Snapshot
The managers: Grozdan and Slavica Stoevski
The jobs: General manager (Grozdan), managing director and owner (Slavica)
The company: SGS Consult
In brief: Grozdan and Slavica Stoevski founded SGS Consult in December 2005 as a more personal alternative to the mega consulting companies that seem to dominate the Bulgarian market. With three full-time employees including themselves, the firm works on the principle of dependable freelancers in various fields, a base of which they have been building up over the past few years. Activities include conference organisation and hosting, translation, copyediting and related activities, with a focus on the business sphere.

The quality that Grozdan and Slavica Stoevski chose as most important in their lives is tenacity. General manager (he) and managing director and owner (she) of SGS Consult, they have overcome a number of rough waves to make the company that they started in December 2005 competitive on the Bulgarian market.

Slavica is Serbian; she and Grozdan met at a conference in early 2004 when they were both working for the same parent organisation in different countries.

Grozdan is from Sofia. He graduated from what is now the National Military University Vassil Levski – Veliko Turnovo, and then served for a few years as an organisational skills officer in the army. She has a degree in engineering technology (“It was during communism; that was one of the promising professions.”)

When they got married and she moved to Bulgaria in late 2004 – leaving behind a lucrative career as executive director of an international consulting firm in Belgrade – it was not so easy for a foreigner to take up residency, even though she was legally wed to a Bulgarian. Necessity, and a desire to start up something new, led them to establish a company – SGS Consult, which gave her a legal reason to stay in the country, and correlated to their entrepreneurial spirits. “Both of us are entrepreneurs in our thinking,” Slavica said to The Sofia Echo. “You could say that we are born leaders. And we thought that since we were starting a company, it should be a profitable one.”

And why a consulting firm? As Grozdan explained it, there are a few factors involved: “You see what is missing from the market, and you also have to assess yourself and your skills. Find out what you do best, and find out how you can charge for this.”

Skill assessment
Before SGS Consult, Grozdan was an event organiser for 10 years, for mostly business-related events like seminars and conferences, both in Bulgaria and out. He said that he likes such work – “people skills, co-ordination skills, communication skills, challenges, creation” – and thinks that it fits his personality. She says: “It’s always something new. You can hardly have two conferences the same.”

They also have similar personalities, though Slavica describes herself as “a little bit more pragmatic; he’s a little bit more of a dreamer”. Conferring, Grozdan says: “She provides the balance. And she’s better with numbers.”

In addition, they both have an affinity for languages. As such, part of what their company does is offer both interpreting (simultaneous, meaning that the interpreter sits in a booth in the back, and the audience has earphones; and consecutive, meaning that the interpreter is on stage with the person speaking) and translating services in more than 20 languages, ranging from Persian and Turkish to French and Polish. “Most international conferences need translation and interpretation,” Slavica says. Correspondingly, they also offer document correction services.

This, mostly, is outsourced to a pool of dependable freelancers – full-time staff at SGS Consult total three: Grozdan, Slavica and the project manager.

The beginning was hard, and it took some time for their company to focus in on its purposes. No longer meandering like an oxbowed river, they’ve since closed in on where the target lies. Consulting is a growing industry in Bulgaria, Grozdan says, with little competition apart from two or three large firms that have been on the market for a long time. But, these two or three firms control about 20 per cent of the annual events calendar.

As consultants, specifically, Grozdan and Slavica see themselves in the roll of the little tugboat leading the freighter into harbour. There is a big need, say, a conference for 5000 attendees, and they are the ones to pull everything into place, nimbly so.

Less is better
Being small has its benefits in the industry, they say. For start, there is flexibility and adaptability. “We can easily become part of a larger team,” Grozdan says. Second, there is lower overhead costs; third, communication lines are shorter; and fourth, there is the mobility that comes with not being tied to a specific geographic location.

The downsides do exist, though, namely in lower visibility and lack of brand-name recognition.

Not like that stops them.

