My professional life has never followed one straight line. There was a service business, a team and customers, then websites, SEO and online promotion. There were also periods when I took on completely different work alongside that. Network marketing is not new to me either, but only now have I decided to approach it seriously and see how it can work together with the skills I already have and genuinely enjoy using.
Why I Decided to Try a Partnership Model After Years of Entrepreneurship
I did not move from one established business straight into another, and I certainly was not looking for a way to make money without doing the work. This decision came after several different stages in my working life, an earlier experience with network marketing, moving to another country and one simple question: what do I actually want to build next?
So I do not want to turn it into a neat story that never really happened
I could make the story sound simple: I spent many years in traditional business, moved to Norway and then decided to switch to a partnership business model. It would sound tidy, but it would not be accurate.
The reality is more varied. At one stage I ran a service business. We repaired and maintained office equipment, refilled cartridges, worked with computers and networks, handled projects for organisations and supplied equipment.
At one point the team grew to as many as 12 people. Later that chapter ended, and websites, SEO, content and online promotion gradually became my main area of work.
It taught me how much sits behind the simple word "business"
A customer normally sees the end result. They want the equipment to work, the order to arrive on time and the problem to be solved.
That is completely reasonable. But the person organising the work sees a very different picture.
You need to find them, understand what they need, keep your promises, solve problems and leave them feeling that they can trust you again next time.
Once you have a team, you are responsible for more than your own work. You have to organise, explain, check, support and deal with the things that do not go according to plan.
Equipment, suppliers, costs, deadlines, paperwork and processes. A simple customer order can have a lot happening behind it that the customer never needs to see.
That period taught me a great deal, including not to judge a business only by its potential income. When I look at a new business model now, I automatically ask many more questions.
Where does the product come from? Who makes it and takes responsibility for quality? Who handles payments and delivery? How are customers found? What costs are involved? What happens if the volume starts to grow?
That is probably why one attractive number in a presentation has not been enough to impress me for a long time.
Office equipment gradually gave way to websites, SEO and online work
Long before we moved to Norway, the service business was already behind me. I had moved much more into website development, SEO, content, promotion and different online projects.
I learned a lot of it myself. I was never interested only in building a website. I wanted to understand how people would find it, why they would stay on a page, what creates trust and how all the different parts work together.
Websites stopped being just work for me a long time ago. I genuinely enjoy building, changing and testing them, looking at search, structure and content, and seeing how all those pieces eventually work together.
But that chapter was not a perfectly straight line either. There were good periods, harder periods and times when I needed additional ways to earn money.
During the Covid period I continued working with websites and online promotion, but I also sometimes drove a taxi or made deliveries.
I could simply leave that out and keep only the parts of my background that look neat and professional. But why?
I have a family I am responsible for. If there was a period when I needed to earn money in several different ways, then I took on different kinds of work.
When other people depend on you, you stop dividing honest work into "prestigious" and "not prestigious". There are things you know how to do, there are the circumstances you are in, and there is responsibility for the people around you.
Maybe that is also why impressive job titles or business labels do not mean much to me on their own. I am more interested in understanding how something actually works and whether it makes sense for me.
PM-International was not my first introduction to this kind of business
Back in 2008, my wife and I registered with another international network marketing company.
We used the products, liked their quality, attended many training sessions and had a fairly good understanding of how the business model worked.
But understanding a model and actually building a business consistently are two different things.
We never really moved from using the products, attending training and making occasional attempts into steady, systematic business activity. We knew the industry, but it never became a serious business direction for us.
Looking back now, I do not think that was simply about the particular company or the model itself. I think I never found my own way of working with it.
I had understood the basic idea of a partnership business for a long time. But understanding the model is not enough. You also need to work out how you personally can operate inside it.
At the same time, I was becoming more and more interested in online work. Websites, SEO, search, content and promotion were the things I genuinely wanted to spend my time on.
Back then, I probably did not see how those two directions could fit together without putting my existing skills aside and trying to work in someone else's way.
Moving to Norway changed the starting point again
By the time we moved to Norway, I had already been out of the office equipment business for years. So this was not a story of leaving a workshop in Ukraine and trying to open the same thing here.
We arrived in Norway at a different point in life: with experience, skills and a family, but without a ready answer to what the next few years were supposed to look like.
Moving to a new country makes the difference between circumstances and skills very clear. Circumstances can change quickly. What you have learned stays with you.
Knowledge stays with you. What you learned over the previous years does not disappear when you cross a border.
Skills stay with you. Experience with people, websites, information, customers and projects remains useful wherever you live.
The circumstances change. Language, rules, contacts, the market and many ordinary things have to be built again in a new environment.
I think moving made me value work that is not completely tied to one building, one city or one local market even more.
That does not mean offline business is bad. It simply changes the way you think about how dependent your work is on the place where you happen to live.
This time I was interested not only in how it worked, but in how I could work within it myself
When I started looking more closely at PM-International, I was not approaching network marketing as someone seeing the idea for the first time.
