell us what does company folders.com. What do do?

So companyfolders.com, we are a boutique for custom printed presentation folders. We have the largest selection of die cuts, largest selections of paper, largest selection of print methods, largest selection of foil colors. And we are considered to be the highest quality folders out there.

love that. So you know my concept of wow that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, wow starts at 11 and goes on to infinity. And so when I do my own events and we have handout material, we always print it on the best stock we can find. does it cost a little more? A little? Not a lot, but a little more.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

But you can literally see people who have even a eight and half by 11, you know, a one pager and you can see them pick it up. Yeah. I get my hand in the camera and you can see them feel it and they’re like, Ooh, this is nice. And, um, and so I want to encourage you, if you’re listening today, you know, visit company folders.com because if you, if you want to deliver the wow experience, which

Yeah.

All Don Williams companies, that’s our mantra, okay, is deliver the WAC experience. You deliver the WAC experience through every sense that the customer experiences you. So smell, touch, feel, taste, hearing, visually. And so very, very important, okay, and it sounds to me like Vladimir owns this niche, okay, as well he should, super guy. So.

Okay. So go to company folders.com. Look around, something. Okay. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions here and, well, first off, let me say this. So you and I are actually friends. We met, think in 2018 in Detroit, Michigan, which was my first time ever to Detroit. that’s right. Right.

Sure.

I actually think we met before and then that’s when we got closer. We might’ve met briefly before.

Okay. All right. Well, you have a better memory.

Okay. You must have a better memory than me. The one I recall is 2018 Detroit, Michigan. First time I’d ever visited Detroit, I was blown away at the difference in what my preconceptions of Detroit were as opposed to my experience actually in Detroit. so, and I think Detroit for, you know, kind of was on the down slide for a long time. But by the time I got there,

Mm-hmm.

They had been on the uphill for a while. And so it was absolutely beautiful and had a great time. And then another high point of our relationship is this. Maybe in 2019, maybe 2020, but I had it in my heart. a passion project I wanted to write a book about. I wanted to write a book about gratitude and the power of gratitude in people’s lives. And that’s still on my heart. And I’m still adding.

up to a million people to begin the daily intentional practice of gratitude. And I was looking for co-authors and Vladimir called me one day and he said, do you have the first one yet? I was like, I don’t. He said, I will be first. I think that’s a direct quote. I will be first. And so you shared a story which we published in the book. And then when you sent it to me,

I remember you asking me something, are you open for other potential authors? And my answer was maybe. And Vladimir shared that his wife, Janet, we’ll give Janet a shout out today, that she had a story that she wanted to share. And I was like, well, send it, no promises, you know, until we see it. But she sent her story. She’s also a co-author in the book, Gratitude Stories from Our Hearts.

And man, my eyes got watery when I read her story. And it’s the only story in the book we did not edit one word, one comma, one sentence we published as she sent it to me. And I Vladimir if I could speak with Janet later, because I’d never even spoke with her at this point. And we set up a call.

And was like, man, you write beautifully. And she said, well, I have to confess, I’m a writer. And I’m like, well, you are a writer because you write beautifully. And so please pass my hellos on to Janet and ⁓ your kids. And we actually kind of reconnected this week because a mutual friend of ours from the UK, Jeri Walla,

Thank you man.

He was recently on the show and so he was singing the praises. He was like, I know this really great guy in Detroit. And I’m like, okay. A lot of people in Detroit. And he’s like, well, his name is Vladimir. And I’m like, his last name is Gendelman. And so it is a small, small world. And we’re glad you’re here today. Okay. First question. You grew up in the Soviet Union before you came to the U S.

What was the single biggest culture shock?

for you personally and then have a follow-up question to that.

in here you mean?

Yes.

So when I first saw few things, I was a teenager and…

everything was different. And at the same time, I was trying to act like not a big deal. You know, I’m cool. Like, none of this matters. You go to the store and you have 70 different kinds of cheeses or sausages or cereals that I never heard of before. Yogurts. Oh my God, that was amazing. Cream cheese. We didn’t have that, right?