Special opportunities, such as organising and realising the Microfinance Centre conference that was held in Sofia in May 2007, have landed in their bay, along with more specialised events for smaller groups. They say that such reflects SGS Consult well – they’re a “small team with a lot of experience, rich skills and are not burdened by communist-era training or mentality”. As Grozdan says: “Youth is an advantage.”

It was that in particular that attracted Microfinance Centre to hire the firm and invest full confidence in their capabilities. End result? Success and satisfaction on both sides.

Unearthing the need
With the country’s current aim to increase congress tourism, what demand there is for events management will only increase. This need exists already, Grozdan and Slavica say, but it is a challenge to convince people that things will run better if they outsource the behind-the-scenes aspects.

“We are often witnesses of very awkward events,” Slavica says. “The organisers are just able to get by, and the people in the audience...”

One of the benefits of the couple’s backgrounds is that their former parent organisation was stringent about smooth running of conferences and seminars. In fact, Grozdan’s former mentor regularly organises meetings for politicians in Washington, DC. “As we’ve seen high standards elsewhere, we’ve learnt to think things through to the last detail,” he says. “Organisation is not just a question of quality; it’s also about efficiency, and what you get from the event when it’s done.”

Frustratingly, throughout the creation and running of the firm, they have found that the Bulgarian state is not that well organised, and “inconvenient” bureaucracy is everywhere. “Once you start something up, you become the target of all sorts of fines, taxes, new regulations... The ‘paperology’ is the worst,” Slavica says. “You have to collect five or six different documents from various locations, wait two or three weeks for some of them to be processed, go to various offices all around the city for the same project to be approved... And then there is the issue of not being informed.”

In order to respond to these challenges and others, Grozdan and Slavica say that it is necessary to have a balanced life. “Both of us have experience working for other organisations; we’ve since built some boundaries and we’re trying to observe them. That's what you have to do if you’re in for the long run,” they say. In some cases, also, sacrifices are necessary.

Back home
This includes a balance of business between family hours. Given that they both work for the same company, it could seem easy to not make a distinction. Yet, through some painful experiences, they have managed to do so. “There was a phase that I was a workaholic,” Grozdan says. “The laptop would be opened first thing after waking up in the morning, early, too, and it would be open until I went to bed. I would feel guilty when I was resting. I’ve since overcome this.

“That has been a challenge, because it would be easy to work seven days a week. We try to keep Saturdays and Sundays holy.”

The laptop now stays at the office.

As much as it can create difficulties, being the manager of one’s own time also has its benefits. “You can take time off for a sick child,” Slavica says. (They have a son, Daniel, who was born in 2005.)

Recognising the importance of family, they make it a priority to spend time together. “We’re outdoors people. We like travelling, too,” Slavica says. In addition, Grozdan, an avid motorcyclist, is a member of a Bulgarian chopper club.

Instilling moral values in their son has also re-inforced their own commitment to running a company of unquestionably clean ethics. In this country, they have encountered many opportunities to obtain contracts or European Union funding in not-so-pure methods. “In an ethical sense, it’s a challenge,” Grozdan says, because what company would not like to win some tender, or receive some additional financing? They see a dichotomy between what the Government says about the younger generation staying in Bulgaria to help start up small and medium-sized enterprises, and what happens in reality, which is that small companies like theirs have a “below zero” chance of receiving EU funding – unless they bribe. “If you want to do things right,” he says, “you have to pay a lot of money.”

Yet honesty and probity remain the guiding principle of their firm. And with Grozdan’s and Slavica’s tenacity and skill, SGS Consult will continue to lead the big ships into port.

‘You see what is missing from the market, and you also have to assess yourself and your skills. Find out what you do best, and find out how you can charge for this.’

Grozdan

‘Because both of us have experience working for other organisations, we’ve learnt to build some boundaries and we’re trying to observe them – that’s what you have to do when you’re in for the long run.’

Slavica