While the business around the globe was struggling to survive during lockdown this past year, a group of young specialists in Armenia came up with an ambitious idea: to make doing business easier by providing an online team.
The idea came from SHEMM Consulting, whose team provided business consulting services during the most difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemic—when organizing the work for businesses became a matter of life and death. What’s even better is that solutions they have developed will be in demand not only during pandemic, but also in better times.
With a grant from the EU-funded “Innovative Tourism and Technology Development” (ITTD) project, Team2B was put on track. On March 3, a year after the start of the pandemic, EU Ambassador Andrea Wiktorin pressed the GO button and launched the Team2B platform. The platform allows businesses to put together a professional team and remotely receive 10 professional services based on best practices. Supervising, planning and managing the work in an online office will be done in a cost-effective and time-saving manner. This, in turn, will allow entrepreneurs to put their efforts into developing their businesses.
“We believe that, to succeed in business you only need a dream and team, so if you have a dream we will bring the team to help you make it come true,” says Team2B co-founder Vladimir Shatverov. “Now, you can find professionals from various spheres in one place and be confident that they will apply best practices to your business.”
The Team2B platform focuses on two groups of beneficiaries: businesses and individual professionals—who can join different business teams, work online, and have a stable income through this platform, regardless of geographical, physical, or other barriers.
“After a year of active work, we should have 200 clients, each paying $200 on average” says Shatverov. “We are planning to engage 40 consultants within a year with an average salary of $700. Total turnover should be $480,000 starting in our second year. Our three-year plan is to have 1,000 clients and 400-500 consultants on board. We spent three months putting together our ToR and four months setting up the minimum viable platform or MVP of the platform.”
Team2B aspires to become a unique marketplace for businesses and professionals, while at the same time providing a comfortable environment for both sides to organize their work. It monitors the quality of services through a system of experienced mentors.
The platform already has lead users and professionals who have found a job on Team2B. As Shatverov says, the next step is mainly improving the platform’s functional capabilities in order to make doing business in Armenia easier.
The EU-funded “Innovative Tourism and Technology Development” (ITTD) project provides support under the “Innovation for Economic Recovery for Non-technological Micro, Small and Medium Size Companies” Grant Programme and the EU4Business Initiative.