But that was cool, like none of that fazed me. However, as it turned out, it did faze me, but I didn’t realize it over time. And it actually manifested in very interesting way. I don’t know if we actually discussed it before or not, but so in Soviet Union, it was a communism, right? What is communism? Communism is when government owns everything and provides to the people. Obviously,

Nobody will provide anything good to you out of the goodness of their heart. It just doesn’t work. And on top of it, because government owns everything, there is no competition. If there is no competition, A, you might have one or two kinds of cheeses or two or three kinds of sausages, right? But those are deficit. You either have to stand in the long line. And a lot of times, by the time your turn comes up, there might

there might not be anything because it’s gone. But most importantly, everything was like that. So anybody’s house you go to, they have one of four five different wallpapers that were available. Everybody has one of three or four different dishes that were available. Cookware, silverware, furniture was, you know.

maybe five different kinds. So by the time you go to people’s houses, there really isn’t that much difference other than somebody has a closet on the left and somebody has it in the right. And by the way, we did not have built-in closets either. So same goes for clothing and everything else. And therefore, on a grand scheme of things, nobody stands out. You can’t really stand out with, you know, like express yourself, right?

That’s why when you watch movies about Russia, back in the day, Soviet Union, everything is gray. Everybody’s pretty much gray. And that’s all you got. So I come here, obviously it’s very different. And I very quickly got used to the fact that in America, you have variety of everything. And you can express yourself. You can stand out. You can do anything you want.

And that was it. I’m used to it. And then year 2003 comes around. So I’ve been here for, what is it, 13 years at that point. And I was running a computer repair shop. And the customer asks me if I can help him get company folders. I said, of course. How hard could that be, right? 2003, internet is at full swing.

You just go and you, we’re in America, you can find this whole variety of folders and all these options and guess what? I go look for it and there are no varieties or options. It is pretty much.

one pocket, two pocket folders, they’re nine by 12, their pockets are horizontal, you can choose white paper of different weight, and you can print full color on it, for the most part, that was it. Now, if you go and you talk to other printers and you can get extra custom work that will cost you arm and a leg, that’s when you can get variety. And I thought to myself, this is strange, this is not a miracle, right? And I figured,

They gotta fix it. They gotta do it. And then sometime when I started thinking who is they, and I couldn’t come up with the answer. So I figured that’s me. And that’s actually how Company Folders was born. And since the customer asked for Company Folders, I just named the company that way, I guess I didn’t even know any better at the time.

I love that.

Two thoughts come to mind. One, on the company folder name. So, there is a company that does self storage. I think they’re the biggest in the US called Public Storage. Okay, and pretty much everybody’s seen them. They’re coloring is orange and they’re always on a highway and it says Public Storage. But when the company first started, they named the company Private Storage. And nobody would call.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nobody tried to rent, okay, because of the name. And so I don’t know who they talked to, but somebody said, maybe you shouldn’t call it private storage. Maybe you call it public storage. And so they changed the name and now it’s a, know, multi-billion dollar company. And the other point I want to make is this. So Vladimir obviously, you know,

built a better mousetrap. There wasn’t a mousetrap for company folders. He couldn’t find one. So he built one. He stepped into that void, okay, which helped with his business. But maybe even more important than that is this. I think non-entrepreneurs or entrepreneur wannabes, people who want to become an entrepreneur, they think, erroneously in my opinion, that you have like all these

assets, money assets, resource assets, and you start a company. What I’ve found over 38 years as an entrepreneur and knowing literally thousands of entrepreneurs around the world is this. Most companies started with one customer or one idea or one introduction or one meeting where somebody said, bet I can sell that.

And they did. then years later, they’re the leader in their niche. um, but it all started with like one step. And so I’m a big baseball fan. I always tell people, you know, baseball is a game of ones, one pitch, one hit, one out, one error. And like so many games are won or lost over one something. Hey, it’s the same way with entrepreneurship.

Take that meeting, take that phone call, meet that person, say yes, okay, to the one thing that might change your life forever.

take the first action.

Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. So, all right. Now I’m going to ask you about a mistake. And you’ve been an entrepreneur how long, Vladimir?

So technically since 99, so figure 26 years?

26 years, so there’s been a mistake or two. Yeah. Right. So what’s a time you made a big mistake as an entrepreneur? Not a little one. I want you to confess a big mistake. And how did that failing, not a failure, but failing, how’d that end up helping you become an even better entrepreneur?

No, I never made mistakes.

You mean the kind of mistake that kind of bankrupts you, but doesn’t?

I’ll sounds like that’s a good one right there. Yeah, sounds like that’s a very good one.

You

So I started Company Folders in 2003 and I started it online.

Because the field was open, I had a programming background, and it just made sense for me. And I believed in the fact that internet is going to get bigger. And at the time, the field of SEO was growing. And of course, back then, SEO was very simple, because Google’s algorithms were very simple, right?