The more interesting question for me was whether I could approach it differently this time, use the skills I already had and avoid having to build an entire business infrastructure from scratch.
In a traditional business, many things have to be organised by the business owner: the product or service, the sales process, payments, the shop, logistics, sometimes a warehouse and the people needed to keep everything running.
With the PM-International partnership model, a large part of that infrastructure already exists. The company handles the products, manufacturing, the official online store, order processing and delivery in the markets where it operates.
The partner's work is different: customers, recommendations, communication, supporting people and, if that is the goal, gradually building a partner team.
It is not about doing nothing. It is about not spending years building the part of the system that the company has already built.
This time I could also see how my experience with websites, SEO, content and online promotion could fit into that model. Not instead of working with people, but alongside it.
I have explained the business model itself in more detail on my "International Business with PM-International" page.
Someone joining this business does not need to know the same things I do
This is something I want to make very clear.
I have worked with websites and online promotion for many years, so it is natural for me to use those tools here as well. I want someone to be able to find me through Google, read an article, watch a video, understand who I am and how I work, and only then contact me if they have a real question.
But that is my approach. You do not need to know how to build websites, understand SEO or have years of marketing experience to begin a partnership business.
Some people are naturally comfortable meeting others, talking, working through recommendations, organising personal meetings and finding customers that way.
Others use Instagram, Facebook, Threads, short videos, messages and online meetings. You do not need your own website to work this way.
People have different personalities, experience and strengths. I see no reason to turn everyone into the same kind of partner or make someone copy another person's way of working.
What matters much more to me is being willing to learn, communicate with people, try things and gradually discover what actually works for you.
My previous experience gives me a particular set of tools. Someone else may arrive with completely different strengths or may simply need to start with the basics.
This is where training and Y.O.U.R. Community matter to me
Another thing I look at differently now is what happens after someone registers.
Giving a person a partner number and then telling them to work everything out for themselves is not much of a system.
Our team has Y.O.U.R. Community, an independent partner community for people developing a business with PM-International. For a new partner, it means there is already a structured way to learn and take the first steps instead of trying to invent everything from scratch.
There is a clear order of actions, so a new partner can understand what matters first and what can wait until later.
You can gradually learn about the products, customer work, the partnership model, communication and team development.
There are learning materials, team chats, online and offline meetings, presentations and examples from other partners.
If something is unclear, there are people you can ask and real situations you can discuss instead of trying to work everything out alone.
You do not need to arrive as an experienced salesperson, marketer, content creator or entrepreneur. What matters much more is being willing to learn, take the first steps, work with people and gradually build your own experience.
If someone already has useful skills, they can use them. If they do not, they can begin with the basics. I prefer that approach to trying to make every partner work in exactly the same way.
A partnership model does not mean automatic results
I also do not want to create the impression that once you find a good company, training and a supportive team, everything takes care of itself.
I do not need to manufacture the products, build a customer store, rent a warehouse or arrange the delivery of every parcel. But that does not make customers appear automatically.
Partners, communication skills, trust and a team do not appear automatically either.
A system can give you clear first steps, materials, training and people around you. It cannot walk the path for you.
You still have to work with people, learn, repeat simple actions, test different tools and gradually understand what works for you.
That is why I do not put a simple "better" or "worse" label on traditional business and partnership business. To me, they are simply different ways of organising the work.
Because now I can see how the partnership model can work with what I have already spent years doing
This is probably the biggest difference between my earlier experience and what I am doing now.
I am not discovering network marketing for the first time. But this time I have decided to actually try building the business without putting aside the things I already know how to do.
Websites, SEO, articles and video can help people find me online. Social media gives me another way to communicate. Personal meetings and normal conversations still matter just as much.
And the training system and team mean I do not have to invent absolutely everything myself.
I want to take the partnership model, use the parts that already exist through the company and the team, add my own skills and gradually build a working approach that makes sense for me.
That is what I am interested in testing in real life now.
That is why I want to write about the journey now instead of rewriting it years later
I do not have a story where I have already completed the whole journey, achieved some enormous result and can now explain exactly how everyone else should do it.
I am still learning, testing different ways of working, noticing where I am making things unnecessarily complicated, seeing what I need to improve and gradually finding my own format.
I could say nothing about that, wait a few years and then keep only the parts that look good in hindsight. But it is very easy to forget what the beginning really felt like.
I would rather use this site to keep some of the process itself: the decisions, doubts, mistakes, new skills and the way my approach changes with experience.
This is also one reason I created SHCHOKIN.PRO in the first place. I wrote more about that in "Why I Decided to Create This Website".
I do not know in advance where this direction will lead. But this time I do not want to stay on the outside simply watching how the model works for other people. I want to go through the process myself and see what I can build.
I have put the PM-International partnership model on a separate page
That page contains less of my personal history and more practical information: the company, FitLine, customers, the partner team, ways of working, training and how compensation is structured.
This article explains why I decided to approach the partnership model more seriously this time. The separate page explains what the business itself looks like.