Imposter Syndrome: An Honest Conversation With Our CEO

By Manuel Huerta August 21st, 2026 · 8m. reading time

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Imposter syndrome doesn't stop once you make it to the top. Artur Loginov, our CEO, has spent recent talks pushing the team toward better habits, stronger discipline, and daily routines. He's the one who brings up the morning gym sessions, the danger of alcohol, the value of a consistent routine, usually as someone who has already worked it out and is passing the lesson down.

In his latest talk, An Honest Conversation With The Team, he flipped that script. He told the team he'd broken his own morning routine, missed the gym for weeks, and put on six kilos. Some mornings had been harder than usual. Before speaking in public, he'd felt a kind of doubt he doesn't usually admit to,  a version of imposter syndrome he doesn't usually let show. Coming from most CEOs, that stays private, filed away as something to fix quietly before anyone notices. Artur made it the entire subject of the talk instead and used it to make a point about what leadership through imposter syndrome actually looks like, not the polished version people are used to hearing.

Artur opened by naming the pressure directly. He talks often about the importance of having good examples in life,  people whose habits and choices give you something to model your own on. It's a big part of why he shares his own story with our team as often as he does: if he could build a career and a company from nothing, the reasoning goes, so can they. But that same habit of sharing the highlight reel creates an expectation he never asked for. Being held up as an example can make it look like he has it all figured out. He doesn't. Most of the time, in his own words, he doesn't know what he's doing either.

He was clear that this isn't false modesty. It's a genuine gap between the image a leadership position projects and the day-to-day reality of holding it, a gap he'd rather name out loud than let our team assume doesn't exist.

"Struggling is normal. It happens to everybody — but the question is what you do with it."

To explain why he leans on examples so heavily, Artur went back to where it started for him. He joined Drumelia in 2009, right as the real estate crisis hit Spain, starting out as an assistant working alongside Sergey Sinichkin. Nobody was buying. There was no established process, no way of doing things that had been tested and proven, just the two of them, figuring it out as they went.

He brings the story up often, and not for nostalgia. It's a baseline. He didn't walk into a leadership role, he climbed into one, step by step, from the bottom of the company outward. He said outright that he should feel envious of anyone starting today with an established brand and a working process behind them, something he didn't have. He doesn't feel that envy, because it's a feeling that helps nobody, but the fact that he flagged it at all says something about how seriously he takes the comparison: what our team can build from here, starting where they're starting, can go further than what he built starting from an assistant's desk.

The climb from assistant to CEO is where Artur got the most candid. He was direct that he didn't fully grasp what the role would demand before he got there. He didn't know what being a CEO or a manager really meant in practice, and he didn't know how hard it would turn out to be. He even said that if he'd known in advance, he might have been too intimidated to take it on at all.

What carried him through wasn't a plan. It was a mentality: full commitment, no plan B, treating each new challenge as something to solve one step at a time rather than something to have already figured out. Every problem that looked impossible got broken down, worked through, and eventually cleared  and then the next one did, and the next. Somewhere in that process, doing the previously-impossible stopped being remarkable and started being routine. That's the part he says surprised even him.

This is where the talk turned personal, and where Artur stopped talking about the past and started talking about right now. Broken morning routines. Missed gym sessions. Six kilos gained. Mornings that felt tougher than usual for no clear reason. Moments of real doubt before speaking in public, a version of himself that wondered whether he'd actually be able to pull it off.

He named the feeling directly: imposter syndrome. Not as an abstract concept, but as something he's been living with recently, the gap between the image you project of yourself, what you say you're capable of, and how ready you actually feel underneath it when no one's watching.

Artur gave two reasons for bringing it up at all, rather than waiting until he'd already fixed it. First, trust inside a team only works if honesty runs both ways. He pointed back to one of the first talks he ever gave our team, about trust as the foundation good teams are built on, and framed this talk as the other half of that same idea: if he only ever shows the wins, the trust he's asking for isn't really mutual.

Second, he wanted our team to hear plainly that struggling is normal. It happens to every single person, himself included, right now, in real time. But he was careful to draw a line: normal doesn't mean acceptable to stay stuck in. Struggling being part of the process isn't permission to lower the standard, it's context for what the standard actually requires to meet it.

The practical takeaway Artur shared is a rule he says he likes a lot and admits he hadn't been following himself: miss a routine once, and it's an accident. Miss it twice in a row, and it's the beginning of a new habit, usually a worse one. Top performers in any field, in any sport, still skip a workout sometimes or eat badly for a day. What separates them isn't that they never slip. It's how fast they get back to the routine once they do.

"The comeback doesn't have to be impressive. It can be tiny steps, but in the right direction."

He described success as a ladder that doesn't only move upward, sometimes it moves down, and that's part of the shape of it too. The real skill isn't staying at the top without ever slipping. It's how quickly you climb back after a step down, and how consistently you're willing to do that climb again and again. Not perfection. Consistency, applied to imperfection.

He closed by saying, plainly, what he plans to do next: get back to training, back to the routines, and back to the next set of challenges with a stronger mentality than the one he'd been running on. No dramatic reset. Just the next small step, in the right direction.