And essentially, if on your website you say whatever your keywords are, and then there are other websites that link to you and say those same keywords, Google ranks you at the top. It didn’t even matter what kind of websites link to you. So long story short, I found this company out in Russia who for, I don’t know, $300, $400 a month.

kept on building these links. And I would rank number one, two, and three sometimes on Google. And it was great. Inexpensive. I have all these websites. And as it turned out later, some of them were pornographic websites. Some of them were gambling websites. Some of them were like some other websites that were created just for the sake of sending out links with absolutely no quality, no content.

And guess what happened then? Google gets smarter. And they start improving their algorithms. And all of a sudden, they can track the websites that point at you. They can track the quality of your content on a website. And it was a very popular thing back then. So two main aspects, right? Who links to you? And number two, the content in your website. And the way we did it in then,

Apparently the way everybody else did it was you open your website and at the top you have all the legitimate stuff like all this great things but at the bottom You just put a lot of words Just to hit the keywords, right? And a lot of times people would color them either the same as the background color So you don’t see them or maybe slightly off or however

So 2012, March, I want to say maybe even March 23 of 2012, we get a notification from Google that they found unnatural links pointing to our website. And we’re starting to get penalized. And all of a sudden, we go from position one to position five to position nine to position 20 to third page, fourth page, fifth page, 10th page.

Mm.

Mmm.

And all of a sudden, we’re not even in Google. Mind you, by this time, I have the whole company built out. We have all these people who work for me. We have office. We have customers that find us online, come to us. have everything.

And we lost 76 % of our traffic from that. Ouch is an understatement. The bankruptcy was on the table. used to, my daughter was little at the time. She was four years old and used to take her on weekends. I used to take her for a swimming class. And after swimming class, we would go to have sushi because she loved sushi.

out.

Yeah, out.

Then we would go to parents and nobles at the time and we would read books. And after that we would go get ice cream. And I’m getting to the point where I can’t really afford that anymore.

It was.

It was interesting. Let’s just say that. However, I had an incredible team with me. We really dug into this. We figured out exactly what happened, how it happened. We figured out what needs to happen to go further. And it took us about a year to undo everything that was done. And in a year,

we were at the step zero as if we were starting from scratch.

And from there on, we started building up the right way. So in your original question, you asked what was the mistake that actually improved the company.

Because original rankings, right, Google traffic was given to me so easily and so inexpensively, the company was built almost like a house of cards. You know, the wind blows and everything falls apart. Now, we luckily did not fall apart, but we were close to it. So from there on,

we rebuild the company in a very different way. By now, only because of that, we have a solid foundation, we have solid footprint, we don’t do anything like that anymore, and the company is way better off for it. I’m better off for it, and everybody who works here.

Many times the case that the biggest challenges sometime in the future turn out to be very, very positive.

always.

painful, scary, et cetera. Okay, last question. This one’s a big one. So I know you and Janet have a son and a daughter.

If you could leave or project way into the future, you and I are gone. Your kids are our age. Their kids are 20 something entrepreneurs. Your grandchildren are 20 something entrepreneurs. What’s one piece of advice you would leave for future Gendelman generation?

Mm-hmm.

entrepreneurs. One piece of advice.

The very big thing I stress to my kids, and I’ve been doing this for years and finally my daughter is catching up to it, I always say, if you make other people feel good about themselves, you will always have everything you want.

Just never be fake. You see somebody, you know them, you don’t know them, it doesn’t matter. If you think they have a nice blouse on, if you like their glasses, if you like their hair, if you think they said something interesting, it doesn’t matter whether this compliment them. If somebody’s talking to you, listen with intent to understand. Let people feel like they’re heard because you grow from that.

And most importantly, people are gonna love you for it, as long as you’re always authentic and genuine and never be fake. So I would say the same thing.

love that. So, you know, my second book was titled Romancing Your Customer and it details how an entrepreneur can position themselves for their customers absolutely love them. Not just they like them, but they absolutely love them. And one of the foundational thoughts in that is this, you have to see things

from the other person’s point of view. And so much so, your point of view almost doesn’t matter at all because it’s all, it’s a good one to remember folks, it’s all about the customer all the time. Really, it’s all about the customer all of the time. Vladimir, thank you so much for joining me today. I reserve the right.

Exactly.

100%.

to recall the witness again two through four years down the line.

Dan, this was great. Thank you for having me on again. And yeah, I’m looking forward to do it again in three, four, five years. That would be amazing.

That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next episode. Thanks. Bye.