Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Photo: Nikola Vrdoljak and Kristina Ercegović
The popular business event Business Café was held for the 51st time on Thursday, March 21, 2019, at the Zagreb Hotel Academia. According to the already well-established format, creator of the Business Café, Kristina Ercegović, invited guests to tell as much detail as possible about their business, after which the audience got the chance to ask questions. Numerous business cards, useful information and sponsor gifts were exchanged.
Nikola Vrdoljak
The first to share was the owner of the PR and Digital Agency 404, and the director of the Weekend Media Festival, Nikola Vrdoljak, who belongs among the very innovative entrepreneurs. He founded Agency 404 four years ago. Today it has 60 employees in Zagreb and Sarajevo offices. In addition to public relations and digital communications, they provide performance and content marketing services, as well as web and app development. They concluded the previous business year with great profits, and for some time now they are the leaders in the top 10 list of the Croatian PR and marketing agencies.
“Today, all companies are becoming media. An average company today produces more content online than any average media. We’ve concluded that we need to be fast, that communication must be in real time, so we looked for business segments that are fast enough, merging digital and PR. Nobody has time for big analyses anymore, for long campaigns that last 6 months etc. We have structured the agency on those bases, we gave up on TV and turned to the communication channels that the audience demands today. We invested in people. Realization would not be possible without 40 social media managers driving the whole story, and we retain them by allowing them to be co-creators in the company, not just employees,” said Vrdoljak.
Announcing the program of the next Weekend Media Festival, Nikola Vrdoljak did a special block dedicated to women in business, but with a completely different concept than what has been seen so far, as well as the topic of ecology.
Ana Lisak
After Nikola Vrdoljak, the stage was taken by Ana Lisak, the only woman in Croatia leading a large catering company with outstanding business results. Before she conquered the market, she was engaged in humanitarian work. During the war, she decided to join the work of non-governmental organizations. She started the initiative Mothers for Peace and was the president of as many as 130 humanitarian organizations as well as the peace building movement Bedem Ljubavi. As she says, she was always motivated by the conscience and desire to do something for the wider community, not just for the individual. During this period, Ana Lisak worked with war victims and abused women, which took a toll in her own life. To preserve her health, she turned to entrepreneurship.
“Success is doing what makes you happy, and what makes you feel the best. Sometimes even ignorance is crucial for success, in the sense that when you start something, you have no fear of what is coming, because you still don’t know what awaits you in business. This same fearlessness and readiness to leap into the unknown has led me to be a leader in catering today. Initially, while clients still didn’t know about us, I went to them. I’ve literally sent 1000 letters to all possible addresses. Many who responded positively to our offer back then, 20 years ago, are still our satisfied customers. As for quality employees, we all face this challenge today. With our team we build relationships of trust and respect because they are our greatest strength! I never personally dealt with finances in the firm, nor did I bother with it. I left it in the hands of those who do it a million times better than I could. I create, plan, invent… I can’t deal with everything by myself. The only important thing for me is knowing that we’ve settled our obligations on time,” said Ana Lisak, “an entrepreneur since birth” as she describes herself.
Krešimir Macan
Krešimir Macan is a distinguished Croatian PR expert, especially in the field of political communication, and owner of Manjgura PR agency. Until recently, he was a special advisor to Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković for strategic communication. The public knows him for many successful projects, a part of the public knows him under the pseudonym Bijesprvi, under which he published well-known YouTube video clips with grotesque statements by Croatian politicians, and a part of the public knows him for his recent appearance at the HTV’s Stars Sing show.
As he has proven himself instrumental in telling stories in numerous political campaigns, Krešimir Macan also proved this at Business Cafe as a very grateful interlocutor whom the microphone loves and people are happy to hear. He started the story from his departure from Dubrovnik to studies in Zagreb during the war, he talked about resourcefulness, situations that make you grow faster and take things in your own hands, love and enthusiasm about your business, finances, orchids compared to people, cars, as well as several witty anecdotes from the political campaigns in which he participated.
“I can say that I absolutely found myself in my work. For a long time ‘I’ was the job. Nothing was hard for me. I was driven by my work. I am grateful to my wife and my family for sticking with me. The most important thing I’ve changed in business is my relationship to finances. In a consulting job, clients usually take everything they give them, and more but for the same price. I was fortunate that from the very beginnings Manjgura didn’t have to sell anything. Clients came to us. It’s the same today. But I realized that you should charge for your time, and have a serious stance in this sense. You can’t work 16 hours a day and not have money to pay the bills. I don’t know who would be happy with that. Everyone should ask themselves, are they working just for the sake of working, or are they working to earn something along the way, and they should set themselves goals accordingly, same as the heads of big corporations set goals,” Macan concluded.
At the 51st Business Cafe, Portal Dobrote association presented their humanitarian activities, and the event ended with the presentation of the Business Café Book Club, during which Alisa Marić recommended a number of recent domestic and foreign titles to the audience.