Process management strategy can determine whether a great business idea remains an idea or becomes a company capable of growing and scaling. In this episode of Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes, Boris Zhukov, Co-Founder and CEO of LetYouKnow®, joins us to talk about what happens when building the business requires challenging the very process an industry has relied on for years.
LetYouKnow started in the automotive industry with an unconventional premise: instead of beginning with a dealership’s asking price and negotiating from there, buyers determine what they are willing to pay and submit their price anonymously. The technology then provides an instant match or no-match result.
But as Boris explains during the conversation, the bigger story isn’t simply about buying cars. It’s about process management strategy, building systems that remove friction, using data to make better decisions, and having the willingness to rethink your original plan when running the business proves some of your assumptions wrong.
Process Management Strategy That Starts by Questioning the Process
Boris’s background isn’t what you might expect from the typical automotive entrepreneur.
With a Ph.D. and Master’s in Economics from North Carolina State University, along with a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Goucher College, Boris brought economics, statistics, and mathematics into the foundation of LetYouKnow.
Those disciplines ultimately helped him develop the matching methods behind the company’s marketplace.
His motivation, however, wasn’t simply to make the dealership experience less frustrating.
As Boris explained:
“I want to empower people to take control of these transactions.”
For Boris, getting a great deal creates excitement. He wanted to build a system that allowed consumers to experience that while also saving money and time.
The convenience of avoiding lengthy negotiations is certainly part of the result, but Boris doesn’t consider that the primary objective.
“The focus is actually empower you to take control of those transactions to save money. Everything else comes as a byproduct.”
That distinction became an important part of the company’s process management strategy. Rather than simply digitizing the traditional buying process, Boris wanted to reconsider the process itself.
Learn more about Boris and the marketplace he is building through the official LetYouKnow® website.
Process Management Strategy Should Reduce Human Effort
One of the biggest operational lessons Boris shared came from an assumption he made early in the company’s development.
Initially, he believed dealerships could manage their own pricing within the LetYouKnow system.
Running the business taught him otherwise.
Boris realized that asking dealerships to continually manage another system created exactly the type of friction the company was trying to eliminate. Instead, LetYouKnow needed a process that could operate with minimal ongoing involvement from the dealership.
Dealers could establish hidden pricing thresholds, and the system could automatically determine whether a consumer’s bid created a match.
That realization points to an important process management principle for any growing business:
A process isn’t necessarily effective simply because it works. You also have to consider how much human effort it requires to keep working.
For LetYouKnow, the goal eventually became making the process essentially hands free.
That required Boris and his team to challenge their early assumptions and build technology capable of doing work they originally expected people to manage.
Your Customers Can Help Design Better Processes
Interestingly, some of LetYouKnow’s most important process improvements didn’t originate with Boris.
They came from the dealerships themselves.
Several dealership owners became shareholders and helped Boris understand what the system needed to accomplish from an operator’s perspective. One of their requests was straightforward: make the process work without requiring them to constantly manage it.
That feedback pushed Boris and his team to rethink how the platform operated.
Another important discovery came from the data created when a buyer’s bid did not result in a transaction.
A dealership obviously knows which vehicles it sold and at what price. LetYouKnow’s bidding model potentially provides another category of information: transactions that could have happened at different prices.
As Boris described it:
“I all of a sudden have something else, which is the transactions I could have had.”
That demand data can then become another input for evaluating pricing and strategy.
It’s an important reminder for business owners: unsuccessful transactions, missed opportunities, customer objections, and process failures aren’t necessarily wasted information.
Sometimes they contain the data needed to improve the process.
Process Management Strategy Means Choosing What to Pursue
As the conversation moved from automotive into LetYouKnow’s larger vision, Boris brought up one of the most fundamental concepts from economics: opportunity cost.
“Opportunity cost, you do this, well, you cannot do something else.”
Every strategic decision consumes resources.
Choosing one opportunity means potentially giving up another.
For LetYouKnow, the answer wasn’t necessarily to limit the company permanently to one industry. Instead, Boris wanted to build an underlying system capable of supporting expansion without requiring the company to repeatedly rebuild its infrastructure.
That influenced one of the company’s earliest strategic decisions.
“We started with the most difficult industry.”
Automotive provided a complicated environment in which to develop the model. Boris’s reasoning was that if the company could build processes capable of handling that complexity, the underlying framework could potentially be applied to less complicated industries later.
During the episode, he discussed opportunities ranging from restaurants and hotels to storage, services, and nonprofits.
The strategic lesson isn’t that every business should expand into multiple industries.
It’s that scalable process management strategy requires leaders to think beyond the problem immediately in front of them.
