Family Business Branding – 20 Questions for Two Entrepreneurs with Three Small Children

How would you describe your family branding in three words and why did you choose exactly them?

Anita: Love, support, and growth. These are the first three words that came to my mind and exactly in this order.

First of all, love, because without it we cannot talk about HAPPY cohabitation. I believe that the more pure love you feel for your children and your partner, the more beautiful your days are. I know that Plamen and I are already at an age and at a certain level where we do not care about quantity, but about quality.

Next comes support, because life is not perfect at all and the sky is not always clear. It is important when you have stressful days to have someone to lean on – sometimes just with a glance, sometimes with the full weight of your problems.

Growth. Something that I think we both value and that unites us a lot. I want to see how he becomes more successful and how he grows professionally and personally. He also admires that I constantly try to become a better version of myself.

Plamen: United; Spontaneous; Beautiful

I chose these three words because we care a lot about being united and harmonious. We teach our children to take care of each other and be united, because that is where the strength of a family lies. Spontaneous, because we do not plan a specific branding, we are just happy in the routine of life, which we build and share some moments together, without having a specific goal for positioning or a message. Beautiful, because we have the three most beautiful children in the world. (smiley) Like every parent.

How does your individual business contribute to the overall family message or image?

Anita: My business is currently related to creativity, events, a modern intelligent form of entertainment and a break from the gray everyday life. I believe that when you create something beautiful, positive, artistic, it inevitably adds color and freshness to our family message and image.

Plamen: Entrepreneurship, in all its density and colorfulness, is at the core of our lives, which defines a huge part of our images, both individually and together. The very parenting of three children, who coordinate with each other, have strongly distinguishable and different personalities, is a challenging form of entrepreneurship. All of this contributes to us appearing adaptive, dynamic, engaged, successful, and happy. Our message, as I see it, is: do the best you can with the available resources and never give up.

What do you see as the intersection between your two different businesses?

Anita: I see a lot of common things. But the most general is creativity. We both overflow with ideas. Daily, we both receive new “inclusions” 😊 He will come up with some very twisted business project, and I will always find a new and different way to entertain our audience with art.

We both organize events, we both communicate with many people, and we both sell (he much better than me:))))

We complement each other wonderfully.

Plamen: Working with people. Both businesses are dynamic and involve a huge amount of communication. The activities are very different, but require similar qualities and management. Perhaps this is part of our luck, because we show great understanding of each other's moods due to the fact that we experience the same processes.

How do you combine your personal communication style and branding with that of your partner in the context of the family?

Anita: We combine them very successfully. I think our styles of communication are quite different. Plamen is very assertive, direct, persistent, at times rude 😊

I am much more reserved, less intrusive, and I do not like to show off and be too much in the spotlight, the attention and interest of others often make me feel uncomfortable (I know it doesn't show, but it is true)

We are totally different and that helps us a lot. A bit like Yin and Yang. He encourages me to express myself more and not to deny the value of what I have created due to excessive modesty. I, on the other hand, sometimes ground him not to react too sharply to provocations😊

But we both can take criticism and have a brutal sense of humor, which makes our life a song!

Plamen: The contrast suits us. Ani is a very bright and positive figure. Somehow my sharper tone naturally matched her softness and sincerity in a charismatic harmony. The masculine just entered the feminine. Oh, and a lot of laughter.

What values do you want your family to exude – both towards the children and the business environment?

Anita: Resilience and a healthy dose of realism.

It strikes me that for many people it is more important to appear successful in the eyes of others than to truly feel satisfied with themselves and with the life they provide for their children. We witness an artificially created Lifestyle, with which many people parade and with which they identify, but which is absolute falsehood.

I really want to tell everyone to calm down and act naturally. The fact that they have filtered their faces with all possible filters, that they have taken pictures in some restaurant, plastered with various cosmetics and adorned with various trinkets, like Tutankhamun, does not make them happy, nor is it in any way beneficial to humanity.

