They met via match.com, she in Ukraine and he in Minnesota. They blended two families with five children when she moved to America, but found it challenging to communicate well.
They formed a consulting firm called HUElife but struggled to find a focus. Today, Richard and Irina Fursman operate a business dedicated to improving companies, their own relationship, and even the war-torn world.
To them, it’s all one and the same.
Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.
Irina Fursman, HUElife co-owner: HUElife stands for human understanding and engagement, and also hue refers to the color palette.
When we started the consulting firm eight years ago, we focused on number one, digging deeper in understanding personalities, and two, the whole field of organization development.
It’s not just for the work environment. What we wanted to say is we affect people at different levels.
Upsize: Was this realization an evolution or a eureka moment?
Richard Fursman, HUElife co-owner: A bit of both. The evolution came from various things we were attracted to. For example, things we were working on in Ukraine, where they were struggling with moving from the communist model to a democratic model.
The critical elements are engagement with families and engagement with donors at the orphanage level, and at the government level, engagement with citizens. It’s the same way in business. It was first understand who you are, and then understand the group.
Upsize: How did HUElife get started?
Richard: It started with my firing in 2006. Google City Pages and Maplewood….
Upsize: I already did so. You were city manager, and you were fired.
Richard: I had disciplined two firefighters, and a person whose husband I had a restraining order against. They all joined city management.
Upsize: So the deck was stacked against you.
Richard: I got fired and then I was finishing my doctorate in organization development. It was Irina’s push, 90 percent her and 10 perent me. She goes, let’s try consulting right now.
Upsize: Irina, what were you doing at the time?
Irina: I’m an educator, so I was doing tutoring, subbing and interpreting for medical patients. For me it was good, to start the consulting firm. I was in the business management role, at first marketing him, and that’s how it worked for a couple of years.
Richard: A year into our consulting business, I was getting picked up by cities for three months, to do interim management. At the time we were called “anything for a buck.” We were a disaster. We didn’t know what we were doing—how do you define yourself at first?
As I was an interim city manager, the owner of an executive search firm wanted to have us buy the company. Then we both got into personality profiles, and Irina became an expert in facilitation training.
Upsize: What’s that?
Irina: Facilitation training, it came out of the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago. We have a contract to deliver that product in Minnesota, and we adapted that to our own work.
We realized, in order to make change in large organizations, you have to have the skills within the organization after we are gone. If they depend on us, the consultants, it won’t last.
Richard: We become like braces without a retainer.
Upsize: I still want to know the roots of your work. How did you come to these realizations?
Irina: Our aha moment is personal. When I arrived in the United States, in 2002, I didn’t know English. We had a blended family of five people, with my daughter at the time was 4 ½. That power balance was a significant issue.
Richard: The power I had was enormous. I had the citizenship, the language, the economics. I had a lot of power, whereas the best way to make any relationship work is shared power and shared accountability.
Irina: Only 7 percent of what you communicate is actually words.
Richard: Only 2 percent in our case.
Upsize: Because you didn’t speak the same language. How did you find each other?
Irina: We met on match.com. It wasn’t common to have a PC at home in Ukraine at the time, so I would go to the match.com agency to check for matches. I was 25 at the time.
Richard: I was the only American who wrote to her.
Upsize: And why did you?
Richard: Wow, we need the vodka now [laughs.] I had been divorced, and friends had invited me to a New Year’s Eve bash. These friends always wanted to play matchmaker for me, but I turned them all down and decided to stay home and mope.
I finally decided at midnight to write a letter. Irina’s profile showed up, and the algorithm searched the world and found the one person who could tolerate me. This was a “let’s leave it up to the universe” moment.
Irina: We still have those first letters. That same night, I had made a wish. It is a Ukrainian tradition. To make a wish you have to write it down, burn the paper, put the ashes in a glass and drink it in a glass of champagne—all within the 12 strokes of midnight.
I decided whoever wrote me, I’m going to take it seriously. I went to the agency at 8:15 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Richard: If she had gone at 7 my letter wouldn’t have been there!
Irina: In May we met in person; he came to see me. We got engaged the first time we met, then got married in December of that year, 2002, and moved here.
Upsize: I knew there was a good story behind this! And did you ask yourself, what was I thinking?
Irina: Yeah! What was I thinking! I speak Russian only. What you see in the former Soviet Union about America is either tropical, like California, or New York, the big city. I ended up in Elk River—no people, no nothing, a calm lifestyle.
