https://youtu.be/WpN0Q964q74
Olessia Smotrova, the CEO and owner of OST Global Solutions, a consulting firm that helps you win government contracts. She is the author of the book: How to Get Government Contracts. Have a Slice of the 1 Trillion Dollar Pie.
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Shifting Mentality with Olessia Smotrova
Our guest is Olessia Smotrova, Olessia is the CEO and owner of OST Global Solutions, a consulting firm that advises small and medium-sized businesses on winning government contracts, business development, capture, and training to win government contracts. She is also the author of a book titled How to Get Government Contracts, Have a Slice trillion pie of which she is already taking a slice out. She and her team has developed business for clients in excess of $22 billion.
So she knows what she's writing about. Now, she's also part of the GovConnet Council, which is a lobbying organization to help small businesses win more government contracts and to pass legislation to that effect. Now Olessia's background is very interesting and what really intrigued me when I first met her that she was born and raised in Uzbekistan in Central Asia and she made her way into America and being an entrepreneur here which is very, very unique. She also along the way she went to the University of Colorado, she worked for the Financial Times. She also worked for a couple of fortune companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. And now she's running her own business. So welcome, Olessia.
Thank you for having me, Steve.
It's great to have you here. So tell us a little bit about your origin story. How did you make it to America?
Well, I always wanted to come to America. This was always home. So I was in trouble a lot as a kid in Uzbekistan, wanting to come to America and declaring their proud. And I came here as a foreign student, actually on a student visa, University of Colorado in Boulder, and studied international affairs and realized that I had to essentially get a job in order for me to stay in the United States in my line of business, so diplomacy, right? But I was in the US citizen and I could not do that in Boulder, Colorado therefore, and, you know, could not work for the State Department so to get an international job was much easier if I went to Washington, D.C. I didn't really have anything lined up. Right.
And I tried, but none of that worked. And essentially, I took a week off. I asked a friend who had a friend who basically said, well, why don't you come and stay on my couch? Otherwise, I was calling YMCA to actually find a place to be or my other option was on the streets basically. I had nowhere to go. I didn't know anyone. And essentially this guy, his name was Lee, he actually put me up on his couch in a studio apartment. For however long that I spent time looking for a job, I clipped newspapers every day and found this job to become an elite concierge for like Platinum American Express.
And that company that I was working for got sold to AXA Insurance, like a large company, and they moved their location to Chicago and Windy City wasn't exactly a good place for a warm, loving, warm climate, loving person like me. So I ended up looking for another gig, but it's really hard trying to get somebody to sponsor you for a work visa. So it was really, really tough to find something in the area of specialty. And I was without work for a while. I was kind of hungry and very, very skinny, right?
So and I was barely scraping up enough for a tiny little room. And when Lockheed Martin started calling me for a mouthful of coke, I was kind of dismissive because I knew that they were not sponsoring foreigners. They weren't hiring people on work visas, especially not like me, you know, kind of entry level job. And so I told them that and they were like, yeah, you're right. Hang up and call me again and call me again.
And they said, hey, you know, the general wants to interview you and he would like to take you to dinner. And it was like dinner.