My role model
Since my university years, I have always been fascinated about building an intelligent decision support system. At that point, I was studying economics and computer science and, at same time, I would help my father to advise him regarding his business. He had all these fascinating (in my view) business problems. How do you serve your customers better? How do I set up the pricing in such a way that attracts my customers, while also maintains my profitability? How do I retain my best employees? My father had a degree in naval mechanical engineering. He had no formal education in business. For me, it was great, because I was able to experience the beauty of business, while also doing my studies — combine theory with practice. We would spend hours talking about his business and helping craft his business strategies.
It was not always pink and fluffy, four years before, at 16 years old, my father had told me that he would not have given me pocket money anymore unless I had done work for him or his business. Initially, I was very annoyed: “Why is he not like other fathers? Why is he not giving me money anymore?” Well, now I understand his decision. He did that, because he wanted to teach me a very important lesson — you cannot get without giving. He would force me to write his business correspondence with his suppliers in English. Again, I was not cheerful about it, but it served me really well to practice speaking business English. I also started to enjoy doing accounting for him, arranging his invoices, filing them, creating reports in Excel and analyzing his expenses. I began to understand the different facades of his business. Last, but not least, I also enjoyed having more money than any of friends had. By providing a great service to my father, I was able to save and get more resources.
Besides the great stress that a business owner experiences, I also loved the freedom that my father experienced through his business. He was running the place, he was the person in charge that was very respected, he had the power and I was very proud of him. He managed to get from a 4 people company to a 50 people company in just a couple of years. He was scaling and gaining a big chunk of the market.
Everybody asks me, even his employees, why did you not go and work for your father? Well, I worked with him, I listened to him and I was inspired by him, but I also had my ideas, my dreams, my visions and one of that was building an intelligent decision support system. Have I achieved that? Partially. In the end, it does not matter. What matters is being your authentic self and trusting your inner voice, your intuition, while also knowing yourself well to understand your blind-spots and internal biases.
