Leader on the line: how Timur Turlov delegates, answers and grows managers

Timur Turlov, founder and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp, clearly demonstrates how these principles help his company overcome crises and scale.

Timur Turlov's management philosophy is based on trust and delegation. He openly says that it is important for him to invest in new companies not to resell them at a higher price, but for integration and developmentwithin the Freedom system . Over several years, Freedom Holding has spent a total of more than $185 million on investments in startups and technology businesses.

"We are not just building a financial holding. We are creating a system where each service complements the other. This is the ecosystem of the future," says Timur Turlov.

Thus, having acquired projects like Ticketon and Aviata , Turlov does not simply add them to the company's portfolio, but actively develops them, allocating individual areas and their leaders with broad powers. These teams are given the opportunity to quickly make decisions and develop one or another sector of Freedom in accordance with the holding's overall strategy, but with sufficient autonomy.

Timur Turlov especially highlights the ability of managers to make quick decisions, the willingness to take responsibility and learn from mistakes: "A complaint is the best gift from a client. Our whole team is here, maybe not 24/7, but a lot. And we try never to sit in a "high tower" and really hear about problems."

Turlov trusts the leaders with significant independence and emphasizes the importance of delegation:

"We never wanted to just take a place in the market, our goal is to build an alternative financial and telecom infrastructure that will meet the most modern standards. Therefore, our teams receive a lot of authority and responsibility. They should feel like independent entrepreneurs within the holding."

His approach has no place for those who avoid risks: “If you want growth, innovation and development, don’t dream of a quiet life.”

At the same time, Timur Turlov makes it clear that he allows his teams to make mistakes and is ready to support employees in difficult situations, providing them with space for initiative and independence:

"Any crisis is an opportunity to become better. We are not afraid to make mistakes, the main thing is to quickly correct them and learn lessons."

How these management principles work in reality is clearly seen in difficult cases, when Turlov and his teams demonstrate their work in crisis moments. Let's look at two recent cases.

On April 11, 2025, Ticketon faced unprecedented strain as tickets for a Jennifer Lopez concert went on sale. A glitch occurred, causing thousands of tickets to be resold.

Timur Turlov spoke openly about the problem on social networks and, together with the Ticketon team, quickly began to eliminate the consequences:

"Ticketon was chosen by the organizer as an agent for distributing tickets for a commission. The demand for the concert was many times greater than ever before in history. At the time of the sale, the site could not withstand the load, the database crashed, and as a result, due to this technical failure, many tickets were resold. When colleagues saw that tickets were being duplicated, sales were stopped."

It turned out that the total number of tickets exceeded the stadium's capacity by about 10% due to doubles. In the most difficult conditions, despite the scale of the crisis, it was decided not only to return the money for the tickets, but also to offer compensation :

"We believe that we owe our customers a monetary apology. This decision will cost us a year's worth of Ticketon profits."

According to him, the service will take several steps: refunding the service fee, refunding money to those whose tickets were purchased multiple times, with the opportunity to attend the concert for free, etc.

Alexey Li , leader of the Freedom Lifestyle Group (which includes Ticketon), emphasized the importance of what happened:

“This crisis has taught us a lot and forced us to make a number of management decisions that had previously been put off for a long time ‘for later’.”

As a result, the approach to managing mass sales was completely revised and Ticketon's transition was accelerated. to a new technological platform.

At the end of April 2025, the holding faced a critical failure in the Freedom Broker trading system, which was caused by the failure of key servers in data centers. Timur Turlov personally kept in touch with clients via social networks, informing them in detail about what was happening.

“Colleagues are finishing restoring the Freedom Broker trading system cluster from a multi-terabyte backup, layer by layer,” Turlov promptly reported on his network in Threads.

When the service came back online, acknowledging the inconvenience to customers, Turlov announced : “As an apology for the complete downtime on Monday, we are completely waiving the brokerage commission for transactions for our customers from May 1 to May 11.”

His position on clients and their feedback was clear: "Thank you so much for your support! For the team that didn't sleep for almost two days, getting the system up and running, this was very important."

The main thing that determines Turlov's approach is the desire to maintain reputation and transparency with clients and investors. As a result, in early May 2025, Freedom Holding's capitalization exceeded $10 billion for the first time - this became proof that the company knows how to go through crises with dignity and is not afraid to openly admit its mistakes.

"What does it take for a product to be truly great? You need to listen carefully to your customers, collect their feedback. Make sure that this 'feedback' quickly reaches the team and they constantly refine the product, improving it," explains the head of Freedom.

Timur Turlov is convinced that only constant openness, interaction with users of their services and the ability to admit mistakes, change after mistakes form a truly sustainable and successful business. Considering that today the services of the Freedom ecosystem are already in contact more than 11 million people, this is a huge responsibility.

Thus, effective management according to Turlov is trust in independent teams of different areas of the Freedom ecosystem, prompt response to crises and total transparency to clients. This is what makes his company unique and continues to grow even in conditions of unpredictability and high competition.