Childhood and education
The future entrepreneur was born on March 18, 1991 in Moscow. Already as a child, he discovered his interest in cooking. But the hobby did not receive further development then - instead, Zeleny Arthur Eduardovich received a classical education with a degree in international relations at the Faculty of World Politics of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov.
Years and many other business projects will pass before Green’s childhood dream, drowned in routine, comes true.
Arthur Zeleny: biography
The businessman was born in Moscow on March 18, 1991. Already at school, Arthur’s extraordinary qualities appeared. During his school years, he was fond of motocross. In the ninth grade, he was injured and could not attend classes, which did not prevent him from getting excellent marks in his exams. I studied the high school curriculum at an accelerated rate, as an external student.
In 2013 he graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in international relations. During his studies, he realized that diplomacy did not interest him and decided to engage exclusively in entrepreneurial activities.
How Arthur Zeleny celebrated his birthday, see the following video:
First steps in business
Another school hobby of Arthur Zeleny was motocross - racing on ATVs over rough terrain. The teenager noticed that athletes love to tune their cars, but few could help them with this. Green tried to modify his ATV himself, and suddenly found out that he was among those who knew how. As a 14-year-old teenager, he launched his garage workshop with a partner and almost zero investment. While studying at Moscow State University, he continued to engage in business.
In 2010, Arthur Eduardovich Zeleny created the European School of Arts, which opened on the territory of Winzavod. The school taught applied creative specialties: photography, design, floristry, cinematography and much more. In addition to full-fledged courses, the school held separate master classes. The concept of the school implied a full cycle of training and internship for specialists - it had its own photo studio, modeling agency and even an exhibition space. Since 2011, he has been actively developing projects in online sales: in particular, selling household appliances.
Career and business of Arthur Zeleny
As a businessman, Artur Eduardovich began to develop in his youth. Already at the age of 14, he began making money by modernizing motorcycles. Having gathered like-minded craftsmen, Zeleny founded an atelier that specialized in tuning a wide range of motorcycles.
As the young entrepreneur’s capital increased, new projects were born. Along with motorcycling, Artur Eduardovich idolized photography. Over the years, this childhood hobby has reached a professional level. When comparing Western and domestic schools of this art, Zeleny concluded that the latter was imperfect.
As a result, in 2010 he founded the European School of Arts, which was located in one of the workshops of the Moscow Winzavod. In addition to photography, the European School of Art began to teach:
- Web design;
- landscape design"
- floristics;
- make-up;
- sand art;
- basics of cinema and other fashionable arts.
Unlike existing educational institutions, there was an emphasis on practical training, which was neglected by Russian standards.
The startup quickly gained fame and after the sale brought considerable profit to the entrepreneur. Having secured substantial capital, Zeleny switched to e-commerce in 2011. His new company specialized in the sale of household appliances and household goods. In a short period of time, the annual turnover in online stores created from scratch exceeded $1 million.
Owner of Performance Food
The childhood dream of opening a restaurant eventually came true in 2015, but in a slightly different way. Arthur Zeleny was looking for a diet that would help him with his training: he needed to get rid of excess weight. It turned out that there was no food delivery service on the market where calories could be accurately calculated. Zeleny quickly realized that the niche was empty, and already in the summer of that year he created the Performance Food company, becoming its first regular client. The name of the new brand reflected its idea - to help clients achieve results. Green tried to take into account the shortcomings of competitors and create a service that was not the cheapest, but convenient, with an individual approach to clients. A special feature of Performance Food is free consultations with nutritionists and assistance in selecting menus for subscribers with specific diet goals or dietary needs: for example, those suffering from diabetes or observing religious traditions. In 2020, the company was renamed Performance Group, and Performance Food became one of its brands. Today it is a premium healthy food brand with ten lines, and the company has begun expansion into adjacent segments. The brands Level Kitchen, offering proper nutrition for sports performance, and MyFood, focused on programs for every day, were launched. According to the InfoLine-analyst agency, in 2020 Performance Group ranked second in the country in terms of revenue in its segment and about 25% of the entire Russian nutrition delivery market. In 2019, the group’s turnover amounted to 1.5 billion rubles. In 2020, Mail Ru Group bought a stake in the company.
