Marketeer Finds Russia Not Just a Pipe Dream.

(From The Moscow Times)

Ian Schier's first clue of what he was getting himself into came on the highway from Sheremetyevo to downtown Moscow during his first trip to Russia in 1992. Or, rather, he thinks it did.

"I was very tired, but I could swear I saw somebody sitting on a metal sled with a big metal wheel, flattening out the road. It was what we use a steamroller for back in the States -- except, here it was being pulled by hand."

To a budding young entrepreneur, four years out of college and looking to start his own business in a new country, it was an odd symbol of enormous possibility.

"I blinked my eyes and thought: There's a lot that can be done here!" Schier says.

Schier had come to join Russian business partners he barely knew in importing Italian clothes. "People thought I was crazy," he says.

Twelve years later, Schier is still here as managing director of Advinter, specializing in outsourced sales and trade marketing for small to medium-sized Russian consumer goods producers. The firm also produces a series of FMCG-oriented market research reports.