Jan de Jong - "Ljudi u Hrvatskoj dobro detektiraju probleme ali ne i rješenja!" #S03e02

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you very much for having me welcome to rieka welcome to my podcast yes thank you so this is the first episode in english not sure if it's gonna be the last but i sure hope so that people will not choose to concentrate on my pronunciation and possible mistakes but maybe to start with this how's your croatian government okay so great we're going to check the phrases in the end but i have to say the the padajay are are very difficult to make the padagi are very difficult to everyone so you understand a lot yes i mean at my home we also speak croatian my wife she speaks creation with the kids and i speak dutch with the kids and then my wife and i be speaking to each other and of course i'm also in the business i'm the only non-croat so everybody else speaks creation so i hear creation around me all the time and being already here for uh for 15 years i celebrated my 15th anniversary a few weeks ago of course i i hear it a lot and i start to understand it better and better but it's a very difficult language i have to say it is but so how is your wife with the dutch she also understands more and more okay uh especially the songs we sing a lot listen in dutch so uh she can sing the dutch songs she can sing them along let's say okay and the kids are you know kids so they just basically they're smarter than their parents yeah they speak everything it's usually like this but okay back to basics i know probably a lot of people are asking this but i'm gonna ask it as well so how come you chose croatia i know you came here to write your thesis and true yeah but why was it croatia why was not i don't know italy maybe or some other country well at that time i was uh actually working in a company in the netherlands called m-plus group and that company was founded by mato so obviously he has croatian roots and when i approached my final year of university i had to write my final thesis my diplomas and i asked mato whether he liked the idea if i would go to croatia for one year to write my final thesis where the subject of my final thesis would be to expand m plus group contact center from the netherlands to croatia i could have suggested to go to italy but i'm not sure if you would have liked that idea very much but since i proposed croatia he uh he thought it was a good plan okay and uh yeah when i was 22 years old i got into my old car drove down to croatia started writing my final thesis alongside together with that i started the business and by the time that i graduated nearly one year later we had the first 35 employees in split we were helping companies at that moment mostly with with telesales activities so selling their products or services over the phone and on the day that i graduated i had a lunch with mato and he asked me whether i would like to go back to croatia to finish what i started and to become his equal business partner so we would be business partners 50 50 in the business i like that idea very much at that moment i already met my girlfriend nowadays wife so i had more than just business reasons to go back to croatia i went back to croatia and uh yeah fast forward uh nine years after that uh i actually sold the company i made an exit from it and at that moment we employed a bit more than 400 people in in our contact center okay yeah those are i think some amazing numbers so uh but if it hadn't been for uh you met meeting slavic at that point already do you think he would still be in croatia or maybe not so keen about it well i don't know i mean i think uh one way or another but you will find love i mean of course i was very fortunate and very happy that i ran into slavica but it could have been somebody else of course as well at the same time i have to say that that first of all i fell in love with the country when i came here i think it's really beautiful we are now here very close to the echo with you again you know it's it's very overwhelming actually how beautiful this country is every time when i go to a new part and at the same time i believe that there is a lot of business opportunities in this country and what i keep telling many people over and over again is the fact that all the businesses that i started here in croatia sometimes they're very different from from one another however they all have one thing in common and that is that these are very often products or services that are already being offered at a very high level in the netherlands those markets are very often already saturated divided among very big players already out there and in croatia very often those products or services are not being offered or not not at all or could be done better very often we are buying those services from companies abroad and in my opinion if you identify an opportunity like that and you can become first offering a service or a product like that in this country you actually have a first mover advantage and first mover advantage also allows you to to become a market leader in that segment and that's what i've been doing actually over the past 15 years with all my businesses and now you are you have by and it's also the first company that that offers newsletter in croatia yeah so for example in the netherlands uh you have of course there's also male chimp being used in the netherlands which is a big global player but in the netherlands you have at least 10 or 15 very strong local players and each of those companies they employ anywhere between 10 and 50 maybe even 100 employees so we're talking about literally more than a thousand people finding employ employment in companies specialized in providing a software for sending newsletters based in the netherlands and when i investigated the market here in croatia after my exit from from m plus group i wanted to start something else something new again connected with marketing because i have a great passion for marketing and then i realized that in this region actually everybody is working with mailchimp and that there is no local player present offering that kind of a solution and of course companies that want to send out newsletters they can go to their digital marketing agency or their marketing agency and those marketing agencies they would then very often help their client by offering mailchimp and that's why i decided that we wanted to be the first locally present email service provider in this region and that has been proven to be a right decision actually because we are