The Femme Palette podcast ‘On Air’ brings you honest conversations with inspiring entrepreneurs and professionals. We summarised the key learnings from the most listened to podcasts: with Cristina Muntean, a personal branding trainer, Nina Formanek Jaganjacova, a founder of a healthcare startup, and Petra Vaskovych, the Chief Product Officer at Kiwi.com. You can listen to our podcast on Spotify, Anchor, or Apple podcasts.
Cristina Muntean is a consultant, trainer, mentor, and coach who specializes in personal branding, strategic communications, emotional and systemic intelligence for leadership. A former journalist with more than 12 years of experience in the Czech, Romanian and international media, she founded Media Education CEE, a PR advisory, and training agency in Prague in May 2010. Her clients are executive-level managers and entrepreneurs with Top100 companies in the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe. Cristina is also an internationally certified trainer and coach with Enneagram, a complex system of personal development, and a facilitator of systemic dynamics in organizations.
Cristina’s dreams were crushed when her journalist career ended overnight, due to the financial crisis. As an expat living in Czechia, she was facing a language barrier and couldn’t get a job in the Czech media. Therefore, she decided to become an entrepreneur.
BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR
Initially, she planned to educate people on how to communicate with journalists and add extra value by using English. However, the market said no. And so, she went to bankers and asked them about her level of Czech. Simultaneously, she was also offering media advisory and public relations services to secure her cash flow whilst establishing herself as a trainer. Her main area of focus became emotional intelligence and crisis communication.
“Entrepreneurship is a series of pivots”
FINDING CLIENTS
Before she left her job, she created a sheet with 100 odd contacts, out of which 90 percent stopped answering her calls. But the remaining 10 turned into sources of business and helped her get her first deals. However, training on emotional intelligence and communication is not a nice-to-have skill, it is essential, and so she also needed to educate her market first.
PIVOTING BUSINESS
According to Cristina, entrepreneurship is a series of pivots. And the older you get, the better you become at pivoting. For Cristina, to be able to stabilize her cashflow, she decided to spread horizontally. She boosted her portfolio by expanding her offerings. In this way, not only could she attract new clients but also offer more value to the existing ones.
“If you want to be strategic, you need to keep your head clean.”
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
In 2015, three of her four major clients withdrew. However, her other large client offered her an interim position. She kept her mandate for 18 months, after which she realized that what she wants to do is to develop people. In 2018, Cristina published a book on personal branding in Czech(!). This allowed her to combine her journalistic skills and align it with her values. Publishing a book also triggered many new deals and helped her restart her business.
KEY LEARNINGS
Cristina also organized a conference on personal branding for which she brought together a great team of professionals. The key learning was to allocate more time and resources to organizing these events as well as to hire someone to focus on communications only. Because if you want to be strategic, you need to keep your head clean.
Following this year’s crisis, she had to pivot the delivery methods of her business. Turning everything remotely and selecting online platforms brought down the barrier of entering new markets or communities, Romania included. Now the biggest challenge is to stay focused on what Cristina is already doing and think strategically about what to do next.
“We grow on the shoulders of giants.”
INSPIRING MENTORS
Cristina always says that ‘we grow on the shoulders of giants’. She has a group of around 20 people who she can call for opinion and have an insightful dialogue. She calls them frentors (friend & mentor). Those are people who welcome her with an open heart, mind, and arms.
To name a few of Cristina’s mentors:
Mentoring is crucial in your professional development as you are always in the middle of the journey with something to share AND something to learn. As you mature, you start perceiving these conversations as the best way to help you get better at something. And so, the older you get, the more mentors you have!
Nina Formanek Jaganjacova was born to two doctors in Sarajevo, in what soon became a war-torn country. She grew up in the Czech Republic and has always been enthusiastic about helping others. Nowadays, Nina and her team have a positive impact on society through her non-profit organization Sifty, where they combine what she considers most important: health and education. She strongly believes in ‘Prevention through education’, which led her to start her second health-tech venture HealthBase.
