This Lakewood Rancher has found success. Now he helps others do the same.

He grew up in Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union, where, as a 7-year-old, he would trudge through the snow to buy potatoes and onions for his family. When he was 10, the family left the then-crumbling USSR with $400 his mother had hidden from airport guards. They ended up in Baltimore. He served eight years in the U.S. Marines and saw combat in Afghanistan. He sold copiers, got good at it, and became a sales manager for Xerox. 

These days, Eric Konovalov (pronounced Cone-of-Olive) lives in the Polo Run neighborhood with his wife and two sons. He runs his own sales and executive coaching business called The Goal Guide. 

He’s 45 and life is good. 

Does he ever stop and take stock of where he started and what he’s accomplished?

“Yeah,” Konovalov says. “I have to intentionally do it when I’m stressed or when I’m up against the wall, or I’m being hard on myself. I remind myself that the life I’m living now was like a dream for me. I have to remind myself that, ‘yeah, I’ve achieved a lot.’”

Name game

During two extended interviews, Konovalov never presented himself as a master motivator. Instead, he was quietly reflective, free of the amped-up energy you might expect from a sales coach. What emerged was a fascinating, often harrowing, life story of a man who is one of your neighbors.

He grew up Arkady Konovalov in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which borders the Caspian Sea. Scarcity prevailed. With two young kids — Arkady and older sister Inna — his mother divorced and remarried a widower with two daughters. It was a union not of love but of practicality, Konovalov says, with the parents pooling resources. “My mother was an instructor at a music university, so she would get concert tickets, which she could trade to buy us food sometimes,” Konovalov recalls.

Konovalov wore too-small shoes but never went hungry. He was unaware of being Jewish in a country that was 95% Muslim because Soviet people were not permitted to practice religion.

The family left the USSR on a flight from Moscow, but not before the guards rifled through their bags and took jewelry and heirlooms, somehow missing the $400 Konovalov’s mother had stashed away. The family spent a few months in Austria and Italy before settling in Baltimore because a relative who lived there helped get them guest visas. “When my mom walked into a grocery store in America, she cried,” Konovalov says.

Konovalov spoke no English. One of his first teachers was Bugs Bunny. “I used to greet people by saying, ‘What’s up, Doc?’” Konovalov recalls. He enrolled in an all-boys Hebrew school, which had a woman who taught English as a second language. “Once I was immersed in the environment I picked [English] up quickly,” he says. But Konovalov was an odd fit in the school because he wasn’t a practicing Jew. 

He left the Hebrew school after about six months and enrolled in Deer Park Elementary in Randallstown, Maryland. That’s when the taunts kicked in, starting with his name. As a remedy, the Baltimore relative coined him Eric. “It helped me assimilate,” he says, but the bullying persisted. “It was a funny thing to beat up on the foreign guy,” Konovalov says. His mother signed him up for karate classes when he was in the seventh grade. “I was already good at taking punches,” he says, dryly. “But I got to the point where I just wouldn’t take any crap.”

Semper fi 

With no intention of going to college, Konovalov joined the Marines, which deployed him to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. He worked as an aerial observer on light attack helicopters, among other assignments. He later did a tour in Iraq. How did he react when live bullets started flying? “It was scary, it was exciting, it’s what you trained for,” he says. “You reacted. The Marines were very good at making you feel that you were part of the best fighting force in the world.”

On Dec. 27, 2003, while in the military, Konvalov met a woman named Julia Feldman, a native of Moscow, at a party of Soviet émigrés in Baltimore. He was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base near D.C. and she was finishing up college at the University of Maryland. They began dating, and things quickly grew serious. When Konovalov was offered a tour in Iraq, Julia told him she didn’t want to be the wife who stayed home while her husband took deployments around the world. “So I had to make the hard decision between the girl and the Marine Corps,” he says. “I decided I wanted to be with her.” 

After leaving the Marines in his mid-20s, Konovalov found himself out in the world with no readily evident skills. A former commanding officer suggested sales. After turning down a few straight-commission jobs, he accepted an offer from a former Marine to sell copiers. His starting pay was $44,000 a year — more than he made in the military. Konovalov didn’t even know what a cold call was, but he started working the phones and knocking on doors. “It was a humbling experience, but, y’know, no one was shooting at me,” he says.

Within a couple of years, he was a top salesman. Konovalov moved on to Xerox but never adjusted to the button-down corporate culture, so he left after three years. He signed on as sales manager with a family-owned company that sold office equipment. Konovalov went in with a mission-driven approach learned from the Marines, looking to whip his team into shape. He quickly alienated them, and they tried to get him fired. 

“I couldn’t connect with these people, and it occurred to me that I had to learn more about leadership,” he says. Konovalov read books by John Maxwell and other leadership gurus. “I still remember the spark,” he says. “It was a quote by Maxwell, adapted from Teddy Roosevelt: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.’”

Konavolav won over his sales crew by getting to know them as people, homing in on their needs and wants, and helping them establish goals and plans to get there. Company sales soared.

He joined a John Maxwell leadership team and started coaching. His employer let him work the gig on the side. Konovalov moved his family to Lakewood Ranch in early 2020 while keeping his management job and clients in Maryland. Then Covid hit.  “[My boss] said, ‘I love you, but we just can’t afford to keep you,’” Konovalov says. “It was the best thing to happen because in order to really succeed in my coaching career I had to burn the ships. I’ve been on my own ever since.” 

Goal Guide is a family business, with Julia working alongside her husband. Eric joined the Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance and has been an avid networker. He does regular local speaking engagements for free. He has authored a book (not ghost-written) titled “B2B Sales Secrets.” He coaches a group of about 50 entrepreneurs, hosts a podcast called Relentless Goal Achievers. All told, Konovalov says, he’s worked with more than 4,700 sales professionals. 

He’s happy with his success, but — true to his profession — not satisfied, declaring, “It’s nothing compared to what I’m gonna achieve in the next 10 years.”