growing very fast last year we grew with more than 100 percent this year i think we'll grow with about 75 percent we are servicing today more than uh 100 clients among them are really the the key players in their respective industries um and we are very happy and and very excited actually about the future growth that we will experience in this region yeah but have you ever experienced let's say a doubtful client that goes like i would prefer to stay with the global big guys well i mean of course uh not not every client is a perfect client for web power you have companies for example that are very small that the aura actually doesn't have to be a small company but if they have very small databases with mailchimp you can you can use their service free of charge until you reach 2000 subscribers in your database so for a lot of companies that simply don't have budgets for email marketing they would say you know what i would rather stay with mailchimp use their free of charge service now but something like that i can't compete and i don't want to compete that's obviously not the perfect client for web power and then you also have clients all the way on the other side that are huge have enormous budgets that want to do all kinds of things with ai artificial intelligence or maybe integration with certain sophisticated crm systems they may be they they want to put it on an even higher level perhaps that's also not the perfect client for us but then you have a huge amount of type of companies basically that fit right in between and and those are my perfect kind of clients so they have budget for email marketing they have certain wishes certain needs they want to do some marketing automation they maybe want to also combine with sending an sms or a vibra campaign now these are the kind of solutions that we can offer and it's also the biggest segment i would say so yeah that's where we feel very comfortable okay so how much time did you spend or do you spend in uh you know researching the the right kind of target for you well we have uh completely actually changed the way we are doing our business development so in the past especially in the first i would say two or three years when nobody knows about your company um of course i had a lot of contacts already from my previous business so what i did is i just contacted proactively those companies and i asked them whether they would want to switch to web power so from mailchimp to web power or from another provider to web power and that worked you know we were getting clients step by step it took a lot of effort but we were growing and we targeted in the first place let's say the key players so we we targeted companies like telecom croatia airlines air serbia as the card club these are the kind of companies that we onboarded first and then once you have let's say uh a reference list that a lot of companies would would recognize uh then that also gives a lot of trust and then we started actually going down to let's say smaller companies or less known companies okay in addition to that we also changed the way we are doing our business development because before it was very much a proactive approach towards all those companies and right now we are actually more focused on on content marketing so obviously on my personal linkedin profile i do that uh but we also create a lot of content uh for web power also on linkedin but also video content and in that way we are giving a lot of value and in that way we are getting our leads and then once somebody contacts us like hey i would like to consider using web power then that's a lot easier to close a deal like that especially once we give a demo of the product and we explain them the pricing and we explain that we are locally present and that we offer great support so yeah then in that way we were able to get our clients faster what do you think was the turning point in which you figured out that you will have to in in order to grow your business move to zagreb that everything is pretty centralized in croatia in the beginning when we opened actually our office in split very soon after that like within the first year i realized that pretty much everything was going on in zagreb in terms of business but since we already opened up in split and i was living in split and i enjoyed being in split for a very long time i told myself you know what if there is an opportunity for me to meet with somebody in zagreb for business development reasons doesn't matter that it's 400 kilometers it's my choice to live and split i will drive to those meetings and i did that for the longest time for almost a decade i would say but at one point we had about 65 70 people in split employed and it was very difficult to uh to hire more people than that to find new talent without losing the the existing team and to to scale the business even further and then at one point we also had one client that wanted to outsource a part of their customer support so their inbound activities but one of the requirements was that you actually had an office based in zagreb and you know in a way i understand because all those headquarters are in zagreb and very often if it's something new to those companies outsourcing their customer support to another company they like to have the feeling that if they have to that they can just walk into your office and see if everything is okay and that's not really possible if that partner is 400 kilometers away and that's when we really made the the decision okay we want to be closer to our clients all our clients were in zagreb so we decided also to open up an office over there and then we continued hiring more and more people in zagreb it was difficult to hire more and more staff in split and at one point our zagreb office already had like 300 350 employees in split we were left with maybe 50 60 and it was uh at one point we we had to make a very difficult decision which was to actually close the office in split and to move all our operations to xander was there a choice for people they were working in split to you know start working in zagreb of course but one thing that we also organized for them is that one of our largest clients at that moment telecom we agreed with them that any of our people our contact center agents the co-agents that they could all continue working in the contact center of kharatsky telecom in split if they wanted to so even though it was painful that we had to close the office and that we had to say goodbye to people that have worked for us for many years we did offer