What are you building today?
And if the company succeeds, will that process still work when the business becomes bigger, more complicated, or enters a new market?
Automation Should Support Your Process Management Strategy
Automation and AI came up repeatedly throughout the conversation, but Boris doesn’t treat technology as the strategy itself.
Instead, technology is useful when it eliminates unnecessary work, creates better information, or allows a transaction to happen more efficiently.
That distinction matters.
Businesses frequently add software in an attempt to improve operations, only to create additional steps, systems, and administrative responsibilities for their teams.
Boris’s experience points toward a different question:
Can the process operate with less intervention?
In LetYouKnow’s case, that meant developing systems capable of managing pricing thresholds, matching transactions, gathering demand information, and eventually supporting businesses across different industries.
The objective isn’t automation for the sake of automation.
It’s reducing the amount of friction required to produce the desired outcome.
This same principle sits at the heart of effective operational leadership: the goal isn’t simply to add more processes, but to build systems that allow the business to operate more effectively without unnecessary dependence on the owner.
[INTERNAL LINK: Fractional COO or Operations page]
Good Strategy Changes When Reality Changes
One of the most valuable parts of Boris’s story is that he doesn’t describe LetYouKnow’s current model as something he perfectly envisioned in 2019.
Some of his original assumptions were wrong.
He had to change processes.
Dealers identified opportunities he hadn’t initially considered.
New technology created possibilities that weren’t available when the company started.
And operating the business exposed problems that couldn’t have been anticipated from the beginning.
That’s part of process management strategy.
A documented process shouldn’t become untouchable simply because the company once decided it was the right way to operate.
As businesses grow, leaders have to distinguish between consistency and rigidity.
Consistency creates reliability. Rigidity keeps companies attached to processes that no longer serve them.
Process Management Includes Putting the Right People in the Right Roles
Boris also shared a leadership lesson that developed through the experience of building the company.
He had to learn to recognize that people don’t have the same strengths.
When someone isn’t performing well in a particular area, the answer isn’t always pushing that person harder. Sometimes the responsibility of the leader is understanding where that person’s strengths actually belong.
As Boris put it:
“You have to recognize who’s really good at what, and then position them in that fashion.”
He acknowledged that this wasn’t a leadership ability that simply came naturally to him. It developed through experience.
Boris also credits the business owners, shareholders, and advisors around him with helping shape LetYouKnow’s evolution. By surrounding himself with people who had successfully operated businesses in different industries, he created access to expertise he didn’t personally possess.
For growing businesses, this is another important part of process management strategy.
The right process with the wrong person responsible for it can still fail.
Process design and people strategy have to work together.
Measure Progress Without Expecting Immediate Results
The conversation closed with the signature question we ask every guest on Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes:
What does it really take to be a business owner?
Boris’s answer centered on optimism and perseverance.
Entrepreneurs inevitably encounter people who believe their ideas won’t work. Boris believes business owners need enough optimism to continue moving forward despite that noise.
But optimism alone isn’t enough.
There also has to be perseverance, particularly during the periods when hard work isn’t producing an immediate reward.
“You gotta keep that optimism inside of you, and then you gotta persevere.”
At the same time, Boris emphasized the importance of being honest about whether the business is actually progressing.
You may not see meaningful change from one day to the next. But when you look across a longer period, there should be evidence that the business has moved forward.
That creates an important balance for entrepreneurs:
Don’t expect immediate results, but don’t confuse stagnation with patience either.
When You Hit a Wall, You May Be at the Frontier
Perhaps the most memorable idea from the conversation came when Boris talked about obstacles.
Business owners naturally want problems solved.
But Boris believes particularly difficult problems can sometimes be a positive signal.
“Whenever you hit a wall, that’s great.”
His reasoning is simple.
If every problem you’re trying to solve already has an obvious solution, chances are other people can solve it too.
The hardest challenges can appear when you’re operating at the edge of what has already been figured out.
That’s where perseverance matters most.
Boris summarized his philosophy toward entrepreneurship as staying positive, working hard, refusing to give up, and treating challenges almost as benchmarks that you’re moving in the right direction.
It’s an appropriate takeaway for a conversation about process management strategy.
Processes aren’t built once.
Strategies aren’t written once.
Businesses evolve because owners continue identifying problems, testing assumptions, learning from data, listening to the people closest to the work, and building better ways forward.
Sometimes improving a process means optimizing what’s already there.
And sometimes it requires asking a much bigger question:
Why are we doing it this way in the first place?
Listen to the full conversation with Boris Zhukov on Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes for more on process management strategy, innovation, automation, perseverance, and the story behind building LetYouKnow.
