There was a time when newly arrived Soviet Jews found Canada’s free enterprise system baffling.

Running a business, turning a profit, what was that all about?

Not so these days. When Marat Ressin arrived from Moscow five years ago, he was already an entrepreneur with an impressive track record of success. Though trained as a mathematician, he had switched careers and become a turnaround specialist, acquiring decrepit old enterprises, installing his own management team and turning them into going concerns.

Moving to Toronto, he applied what he had learned in Russia, investing in small businesses and the real estate they inhabit, renovating them and renting them to tenants who provide each other with  a synergy that allows them to feed off each other. Ressin focuses on smaller plazas and commercial buildings, often finding new uses for the space they contain.

“My niche is small business. All my practical and theoretical business knowledge related with it. No big malls. No real estate itself, only as a part of a particular small business project. I never had a project with a budget more than $20 million,” he explained.

As in Russia, his success has given him the time and capital to indulge his other great passion, helping others in the community. He is a supporter of the Jewish Russian Community Centre (JRCC) and he’s actively involved in trying to assist charities to operate on a more business-like basis.

Recently, he conceived the York Entrepreneurship Development Institute (YEDIntitute), which subsidizes the business education of prospective entrepreneurs, as well as those in the not-for- profit sector. Many of the first cohort of students come from the Russian Jewish community.

Ressin, 44, estimates he devotes about half his time to charitable endeavours. For years he has been involved in PresenTense, a volunteer-run organization that helps Jewish innovators in Russia, the United States and Israel develop their ideas into ventures that support local communities.

“I like to do social stuff, something that benefits people,” he said.

Still, it’s the business side of things that pays the bills.

On the walls of his office, photos display some of the buildings across the GTA that he acquired and later sold off. One was purchased for $7 million, renovated and new tenants brought in. It was sold two years later for $10 million.

Another commercial building cost him $2 million and, after undergoing the Ressin treatment, was appraised at $3 million, only three months later.

“The buildings have to fit the projects,” he stated. “If the project needs a single building, it will be a single building. ‘How many’ also depends on a moment. I buy and sell. I never had more than 14 buildings at a time. Today I have five multi-unit commercial buildings in Moscow, one multi-unit and three single buildings in the GTA. No one building is bigger than 30,000 square feet. Price range may vary from $1.5 million to $20 million, depending of the project needs.”

Leverage is an important factor in Ressin’s business plan. He doesn’t invest his own money in the projects – the acquisitions are financed through loans, mostly from banks, but about 30 per cent comes from private investors, many of them Russians and Russian Jews.

In Russia, investors receive their money back plus 50 per cent of the profit. “In Canada I can use the bank’s money and for the rest, the investor gets six per cent per year plus 15-20 per cent of a profit when the company is sold or when the investor’s money is replaced with additional bank [funds] after reappraisal,” he stated.

Russians have a somewhat different way to look at investments than Canadians, he explained. In Russia, annual reports and financial statements are barely worth the paper they’re printed on. 

“There are too many fake records,” he said. Investors visit the business to see for themselves what it’s all about. And they particularly value the individual running it. Personal credibility is paramount, and that has transferred to his affairs in Canada, Ressin said.

“You have to do everything properly because it’s your name, your reputation,” he said.

Back in Russia, Ressin wrote a PhD thesis on small business crisis management. “I used my own results, my own statistics, because I did 30 companies,” he said.

His knowledge of math played a key role in his early success. “Business is about structure and understanding how things work. Math makes you think systematically and that is the most important thing.”

In the 1990s, not long after the Soviet Union collapsed, “there was no interesting work in Russia. There was chaos there. I decided working in a small business was more interesting than sitting in a scientific institute with nothing to do.”

There were a lot of Soviet-era enterprises around, but nobody around who could run them on a profitable basis. At the end of 1993,  “I had  a serious car accident and  spent a lot of time  in hospital. I had a lot of time to think. I thought of operations that could succeed in different areas of business.”

When he recovered, he found investors to support his acquisition of various small businesses. “People had money at the time from different Soviet organization, but all the systems were destroyed and they had no idea what to do with the money.”

He used borrowed funds to get into businesses in the construction field, in a bakery chain, a china factory along with its retail outlets.

 “I buy something when I have an idea of how to improve it dramatically,” he said.

He also found that diversifying hedged his risk. “I  understood it was not possible to survive if you had only one company.”

One acquisition in particular brings a smile to his face. It was a factory that assembled computers. There was no computer market in Russia at the time, and the company quickly filled a much-needed niche. It also “was a good way to improve the lives of people,” he said.

In Toronto, he’s particularly proud of a commercial building that’s been turned over to cultural uses, including a theatre and ballet studio, as well as a small plaza whose basement was given to the JRCC for use as a furniture bank.

“I really believe we are here to make the world better,” he said.