Richard: Irina and I discovered that every once in a while we would say something and the other person would get hurt, and we’d do a deep dive. What we discovered is there’s interpretation issues, cultural assumptions of what normal is.
We had a long talk about, if you’re feeling hurt, let’s assume first it’s a cultural or communication issue. That’s the biggest thing we took into our work.
Upsize: How does that manifest itself in the workplace?
Richard: Most of what occurs in business is an understanding breakdown. Discovering how to break down those hard feelings is essential for any marriage. Had I had those tools earlier it would have been useful.
We assume in business that because we speak the same language, that we must have a common understanding. That can be a disaster.
Upsize: Our readers are the owners of fast-growing companies. How does your work apply to them?
Irina: Many companies that come to us, when you have two people starting something and you grow and see the future differently, we can help people get past that ownership growth pain.
Richard: Another example is, you don’t want all the same type of thinkers, and yet when you introduce different types of thinkers it’s explosive, but it’s also energy. We try to help people identify the fact that you need someone who thinks differently. At the same time it’s going to feel uncomfortable.
So it’s the balance between forces of nature. The biggest problem when two people think the same is, they both get hit by the bus at the same time, because no one’s looking in the opposite direction.
Upsize: You’ve also taken your work to Ukraine. Tell me about that.
Irina: In 2011 we started in Ukraine.
Richard: When I was doing my doctorate at the University of St. Thomas, I worked in Ukraine, and I thought it’s going to pop.
Irina: He smelled the revolution there, that things were going to change. In order for somebody to see that it’s different here than there, we started the exchange between Hopkins, Minnesota, and Ukraine. When you live in the same place you don’t see it.
We thought, let’s bring people here and they can see it’s different. There is no corruption here, for example. But when we send them back there’s nothing they can do unless they have others. We now have 300 trained facilitators. We were there at the right time.
They’re facilitating the consensus level of reform. Then we held the PEACE forum in 2014, and said we’re going to challenge every assumption. We had 275 people gather in Ukraine. Today we’re watching people in strategic discussions at ministry levels, using our tools.
Richard: An example: My apartment building is falling apart. Under the old regime there, no one’s responsible. No one owns it. Now they’ll say, we’re going to build a co-op to manage the building. It was a multitude of effects. Others sent a petition to the president.
Upsize: How do you find the motivation to tackle such big challenges?
Irina: I saw the apathy, when I was teaching. The attitude was, I’m here because I was paid to be here. I stopped and said, If not you then who? If not now, then when? It became the motto.
If there is a need and we can fill it, why shouldn’t we? It feels irresponsible not to. If we teach leadership, we have to model it.
Upsize: You are planning to take this message to other countries, beyond Ukraine?
Richard: One of the things that kept us out of Russia so far is their turning Irina into a suspected CIA agent. There was a public denouncement of her, and they linked the riots in Kiev to Irina’s training, in March of 2014.
Upsize: Being identified as an enemy of Russia is dangerous! I saw the person who was poisoned with polonium, allegedly by Putin’s regime.
Irina: I don’t hinkt I pose that kind of a threat, but organizing in Russia is illegal. In Ukraine, there’s propaganda, that everything said is from the West.
Upsize: Yet you have also thought about taking your work to Iran.
Irina: It would be too difficult now.
Richard: We still hope to do that in Iran. There are lovely people in Iran who are trapped. One of the individuals we met in Ukraine is an Iranian national. He approached us and said, we need this type of training in my country.
The business community very much wants to open up to the West. But that’s the last thing the leadership wants. They hold power by fear and intimidation. The last thing they want is our message.
Irina: The approach we use in facilitating all this discussion—it applies and works well in any culture and it especially works well when you’re mixing cultures.
Upsize: And now we’ve returned to the roots of your relationship.
Richard: It weaves back into the same fabric.
Upsize: What’s one lesson you’ve learned through your work, to pass on to other business owners?
Richard: For me the key is to find a reservoir of passion that fills more than it drains, because your passion will drain you. It will wrestle you to the ground. But it’s also there to lift you up.
Irina: I would go to a powerful coalition. Build a coalition in your marriage, your work, your community. Do it alone? Nah. It’s hard. I like the saying, if you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Richard and Irina Fursman are co-owners of HUElife, an organization development consulting firm in St. Louis Park: 651.338.2533; www.hue.life