them an alternative that they could work for telecom okay so is this different in netherlands is everything centralized there as well or not so much no no i think that of course in the western part of the netherlands there's probably more activities more economic activities going on but for example rotterdam even though it's the second city in the netherlands i would say that economically it's there's probably more happening over there than in amsterdam it's also because of the harbor there's a lot of import and export in in the harbor in rotterdam but i mean starting your business in the second largest city in the netherlands or even the third or the fourth or the fifth or the tenth biggest city in the netherlands really is not limiting you in any kind of way netherlands is also very small i mean in like two hours you're everywhere yeah if i drive uh from split to zagreb it's it's 400 kilometers if i drive from the netherlands 400 kilometers i'm already passing two different countries i went to i went to belgium and i'm in france oh yeah yeah okay in 400 kilometers yeah it's interesting when you put it like that yeah and uh what i also wanted to know is which is the biggest difference in the business world and functioning in croatia compared to the netherlands um i would say that i mean obviously in croatia we we like to meet each other in bars and and during lunch in the netherlands people are are more regularly just meeting each other in the office one hour meeting in the office then everybody goes out and one other thing that i that i noticed in croatia is that very often companies in croatia they have much stronger hierarchies so in the netherlands our our the management style of most dutch companies is very let's say inclusive very flat organizations pretty much everybody's opinion matters in decision making in companies and here in croatia you very often see that you have one leader or an owner who decides in which direction we're going to go and everybody else should just follow strong hierarchies and that's something that i don't like that's why i'm doing it completely different in my company can we even say that these people are leaders well there is a difference between a leader and a boss and those people are bosses very often those people are bosses and they're not leaders buses owners or something like that you know okay so maybe we will get educated better in this leadership thing well i i think that um you know the the companies that are actually most successful right now in croatia are actually companies that provide products or services abroad we're talking about the info bibs the nano bits the other other companies focusing mostly on i.t that are doing really great abroad and i think that those kind of companies they also understand how how to how to manage the business and how to to actually have employees really wanting to work for that company but i also want i mean i also stepped into businesses where uh somebody calls his director not by name but by saying director for me that's very weird to call somebody director yeah okay yeah i don't know maybe it's maybe it's me maybe i'm uh it's maybe it's a bit old-fashioned style to to call your director director or president of the board to call him or her president and also one thing that power adria is i would say living in or recognized for uh in recent months i think is the four week four four work day week four day work week yeah okay yes yes so uh when i talked to certain people about this and i was like yeah you see four days and they were like it doesn't pay off so how does it pay off to you yeah so um i mean i was first of all i was inspired by the the experiments that they were doing on on in iceland and they even did it in the in the public sector so not in the private sector but in the public sector where actually they have shown through their experiment that by working less days people have more time to relax to rest to to complete family chores let's say to develop themselves to exercise to be in better shape and to also be mentally in a better shape and then during the four days that you're actually working you're more productive and uh like i said already previously i like to be first with things so not only in the type of business that we are starting but i also like to be first in the way we are doing our business or in the way that we are for example uh treating our staff and that's why i wanted to be also among the first companies to actually introduce a four-day work week i think that web power as a business is a perfect kind of company to introduce something like this because we are not really selling our time you know there's a lot of businesses where where at the end of the day you're selling your time and what we need to do is we need to provide a great customer experience and customer service five days a week of course and that's why um uh before we actually made the decision which was uh before the summer we decided to investigate the possibility of introducing something like that so we we had a very close look at how busy is our team actually and would there be space for everybody to do that kind of work in four days and then of course to rotate so that we are not all free on friday yeah okay because clients need to be serviced and and after investigating that we found out that it's actually possible to do that that's when we suggested it to the team just to see their first reaction to it and they responded so positively that we thought okay we have to go and do this we'll do this after the summer holidays are over so we'll start with this in in september yeah and when we announced it uh it was a big explosion in the media i would say all the news portals they covered it it was on rtl direct heart even had a had a mention about the four-day work week and we actually as as a even though we are a small company it's only the nine of us in web power but we we enjoyed uh a lot of uh free publicity as a result of that that means that um probably where power will not have too many difficulties to to hire great talent because we uh i mean just based upon the announcement that we made i i think i got like 35 open job applications of people that wanted to work for us so we are we are actually putting ourselves in a position where we can really choose who do we want to hire uh getting the right people on board and and to be really focused on on making sure that the quality of the lives of the people that are working in web power that that is at the highest level possible so to have