Q&A: From senior banker to owner of an aesthetic clinic in London, former Russian banker Anna Saprykina explains her career path

Anna Saprykina is a self-made woman. From provincial Russia, she moved Moscow and started out as a personal assistant ten years ago. From there, she became Head of Credit of Structured Trade Finance at one of the major banks in the UK before opening her own business, and aesthetic clinic Body Silk and attracting an investor from the Sunday Times Rich List.  We asked Anna some questions.

How did you get to London?

I grew up in Ulianovsk – a small town on the Volga River - and after graduating from the university in my hometown came to Moscow to study for an interpreter’s qualification. At the same time, I managed to get a part-time administrative job at Alfa Bank. Gradually I expanded my duties from administrative work to book-keeping.

When the bank opened a subsidiary in London, Alfa Securities, in 2000, they needed an administrator and a book-keeper fluent in English. I saw it as my chance of a springboard to a career. Moscow’s banking sector was still recovering from the effects of the 1998 crisis at the time, and besides, in Russia it is much harder to make the transition from an administrative to a professional role. While working in Moscow I constantly dealt with London-based colleagues who said they were prepared to hire me as long as my boss did not object. My boss was very reluctant to let me go, but I literally begged him to give me a chance and if not help me move forward to work abroad, at least not stand in the way.

While working at Alfa Securities in London I pursued part-time a professional qualification in finance. Once I received my ACCA qualification in accounting, financial management and business analysis, I managed to find a job in a Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation Europe, initially in their Accounting department. Then the bank decided to establish their Trade Finance business in the Emerging Markets sector targeting Russia and CIS, and I turned out to be at hand with my Russian contacts gained through my experience at Alfa Bank. I was transferred to the credit team – this time - within the front office. A couple of years later I was hired by another Japanese company, Mizuho Corporate Bank, where I worked as a Credit Analyst covering commodities, Sovereigns and Financial Institutions.

Was it your choice to change jobs every two to three years?

Yes. I knew that it was quite a challenge to make a fast career move within the same company, so I chose to move from one bank to another. In 2008 I was hired by KBC, a Belgian bank, as Head of Credit within Structured Trade Finance department. The team was great (we became friends and still keep in touch), the work hours were reasonable, and the money was good. I thought that I would stay at KBC till I retire. But things did not work as planned, and the bank decided to scale down their Trade Finance business resulting in a redundancy of the whole department in January 2009 because of the financial crisis of the banking system. Fortunately, we were given a good redundancy package.

Why did you leave finance?

It was scary to be made redundant. I kept looking for jobs in the banking sector but it was clear that the banking system would unlikely recover in the next couple of years. For me, therefore, the prospect of finding a similar position did not look promising. At the same time, I was not prepared to step down for less attractive terms, given how long it took me to get there. On the other hand, I understood that my big redundancy package was going to run out quickly, so I thought that it would be a good idea to invest it in something long-term – something that would hopefully give me a secured financial cushion regardless of a banking crisis or any credit crunch.

Ironically, a few months later, KBC asked me to come back to cover the remaining portfolio on a contract basis. By that time I have been already into my business idea of starting up a clinic.

How was the Body Silk idea born?

I started wondering what people would always do regardless of how good or bad the financial system is. For example, people will always age and will want to look better. My initial idea was about laser hair removal, so I started doing my homework on it. I called a few equipment manufacturers and spent time on several American forums where doctors exchange their opinions on which technology works and which does not. As it turned out, there were a lot of challenges with licensing and certification at the time, but I thought that these initial difficulties to enter the market could later become a competitive advantage.

Don’t you regard your switch from finance to beauty as a rather unusual step, to say the least?

Many bankers think that way, but it is not quite the case. If you’re an employee there’s always going to be a limit to how much salary or bonus one can earn, especially so if you are a woman.

How did the idea of laser hair removal expanded into a full-scale aesthetic clinic?

It turned out that performing laser treatments back then involved lots of paper work, training, licensing, money and most importantly, having suitable premises. I mentioned my business idea to a former bank colleague, and she offered to implement it in partnership. From that point, the laser hair removal alone gradually grew into an idea of renting bigger premises to offer treatments other than laser hair removal. She bought an anti-cellulite machine and I bought a laser machine. We decided that if we ended up with too many treatment rooms, we would sublet the spare ones.

Was it easy to find the premises?

It took us a year. The trouble is that most landlords do not take you seriously when you are a start-up business. The majority of commercial real estate in London and the UK is owned by big trust companies. They hire agents who are supposed to deal with potential business tenants and receive a monthly fee for doing it, so the agents are not particularly motivated to fill in the premises with tenants sooner than later. Also, during the boom years of real estate market, the agents and landlords got used to receiving “fat” rents and practically laughed at my proposals. Time went by, but we were getting nowhere with the premises search. I had to find a way of reaching the owners directly.

In the end, we found suitable premises in the City, but the agent did not even pass our proposal on to the owner. I then purchased the owner’s address from the Land Registry database and sent my proposal directly by post, explaining the situation. The person in charge called me back almost immediately, we had a chat, he called the agent and specifically instructed him to lease the premises to us.

The day we had finally agreed the lease terms and were ready to go ahead with legal formalities, my partner announced that she’d changed her mind about opening a joint business. It meant that all my costs instead of being shared, suddenly doubled. Worse yet, she started demanding that I should pay her back with interest for the equipment and all the start-up costs incurred during the year towards launch, threatening not to hand me over her 50% of the company shares and, therefore, taking away my chances to attract an investor, jeopardising the very idea of starting up this business.

