Achievements
What events does Podegiki organize in particular?
HR events, MICE, event marketing.
More than 40 clients including:
Svyaznoy, Unilever, ROLF LLC, Renault, Efes, M.Video, DANONE, Kraft Food, Wrigley, Audi and many others
Awards
The best Event-agency 2012 (Association for communication and corporate media in Russia (AKKMR) version)
Gold Puzzle Award 2012 – “Best Team Building Project” category
Best Event Agency 2012 (AKKMR version)
Corporate Event of the Year 2011
UK Event Awards 2011 (Short list)
Gala Awards (Short list)
1st place in the EVENT.RU magazine phone survey
2nd place in all Russia voting (1680 votes), 4th place in the expert rating “Russia’s best event-makers and caters by PROFILE Magazine”
History and background
After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance, Michael completed an internship at the local bank. However, he clearly decided that being a bank official wasn’t his thing as the working environment there was too formal and overcomplicated. Moreover, he always had an entrepreneurial set of mind. Suddenly, he saw growing business opportunities in event planning, so he made a life-time decision to start his own business.
The process took off back in 2002, on a mansard roof in St. Petersburg, when Michael Voronin and Olga Krinskaya, who were economists at that time, decided to change their lives completely and devote themselves to the event management.
They started with hoaxes, which they thought were the most simple to organize. Michael described his first event during the interview. To make a long story short: 7 days, 0 hours of sleep, 10 women from the financial department of a company spoofed, and surprise! - $32 as a profit.
There is a Russian proverb, that says, “the ship will sail the name you give it”. So to give the company a good name became a real challenge for young entrepreneurs. They thought over a huge number of variants, enriching the language with extreme neologisms, until we found the one, the best – simple, recognizable and optional. So Michael woke his father in the middle of the night with the news that his new company would be called “Pod-egiki” (which can be translated as “hedgehogs”). So, When Michael’s sleepy father asked: “What? you are going to, like, catch and hoax people?” – he realized that it worked out!
The work went on, but soon the company recognized that the organization of hoaxes as a difficult and sometimes even dangerous thing to do. The first serious offer came from a previous client, manufacturing company. After organizing and successfully running a New Year event, it was no question that clients are willing to pay more when they know what to expect in contrast with hoaxes when everything is set up spontaneously. In fact, this New Year corporate party turned out to be so exciting that we decided to become professional event-managers for both private and corporate events.
In May 2006 Podegiki was participating in organization of G8 Summit. As one of his favorite projects, Michael mentions Megaquest, an interactive social project for the youth, that attracted more than three million people in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in 2007. From that day on this quest has been considered to be the most numerous. Restless nights, abandoned buildings, the famous Russian Museum in St. Petersburg with its biggest collections of Fine Art giving no approval of the quest zone and hundreds of difficulties and problems we faced but became stronger and more confident.
In 2009 the company moved to Moscow and opened its main office there. Michael Voronin took four people that moved to Moscow with him and employed four more in the place. We won tenders for big projects: conferences and New Year events for M.Video , Craft Food, Pravovest, Vedis Group etc. At that time the number of full-time employees still didn’t exceed more than 10 people.
In 2011 the company moved to a mansard again (as it used to be in St. Petersburg). And from now on there are more than 40 people working in the company. The projects are becoming more and more diverse.
Podegiki today’s priority is sustaining reliable partnership with their long-standing clients, such as M.Video, Craft Foods, Unilever, DANONE, Svyaznoi and others.