a good work life balance uh enough time for family for relaxation for development for exercise but then when we work we work hard and we finish the job okay so which brings me to my next question and this is uh are you employing outside of zagreb as well or do you still need people in the office no because uh actually from the moment that we uh that we were confronted confronted with with the first pandemic everybody was started working from home and we actually never came back to the office so everybody is still working from home because i really like to empower our team to make their own decisions so we asked them would you like to continue working from home or from the office everybody has a key of the office they can go whenever they want but everybody chooses to work from home and since we at the moment that we actually realized that nobody was going to come to the office anymore we also decided that in that case we can also hire new talent outside of zagreb so a couple of months ago we hired a first colleague from aussie okay so she is now working from her home office in aussie and one of our colleagues that was living in zagreb she actually terminated her rent for the apartment and she moved back to riyaka so we now have most of the staff is still in in zagreb but then we have oceac and arieka and myself in split so did the pandemic somehow changed your work like work-life balance as well since you were able i'm imagining uh to be more at home but then some people are saying that you know work from home is very hard especially if you have well four kids yeah so in your case so how how would you say your work life balance looks like well i was one of those people that that never thought that i could be working from home especially for the reasons that you brought up with with having 4k for kids at home it's it's always a lot of chaos there's a lot of noise so try to find a moment of peace to actually do something working from home but you know at that moment when we had no other choice and everybody was doing it i actually realized that i very much enjoy it and what i also like about it is that to me business became more personal because actually instead of meeting in a corporate environment in in an office we are pretty much now meeting each other in each other's living rooms and there's all kinds of things happening you know it's okay if if one of your kids comes through the zumko or starts screaming through the zumko i mean we are all human first and and after that we are employees or entrepreneurs and and i and i like that that aspect and for me i have to say that um i very much enjoy the possibility of being there with breakfast with the kids bringing them to the kindergarten or to school picking them up having a family lunch uh you know also bringing them to the sports after that and and basically i'm having family time and i'm working like in in one big mix throughout the whole day and for me it works i enjoy it very much it's maybe not for everybody but i think that companies it would still be good for companies of course to offer the possibility to people to work from the office if they have no possibility to work from home yeah okay it's a huge topic nowadays especially with this pandemic keeping keeping up as well so we will see what happens next and one of the first huge topics that you were known about and you're still known about were digital nomads would you say that you were kind of a first digital nomad in croatia no no i've never lived the life of a digital nomad like i mentioned previously i moved to croatia 15 years ago and i didn't move and i was never a remote worker i was always working from the office so basically everything that typically defines a digital nomad i was the complete opposite of that okay but well i mean it happened like this that uh last year when all of the sudden everybody was working from home i was asked to be part of a panel on a virtual conference called tourism 5.0 and during that conference i was going to get the question what we can do in croatia to to turn this country into a year-round destination because right now like we all know tourism is very strong here but only four or five months ago okay four or five yeah yeah but what can we do to have actually tourism or income from tourism 12 months a year and after uh speaking with a good friend of mine paul bradbury who writes a lot about those kind of subjects about tourism in croatia i read one of his articles and and it mentioned digital nomad tourism and you know my first reaction was like yes this is just perfect you know first of all nobody is any more um like say connected to having to work from a certain city or from a certain office we can all travel freely uh work from anywhere why would we as croatia not welcome those remote workers to work from croatia because you know living in croatia but on for example a u.s salary i mean who wouldn't want that yeah i i can't imagine yeah so instead of just opening up our borders for regular tourists let's open up our borders to welcome digital nomads and allow them to stay longer than the three months that a tourist visa would allow them and i mean i mentioned that during this virtual conference uh later on in the evening it got also covered by uh by harte in nethnik and after that i started promoting this on my linkedin profile and you wrote to the prime minister yes i imagine a lot of people are writing to him or them and i i can't imagine them replying to everyone but you got hurt so yes what do you think was the key that you were heard and you know he he called you and said well 44 days uh after i wrote the open letter on linkedin uh 44 days after that i met with him in the prime minister's office and during that meeting he told me that that he and his cabinet were going to fully support the idea of introducing such a visa or actually i have to say a permit it's a staying permit prior to the meeting with with mr blankovic i already had meetings with moop [Music] and and during the first meeting with moop they mentioned that they were just about to make some changes to the to the foreigners act to the alien act and that they actually thought it was possible to to add additional legislation for the digital nomads to the changes that they were going to make anyway and that we could do this rather fast and when they said rather fast they said probably by the end of the year we can have this done so that was really really a very positive surprise to me as well you know living in a country that is known for its