THE BEGINNING OF A STARTUP
Healthbase happened naturally. Nina started thinking of digitization of healthcare services when she had kids and needed to keep track of all their health records in a digital form (as every parent confirms, physical papers are in constant danger when you have kids). That was the first pain point. The idea started broad, but thanks to many brainstorming sessions and the Femme Palette mentoring program, it evolved into a clear and specific concept.
EXPERIENCE WITH MENTORING
According to Nina, mentoring made a huge contribution to the development of the final idea for her business. She believes it was super helpful to have someone coming from a different industry who was very invested in her project and helped her navigate various challenges.
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
Another challenge was to find a work-life balance. Nina was used to putting a lot of pressure on herself but learned to never work when the kids are awake. Her husband doesn’t work at home, so he can also help. Nina learned that people don’t mind when she has kids on the call. And if the situation needs it, she can always excuse herself and call later. As she says, ‘when you become a mum, you learn to live with it’.
SHARING RESPONSIBILITY
Nina hates asking for favors and used to think that she ‘can do anything on [her] own’. So for example fundraising was a big challenge for her, but ‘when you are passionate about stuff, it sort of comes out naturally’.
Once Nina had kids, she had to find someone who she could fully rely on, to be able to spend time with her family. It took some time but worked out eventually. The biggest learning was to think back to herself and ask - were the instructions clear, was everything explained properly? If not, she would take full responsibility and constantly try to improve.
“When you become a mum, you learn to live with it.”
TIME-MANAGEMENT
For Nina, work is a form of relaxation, but she has to be very strict when setting deadlines and goals for herself (again, mentoring can help here!). Being present and staying focused on one thing is key. In Nina’s words, prioritizing is more important than spending a lot of time at work.
Petra Vaskovych is a Chief Product Officer at Kiwi.com, a Czech online travel tech start-up. She was the fourth Kiwi.com employee hired and played a large part in scaling the team to over 2600 employees by leading product strategy and planning. Petra shares her lessons learned from being a manager in a fast-growing company along with the main challenges she faced in her career and personal life, especially during these turbulent times where the travel industry has been decimated due to the global pandemic.
Petra started working at a tech company and joined Kiwi.com (then so-called Skypicker) after a deal came in. In the beginning, they were a team of four when everyone was doing everything - from customer support to cleaning the office. But as they grew, Petra transitioned from marketing to product for a company which was once a garage project.
HOW TO BUILD A STRONG TEAM
Petra learned a few key lessons which helped her become the great team manager.
3 RULES FOR HAVING A GREAT TEAM:
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES
The travel industry got hit significantly by the pandemic. Now it’s time to focus on things that got overshadowed and prepare for possible challenges that will come with a new set of expectations and requirements from the travel industry (flexibility, protection, etc.).
BECOMING A MOTHER
Everything changed after giving birth, including Petra’s work routine. She became significantly more organized and got rid of things that were not necessary, so she could be upbringing whilst also continuing her work. Plus, a lot of personal and private events had to be put in the calendar too, and many were foregone, so she could spend more time with her family. Kiwi is an open company, so Petra could reevaluate the expectations directly with the CEO.
WORK-LIFE INTEGRATION
Petra shares a lot of household responsibilities with her husband, who is also the one staying at home with their daughter after she went back to work. Petra relaxes in the following ways:
If you want to learn more on Petra’s work-life integration check out the workshop here.
INSPIRING PEOPLE
MY EXPERIENCE WITH MENTORING
Petra believes that mentoring is a two-way street from which both mentee and mentor can benefit. She likes to have informal coffees with people who can share their experiences, help her filter out ideas, and offer a helping hand. Having a mentor is a great thing!
Discover more success stories and learn new business lessons through our podcast every two weeks. Subscribe to ‘On Air: Podcast by Femme Pallette’, rate the episodes, or send us your suggestions on podcast@femmepalette.com. We look forward to catching up with you soon On Air!
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