Business and career
In the fall of 2019, Arthur Eduardovich spoke with Maxim magazine about how he came up with the bright idea of creating a company specializing in the production and transportation of PP.
“There were no companies like ours in 2020, and I needed to lose weight. Since the market did not offer anything, I had to create a company that prepares and delivers the rations itself. Then, seeing huge unrealized demand, we created other brands in addition to Performance Food,” he explained.
At the same time, the businessman revealed the main principles of work (safety and quality ingredients from large manufacturers) and spoke in detail about the selection of nutrition programs (taking into account the characteristics of the body and even religion). He did not forget to mention the team of specialists involved in creating the menu, voiced step-by-step instructions for preparing dishes, etc.
Businessman Arthur Zeleny / VKontakte
After 2 years, Performance Food became one of the Performance Group brands along with Level Kitchen, My Food, and later Easy Meal.
The activities of Zeleny’s brainchild, which is growing year after year, are closely monitored by market participants and analysts. In particular, according to the INFOLine agency, the group’s turnover increased by 92% and amounted to 1.5 billion rubles.
Childhood and youth
Arthur Zeleny is a hereditary entrepreneur. Although his childhood years passed in the 90s, they were quite prosperous, which allowed the future businessman to try himself in many activities, interests and hobbies. From the age of 10, he studied culinary arts, from the age of 14, he participated in off-road racing on professional-level tracks, and from the age of 16, he was involved in weightlifting and martial arts. Zeleny spent both his childhood and youth in the southwest of Moscow, attended a regular school without any specialties or specializations, and always dreamed that someday he would have his own business.
Arthur Zeleny's companies
The history of Performance Group began with a small startup called Performance Food, which Zeleny created at the dawn of the era of subscription services - in 2020. The entrepreneur believed in success and invested more than 60 million rubles in his company. – several times more than its competitors at that time. For example, one of the leading brands of those times, Elementaree, was launched with approximately 12 million rubles.
The entrepreneur’s idea was to enter the “blue ocean” with a service that would be head and shoulders above all companies on the market and could quickly scale due to unique conditions for clients and aggressive marketing.
Note! It is not known for certain whether this is true or a beautiful legend, but it is believed that Zeleny initially created his service for himself personally - because he could not find one on the market that would not only bring food, but also select a diet according to the daily amount of calories and tasks client. The idea for a new business was built on this – maximum adaptation of food delivery for busy people who need to achieve a specific result from their diet.
Therefore, the first thing Arthur did was abandon the concept of subscribers preparing their own dishes from pre-prepared ingredients, which was dominant in 2020 - Performance Food delivered ready-made rations that just needed to be heated. In addition to saving time, this made it possible to achieve the same taste of all food, regardless of the human factor.
Photo: Instagram @performance_food
Another feature of the service was the ability to completely customize the nutrition program for themselves - subscribers could indicate their preferences, restrictions and goals, and the company’s nutritionist would create an individual plan for each. Constantly researching the market, Zeleny looked for vulnerabilities of competing products and sought to cover them.
For example, noticing difficulties with delivery to the nearest Moscow region, he quickly expanded the work area to +15 kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road. After researching the reasons why people unsubscribe from such services, Zeleny decided to make his menu more diverse - as a result, Performance Food became the first company to regularly deliver restaurant-quality food and even sometimes molecular gastronomy dishes made from exotic ingredients.
By 2020, Performance Food had become one of the leaders in the subscription food delivery industry, and the entrepreneur was faced with the question of how to further develop the company. Noticing that the market was not yet saturated enough, Zeleny decided to invest in the creation of a new brand – Level Kitchen, whose face was Russian bodybuilder Denis Gusev.
The bet turned out to be correct - the new structure quickly occupied the niche of healthy food for athletes. The synergy of services made it possible to use the same production facilities and logistics solutions for both brands, and internal competition kept management on its toes.