bureaucracy uh you mean slow by slow bureaucracy being able to change and the alien act and the tax law and regulations connected to health insurance and pension fund all within a matter of let's say five six months and to be as of january this year 2021 among the first countries in the world actually to welcome digital nomads by granting them a staying permit yeah that was uh that's definitely worth celebrating to to be able to do something like that and for me all this time of course we have worked very hard on it uh together also with with amazing people from the government like uh state secretary teresia grass from the ministry of interior uh such a powerful woman she really was the glue between all the the ministries and she made it happen all the way until the end but yeah obviously it proves that if we really want to as a nation that we are able to pivot and that we are able to to move forward and to bring positive change and to lead yeah yes okay so but would you think that maybe if it hadn't been for well let's say media pressure uh in covering that story and that idea of digital nomads do you think that the prime minister would be like maybe a little bit deaf about it i don't know i mean uh deep inside i believe that also the prime minister and everybody else that works in those kind of positions that they really do want a good and positive change for the country otherwise would it make sense to hold a position like that and i think that at the same time it was perhaps me being the right person at that moment making a message or making a letter like that at the right moment all the circumstances with us actually being in lockdown made a lot of sense estonia actually introducing such a visa a few months prior so already one other european union country did it uh croatia being the destination that it is and strategically would really benefit from having year-round tourism i think all of that combined in addition to that the media exposure it made a lot of sense to to do it and uh i'm very happy that that prime minister and also minister bojinovic that they recognized this opportunity and that we grabbed it with both hands you said you were prior to this you were with the moop guys so [Music] i imagine you were you were talking to someone who was uh rather open but have you experienced someone being like what is this guy talking about is this guy crazy only take him out only for us now yeah i i imagined why porters didn't like it yes because of course i mean we suggested that uh digital nomads didn't have to pay any income tax in croatia for the reasons that they already pay income tax in another country yeah and if you would charge it as well in croatia that would mean double taxation and that would not make croatia a very popular destination for digital nomads to come and live here and work from here um but yeah of course boris now they were looking in into ways how can we actually earn something from this but uh let's face it we have one of the highest vits pdb's in the world if not for sure in europe uh and that's also what i mentioned is that um the the tax office will see income from all the spending power that the digital nomads will bring to this country okay uh but we've also had a very productive video call actually with the the ex-representatives of the ministry of economy in estonia because like i said they were first and we had a lot of questions on how to treat this and how to how to handle this in croatia so i reached out to estonia to the ministry uh one gentleman dimitri he was very willing and open to to help us and to to answer any kind of questions that we or that porrison had so we had a yeah kind of like like a working session for almost two hours with estonia to get as many ants as possible and after that we went back to the drawing table and we continued uh changing the the text law yeah so a lot of law-wise things have changed and but what would you say the position for digital nomads nowadays in croatia is i mean what are the things that we should still keep working on well [Music] i think that first of all it's probably going to be very important that we have a strong community here because i mean i think that internet connection is more than okay i mean we have all been working remotely from home and we all did that by using internet connection and in my opinion of course can always be better and faster uh but it was something that we could work with then the co-working places are growing like mushrooms after rain there's popping up everywhere so that's a good thing but what i think that this country really needs now are more and more strong efforts in order to build a community because even though digital nomads they very often they travel alone but they don't like to be alone and they would go to [Music] the worst place on earth where there is literally nothing to do if they can find community over there because they they want to be together they want to feel safe and but we are actually making strong strong efforts there you know a couple of weeks ago i was also looking at the numbers of how many people have actually applied for the staying permit and i have to admit that i was a bit disappointed uh there were like maybe a couple of like 230 applications after eight months okay and i was really hoping and expecting that those numbers would be much bigger than that however the other day i also read an article on total creation news written again by paul bradbury who took the data from the website called nomadlist.com okay so if you are a digital nomad and if you want to find out more about popular destinations or what to do in certain cities and all that you can go to nomadlist.com and you