I found myself in a situation where I had to find financing quickly – and I managed to raise it in two weeks! One of the investors is a good friend of mine, and the other is a professional investor from the Sunday Times Rich List whom I met at a musical event through a friend. We exchanged e-mails from time to time, mostly when I used to send out invitations to friends for my concerts. Once he was in, I found a few other people keen to invest who wouldn’t even talk to me earlier. As a result, I found myself better off than I would have been with my former business partner: I got more cash and increased my share in the business from 50% to 60%.

Did things progress according to your initial projections?

Everything that could go wrong when one starts up a business, happened to me. The day after we launched our newly refurbished clinic, we had a bad flood, so that we had to rip off the floors and put them back afterwards. On my first day-off after a whole year of not having one, my staff had to call the police in to deal with a trouble-making client. Once Groupon came to the market, our potentially most profitable service - laser hair removal – did not sell for a year.

My business plan had three scenarios: the realistic one turned out to be more or less right except for the laser part. If someone had told me what I would have to go through in the early days of my business, I would have thought twice before getting into it, but given all my commitments with  the lease, my employees and bank repayments, it was too late and there was only way forward. Looking back, it feels like the past two years have been one big adventure. Things are now different, and I finally have some free time as the business no longer needs my presence on a daily basis.

How did you support yourself financially when you started your business?

As I said, KBC offered me a 6-month contract to cover the existing portfolio with flexible working hours. Then an ex-colleague from KBC arranged an interview for me with Bloomberg where he worked at the time to join their Fixed Income team on a temporal rolling contract. I also had to take out a personal bank loan at a high interest rate to pay back for the cellulite machine as it was part of the shareholders’ agreement. The clinic was launched in May 2010 and I devoted all my time to it. Luckily, we managed to be covering our operational costs from Year One.

Where did you find staff members for the clinic?

My fellow-bankers referred me to some high-profile beauticians that they used to go to, and I managed to get them over on board. I have two full-time employees in addition to myself, the other four are part-time specialists, including doctors. The core staff members have not changed since we opened, so we were able to establish effective guidelines and standards for a quality service, which seem to be working really well. Besides, we lease space to other specialists who perform treatments that we do not offer, such as teeth whitening, microdermabrasion, non-invasive eye lift and non-surgical fat reduction.

Do you think that your banking experience helps you run your business?

My job in the banking sector involved analysis of the financial health of companies. Now when I try to decide which aspects of the clinic should be developed, I look at the marketing and financial data and can also look at the business aspects from the financial point of view such as budgeting, cash flow and revenue forecast for new and existing treatments.

Banking is all about money and as a banker, one does not take a ‘no’ for an answer, which helps a great deal if you run your own business. I am not an aggressive or hyper energetic person by character – would gladly stay in watching movies or playing music if I had my way - but working in finance affects people’s attitude. It did mine too.

Also, my banking experience gave me an advantage of knowing better our clientele most of who work in financial services.

What do you mean by that?

For instance, we do not send emails to our clients with images as they are likely to be considered as spam by the corporate server. Often, bankers want to see the gist of an e-mail highlighted in bold, as they do not have time to read it through.

I also know that people in the West End, for instance, do not mind waiting for an appointment to start - they can sit around for a few extra minutes and read magazines. But in the City, we cannot afford to be late with our clients – they simply have no time to sit around waiting as they are often short of time.

Also, City workers, especially their female representatives, are very careful with their money as they earn their own living, unlike wives of many wealthy individuals living in West London who spend their husbands’ money. Clients here are very careful with their money but demand high quality at the same time. When they book a botox appointment, for example, they expect that a doctor and not a nurse will administer the treatment.

Are bankers really that careful with their money?!

Very careful! We have a loyalty points system whereas clients are given a loyalty card to get points for every pound spent with us towards their free treatments at Body Silk once they collect enough points. Many of them say that they prefer to sneak out for a manicure or other small treatments at lunch time or after work to have them done at Body Silk rather than close to where they live so that as they could collect points towards the complimentary treatments with us in the future.

City people can be very loyal customers: if they like you they will stick to you with little or no time to look elsewhere. Besides, it is easier to plan business with them as some of them schedule their appointments weeks if not months in advance.

The clinic works during the week only – Monday to Friday. We are closed at weekends and we are very busy at lunchtime and in the evenings from 5 to 8. We are incredibly busy in May this year though: we are practically fully booked till the end of the month. And many of the clients are former Groupon customers.

Are all your clients female?

About 80% of them are, but we are getting more and more male clients. The most popular treatments amongst men are hair removal, botox, massage and inch loss. We have a policy not to keep men clients in the reception room but to take them straight into the treatment room as many of them feel uncomfortable if left waiting for a treatment together with female clients. They appreciate that they can walk in, fill in a consultation form in the treatment room, get the treatment done and go back to the office. Interestingly, men prefer to schedule their appointments last minute, so we sometimes cannot give them a slot if all slots have been taken through advanced bookings.

At the moment we have an influx of clients and even need to invite extra staff to help us out. I am now considering an option to open another clinic, perhaps at Canary Wharf, but all depends on where I find suitable premises at a good price. Body Silk franchising could be another option, but we shall see...