The experiment was repeated two years later - in 2020, Arthur Eduardovich launched another brand, My Food, focusing on the cuisines of the world.
At the moment, all of Zeleny’s companies are part of the Perfromance Group holding, which combines its assets and invests in expansion in the market for the delivery of ready-made rations. Only recently the group opened the largest production complex in Russia, with which it plans to achieve up to half of the entire turnover in the industry.
Childhood and studies
Zeleny Arthur Eduardovich was born on March 18, 1991 in Moscow. He graduated from a regular secondary school. I passed senior school as an external student.
He received his higher education at Lomonosov Moscow State University: there he graduated from the Faculty of World Politics. He didn’t work a single day in the specialty “international relations” - he was always only interested in his own business. As the entrepreneur himself recalled, during his five years of studying at Moscow State University, he spent less than a year within its walls. “Business absorbed all my energy. However, this did not affect the educational process - when I had to cram without sleep for several days in a row,” Zeleny noted.
Arthur Zeleny now
Currently, the Zeleny holding employs almost one and a half thousand people, and couriers deliver dishes to clients in four cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar and Yekaterinburg.
The company has seven of its own production centers, the last of which opened at the end of 2020 in the capital and became the largest in Russia: 5,000 square meters and 100 thousand portions per day. The group produces more than a million meals every month.
Zeleny Arthur Eduardovich with his wife
Last year, Mail Ru acquired a stake in Performance Group. Zeleny considers the deal a good chance to expand its presence in the markets. The entrepreneur’s goal is to squeeze out his competitors and gain up to half of the entire healthy food market by the end of 2020.
Among the latest news, against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, Arthur Zeleny ordered the company’s products to be temporarily sealed in plastic bags. “Despite the fact that the food itself, as well as cutlery, are hermetically packaged at production, we decided to take additional measures to ensure safe transportation. This will almost completely eliminate contact of the contents of each package with the external environment,” said Arthur Zeleny in an interview
Private bussiness
Arthur Eduardovich is married, his wife’s name is Natalia. They met and got married in 2013. After arranging a luxurious wedding ceremony, the newlyweds went on a honeymoon to Mexico. Soon after this, Zeleny had two children: a boy and a girl, whom he jokingly calls his “most important asset.”
Photo: Arthur Zeleny with his wife Natalia
The businessman has loved ATV racing, martial arts and bodybuilding since childhood. He also enjoys driving and traveling.
In business, an entrepreneur prefers to adhere to the following principles:
- It’s better to go slower, but work for your own.
- If you save on equipment, you will spend on problems.
- Listen to your intuition - you won’t go wrong in your calculations.
In 2020, Arthur became involved in charitable activities: his Performance Group was one of the first to begin supplying free food to medical workers in Moscow and St. Petersburg medical institutions involved in the fight against coronavirus infection.
Delivery King
Already in 2020, Performance Group ranked second in terms of turnover in its market segment throughout the country. Zeleny's company controls approximately a quarter of the total nutrition delivery volume in Russia. The company, which started with ten employees, now employs more than a thousand. The group’s annual turnover is more than one and a half billion rubles, although Zeleny started with only 60 million rubles. PG branches operate in four cities of the country - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar and Yekaterinburg.
Performance Group is becoming a desirable investment, but the founder fundamentally worked for his own. The only exception was made for Mail.ru Group - in 2020, according to media reports, it invested in Zeleny’s holding in exchange for a 25% stake in the company.
In 2020, with investments from Mail.ru, Zeleny intended to conquer half of the entire market for ready-made food delivery in the country, and maintains his forecasts even in the context of coronavirus. According to company analysts, self-isolation not only did no harm, but also strengthened the competitive advantages of a business built entirely on the delivery and regular distribution of food to apartments and offices. In April 2020, Arthur Zeleny noted an influx of new customers - people who had previously dined in a cafe decided to try subscription food services.
In March 2020, Arthur Eduardovich launched a charitable initiative to support doctors working in hospitals where patients with coronavirus infection are treated. From the first days, in agreement with the administrations of medical institutions, companies included in the Performance Group began sending free meal kits to medical workers in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