will get reviews and a lot of information from other digital nomads about those cities first of all zagreb at this moment is on the 26th place in the world okay yeah so that they significantly jumped on the list and what is also very nice is that those digital nomads they have a mobile app and if they go to a different place they actually check in to that city and then they can leave all kinds of reviews about the city so that other digital nomads can learn from that so it's basically like four square but for nomads yes okay but in the month july alone there were 1200 digital nomads that checked into zagreb only from nomad list so and in the month of july as well there were 1200 digital nomads that checked into split and another 600 in dubrovnik so even if we are looking only at the 200 something applications that we received for the digital nomad permit which is rather disappointing disappointing once again but if you actually look at what is happening and how many digital nomads are coming to croatia because not everybody needs a permit if you are a citizen of european union you don't need to have a permit to come to croatia yeah so these people are already not on my list of how many people have applied but also if you are a u.s citizen and you want to come to croatia but you want to be here only for two or three months you again don't need to have a digital nomad permit yeah so either is enough exactly so i think that there's even though number of applications is rather low we are literally talking about having thousands upon thousands of digital nomads in the country right now and if we can be a country that will be welcoming them that will be warm and good to them that will show them around and and and together with them build a very strong and great community then what will happen is that they are actually going to become the ambassadors of croatia they're going to be vlogging tweeting posting and and and and making stories about uh about creation they're gonna share that information among other digital nomads and in that way with word of word of mouth uh marketing is in my opinion the best type of marketing and i think that we can significantly grow those numbers over the years okay so how did you feel when you first came to croatia did you have any bad experiences because you were a foreigner no i actually had only uh good experiences um so i come from a country that is uh probably one of the most densely populated countries in the world the netherlands for me the first thing that i that i noticed in croatia is when i literally entered with my car and i drove from the border down to split that there's so much space everywhere around you you know there's so much beautiful nature everywhere something that at least i never experienced that in the netherlands in that way and the people are are just very kind and warm level of english is in general really good um i've met i mean my among my best friends are are people here in croatia so for me only good experiences i have to say in terms of crime the small crime i would say it's almost non-existent i've never had something stolen from me or nobody ever broke into my apartment nobody kicked the window of my car tried to get something out of my car these kind of things in the netherlands i have experienced all of that oh okay but in croatia not and and i think that we just have to admit that croatia is among the safest countries in europe and for me it's a beautiful country in a very safe country therefore to raise a family okay makes sense when you put it like that but you're constantly very very optimistic about croatia and i've heard a lot of the reasons why you are so optimistic about croatia but what do you think people uh from here that live here and work here are failing to see and why do we lack some kind of optimism especially work-wise well i think that we are actually starting to see more and more positive stories and more and more great examples of actually how things are possible in this country i can imagine that that if you are speaking with with your parents or with your uncles or whoever let's say from an older generation that that sometimes that can be very demotivating that people are getting fired or not getting paid salary in time you know you i heard those stories too but what i really try to do myself is i try to surround myself with mostly positive people if there are people around me that are like extremely negative or if i would come with an idea you know can be a bad idea but you don't have to just be only negative about everything that is going on in your life if i if i encounter those kind of people i just step away from it and uh because i noticed that if i feel positive if i'm surrounded with positivity that i can do much more than when i just have people hanging on my legs and pressing on my shoulders all day long in terms of opportunities you know if you ask an average person in croatia what is wrong with this country they all have the answers but if you have the answers to what is wrong then why don't you have the answers to what would be possible solutions it's like we prefer nagging but that has then to do with attitude yeah you know you're either the person that is going to just sit there and complain about it or you're going to be a person that identifies what is wrong rolls up your sleeves and start fixing it i'm the kind of person that starts fixing things and i've done that very well for myself over the past 15 years yeah definitely yeah so as except for the attitude what would you say are the most important things for successful mindset never i mean you have to always continue learning uh i i consume a lot of content on youtube i'm not really a big reader i don't read books for example but i do consume a lot of content on youtube inspirational or just inside in what great companies are are doing outside of croatia and i try to see is there is there something that i can connect what they're doing over there with what we are perhaps not doing over here [Music] mentors it's very important to have mentors people that have either more experience or different kind of experience that you can turn to to ask for support or help i think that we in croatia also just need to be more supportive towards one another uh almost every day i have people reaching out to me with all kinds of questions i literally try i spent a lot of time on that but i try to answer as many as i can just to to give people that that that small push in the back that they sometimes need in order to continue going um i think it's very important uh that you also have support from your uh from your better half from your spouse you know especially if i mean if you're an entrepreneur uh you're going through a lot of ups and downs and you know when um when when you're feeling positive your business is growing and everything is great it's not difficult to be supportive in those times yeah but when you are losing big customer or when business is not so great at that moment to get the support at that moment that is going to be probably crucial if you would want to continue your path because if you cannot get the support from your spouse in in doing so then then then what to count on yeah exactly exactly so who are your mentors who do you turn to as except for your wife i imagine yeah i've had several mentors throughout my career um i think at one point it's also okay for you to outgrow your mentor okay uh and then at one point to start finding other mentors but i've uh one of my very uh one of my dearest friends actually he passed away just before i went to croatia yaroon he was i would say one of my best mentors ever he taught me everything i had to know about communication working in a contact center so his lessons will always stay with me after that uh mato for instance uh who was the founder of m-plus group in the netherlands who allowed me to expand and plus group to croatia uh being who he is a serial entrepreneur having founded many many businesses i always found a lot of inspiration and and and wisdom in what he has already experienced that i was still about to experience and then i have a bunch of uh really great friends some of them are are my age or just a little bit bit older some of them are even a bit younger that i can turn to and and they don't even have to be in my line of business but sometimes you know being so deep inside of your own business it's very difficult to to step out to to see what is actually the problem that i'm facing and to find a solution for it but sometimes if you're just talking about it with a friend who comes from a different angle he will see what you don't see and just by talking about it you know what what to do next yeah and my business partners i have uh in in web power i have business partners in also in my previous business i had business partners i started another company last year crop which is going to focus on bringing the the dutch agriculture technology the the stock lenici the glass houses the greenhouses to croatia i have a great partner in there jarko troglich from which i can learn really a lot so yeah that's that's how i do it things are happening yes yes every day okay but so i i don't mean to be negative but i do want to ask you uh how do you pull yourself up after a disappointment yeah i don't know how sometimes i even don't know how i do it um i i'm just very focused and and perhaps sometimes i'm maybe i'm naive okay but i just really believe in positive outcomes [Music] and i actually you know very often when times are the most difficult somehow that's actually the time where i feel that i'm performing at my best so i i feel more creative and a very good example of that is when we entered into the lockdown last year with web power the company was doing fine until then you know we were growing nicely but all of the sudden overnight we lost like 40 45 of our revenue from campaigns uh my pipeline looked great but all of a sudden i started getting phone calls from companies all postponing their decision because it was this was not the right time for them to enter into an agreement with us and so what are you going to do you know all of a sudden everything that you've been working on for years it seems to all stop and and it's about to collapse so to say and what i came up with at that moment is uh our buy local campaign our coupon code campaign so because my thinking was that if we as a country are depending on people coming in and spending money here if that revenue stream stops we need to make sure that there's also no money leaving this country anymore and that's why when we started to buy a local campaign i wrote a post on linkedin where i said that for every 25 companies that would switch from mailchimp to web power so instead of sending money to the united states keeping that money here in croatia that for every 25 companies that would do that that i was going to hire one full-time employee in croatia and in the six months that followed i we got 50 new clients and we hired two more people in the company and we were growing faster than we ever did so it's it's going like from hitting a wall to have coming up with a new campaign that will just like completely change the direction change the direction again and accelerate actually what you were doing okay and i have to as well ask this uh i imagine well i've been to the netherlands uh only to amsterdam of course but maybe special part of the netherlands yeah but maybe at some point i would also like to travel the other parts of netherlands so uh i'm imagining it's a completely different mentality than here did you have trouble getting you know in sync with our mentality well i have to admit that the first thing that i really had to get used to uh when i just started living in croatia was that everybody was pretty much just showing up late for appointments yeah to arrive somewhere and then to just be waiting there for 15 30 minutes and then i'm the kind of person that usually comes early yeah as you know as i know yeah so we don't count this as me so i come off an hour early and the other person comes half an hour late and i'm sitting there for an hour all together yeah okay here's the thing uh other than that um no i mean you were a lot on the road yes especially i mean the the traffic on the highway of all fine all good traffic in for example split you know having to learn that you should actually not be driving in the right lane because that's where you park so yeah but but i have to say that also over the past 15 years that also has improved so people are not anymore just parking their car anywhere on the street so if you feel frustrated about traffic and split i will give you some advice that you haven't asked for just try go to rome no istanbul or istanbul okay yeah try istanbul traffic and then i think you will be a lot less right yeah okay so but but traffic was i imagine yeah something shocking it's it's a bit chaotic and um very selfish you know in the netherlands we are very polite in traffic so you know if somebody comes and wants to pass you you allow that person you give a sign like you can go in croatia there's no way you know i mean you first and then everybody else but yeah yeah and if you go uh in between there might be someone knocking at your glass yes a few times happened a few times okay yeah people first start honking okay and then if that's not enough they get out of the car and then when you do you go like that netherlands and i'm very happy that i have my domatinka wife next to me to defend me yeah i can imagine how that looks like yeah okay that makes sense so uh as we mentioned you are very polite in traffic i mean dutch people uh so tell me a dutch curse word oh [Laughter] dutch people do they they curse a lot with diseases okay so like the most terrible diseases that you can think of we turn that into curses so that bogdatti how we have in croatia this thing as well in a way we go da bogdatti and then so meaning uh let the lord give you and then something very bad yeah yeah i don't know no god paula yeah but we might for example call somebody uh a person that has typhus uh-huh okay no divas liar yeah oh okay yeah you can do that pretty much with any disease yeah it's very bad very bad okay so i said in the beginning that i would like to you know just kind of check your creation it's not really checking but i was wondering how are you dealing with that with the phrases yeah because there are some phrases in creation that i don't think are translatable i mean of course we can translate but we can explain it maybe yeah like my ex fell into the honey what no i have never heard of it meaning that something very good unexpectedly happened okay so you never get anywhere okay are you maybe familiar with the thing uh that something is do yaya to like ex yeah or balls okay no it means great okay okay and maybe let me see when people are saying uh ubananism like i'm destroyed or it can be destroyed or lacking money or exhausted or yeah but means in banana okay all right so well it's not good to be in a banana but it's good to be something with eggs okay uh maybe one uh dalmatian thing uh vrag prischodnya never heard they took the hurry oh no oh well i'm translating this i don't know i don't encounter those sayings very often afterwards no no how are you even living in split not encountering these things let me just say everything is okay okay okay uh so uh in my podcast we also do a thing never have i ever okay okay and we are doing one part where i ask people would you rather this or that but i decided that i'm going to just do never have i ever with you okay okay so never have i ever told my kids to just beat it have i told my kids to just get out of here yeah yeah of course i tell them that how many times a day yeah that's the question how often okay and never have i ever used the term i stayed in croatia for you in an argument with wife no i've never done that okay no good husband never have i uh lost temporary in a meeting i have you have how does that look like then after a bit of temper then i just walk out of the meeting oh okay because i think that it's important that we respect each other's time and if if that respect is not mutual if there is no respect for for each other's time then or if all of the sudden somebody would start insulting you for no no obvious reasons then i'm not accepting that so then i then i also lose my temper and then i walk out okay and never have i ever smoked the weeds in the middle of a working day no i have never i'm not saying that i never smoked wheat i tried it as a teenager and i have to say it didn't feel good to me because it makes me feel very sleepy but it was for sure not on a working day yeah okay yeah and i once missed a complete new year's eve because of one joint ah just fell asleep woke up the next morning no more fireworks everything was done okay so you feel like you've lost the new year's eve yes yeah i think for me it would be like oh i choose to excavate it yes for me it was not like that so never have i ever overslept a morning meeting no but i did once uh miss my plane because of the sleep yes the alarm didn't go off i woke up 10 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave yeah that was the biggest shock ever okay so never have i ever thought to myself [ __ ] this [ __ ] i'm come i'm going home like home to come to the next lens no no no no i never had those thoughts okay so i imagine for you now when we reference the home idea is croatia it's very interesting that you're asking because in a way for me it it for sure feels home when i come to croatia but it also feels home when i arrive at my parents place in the netherlands but to me it's like you know even though croatia is my home i do feel like a foreigner here also because of course i'm not actively speaking the language perhaps all day long so i feel like a foreigner in croatia but i no longer feel like a local in the netherlands so where are you in a cloud i don't know i'm in between in between yeah okay but it's very strange not to be a local in the netherlands and and to be a foreigner in in croatia but still loving both countries for for for whatever for i mean they obviously offer different things loving each country because of those reasons i have to say i don't miss the netherlands as a country i do miss the people over there but in august we were in in the netherlands for two weeks and after two weeks coming back to croatia i'm really happy to be back in croatia to see your home door yeah yeah front door yes so uh maybe if your parents would move to croatia and then you would have your parents place in croatia maybe that would help with this they're coming to visit actually quite often if the travel restrictions allow it of course usually they would be in croatia three or four times a year okay yeah great so what's the next best next best thing in your life waiting for you right now what do you think i don't know i think the best thing of of life is that uh that it's unexpected and that you can very much influence yourself which direction you're going into i feel that of course i mean we try to live healthy as healthy as we can there's of course a lot of things that you can't influence when it comes to your health and you can only be blessed by by good health but a lot of other things i feel that that i control i have a lot of control over it in terms of my business or how you would want to interact with your family these kind of things these are these are choices that you make every day and one one choice that i that i really try to make every single day is that it doesn't matter what i'm doing but i want to enjoy what i'm doing of course i have big plans i have big ambitions i want to do a lot of great things in terms of business here in croatia but if you don't enjoy the right as you're going towards those goals then why are you doing it so for me finding joy in the right is the most important thing okay i hope you enjoyed this yes it was very nice yeah i mean i said yes right away when you asked me so yeah it was very quick i was like okay yeah this was it was like i'm going to ravine i will be passing rieka let's do it let's do it yeah i'm very glad you did it because i was thinking about calling you for the show like a few months before and then yeah it was much easier [Music] thank you for being my guest thank you so much [Music] you

2021-10-07 14:46

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