I don't know what this worldwide campaign for brainwashing is, starting with the stupid content for children on YouTube, the stupid products with which influencers bombard our children – juices, t-shirts, and other junk, and reaching the parents themselves, under whose noses and with their cooperation all this policy of zombifying children takes place. We already see “the offspring” of these children and parents – “locals” and “models in onlyfance”. Phew!

Ultimately, we are humans and have inherent potential that we must develop and leave as a legacy to our children and future generations. We should not be like the masses – just a passing negative carbon emission through the planet.

That is why I want to teach our children to think, to make efforts, to develop their potential, to learn and to avoid falsehood and modern nonsense. I want to create personalities - responsible, prudent, the leaders of the new era. Resilient and real!

Plamen: Family values, loyalty, and unity. These are values that we live by ourselves and want our children to live by as well.

 

How do your business partners react when they find out that you are both entrepreneurs in the family?

Anita: I don't know. I don't have time to ask them 😊

Plamen: No one is surprised. Only a crazy entrepreneur can endure another crazy entrepreneur. 😀

Do you have a common communication strategy for social media or do you maintain completely separate images?

Anita: Excuse me?

With three children, maintaining a household of five people and juggling between two to three business projects daily, a strategy for maintaining an image on social media sounds like equations is in the general theory of relativity of Albert Einstein.

Given the above, the answer is rather we do not have a common communication strategy and common image on social media. If we have managed to make it look that way, then we are top communicators.

Plamen: We have no common strategy at all. We just enjoy life together and share, when and if we decide. Most of our personal life is not shared, because it is so dynamic that there should be a whole separate social network just for our reality. But we are not at the maxim “luxury loves silence”, we are noisy because we are not boring.

How do your children perceive your professions and how does this affect their sense of family identity?

Anita: Well, we are Metatron. Our children are from previous marriages and for them “family” is a broader concept. But I am sure that when all three are together with us they feel “on top of the world”.

At one moment they are at an event Painting and Wine and are interacting with people while getting messy with paints. The next day they are at a business meeting and drawing on A4 on someone’s desk while negotiations are taking place. At another moment they are behind the lens of a professional camera, which is filming me for the entrepreneurial show. The girls love to tell even strangers that they are beautiful like their mother, who has two crowns from Miss Bulgaria. The cherry on top is that it often happens while we are having dinner that they watch me or Plamen on TV 😊 I think this reveals to them not one, not two, but at least 5 different worlds and inevitably enriches them. I see in them the feeling that they are children of successful parents and their eagerness to surpass us.

Plamen: And all three are not used to seeing us differently separately, but now together. For our children, the most natural thing is to live with entrepreneurs. This means living with people who do not complain, who act and solve problems. Who are dynamic, lively, and hungry for everything in life. About five years ago, when Plamen Junior was three, he was asked what his dad does. He answered that he meets a lot of people.

In what moments do you feel that your family is "branded" unconsciously – through behavior, language, or habits?

Anita: When Plamen tells me at 11 PM that they want us to give an interview.

Plamen: Honestly, I felt that our family is branded when I received the invitation for this interview. I hadn’t thought about it before. We are too busy with a huge amount of tasks to think about common branding on a personal level. But anyway, the best branding is the natural one, because artificial is full, and sharing what we experience and live through obviously creates some feeling for us. Basically, we are like one big Italian family, but without the scandals.

Are there situations where you have to balance between the image of “parent” and “entrepreneur” in the public space?

Anita: As I already said, I don’t feel that I am in the public space and I don’t live on social networks, so I don’t balance images. I am a mother and an entrepreneur. The balance between the two is important to me at home, not in the public space.

Plamen: Never. Being a parent has always been part of being an entrepreneur. I have entered countless meetings while being with my boy, as well as with the girls, and it hasn’t bothered me. On the contrary, I think it’s human and beneficial. I am grateful that I can afford to be with the kids at work. At the same time, I have no concerns about this fact.

How do you appear in the eyes of your clients and partners of your partner – is there trust built through your relationship?

Anita: I think that Plamen's clients and partners like me and trust me, both thanks to my personal qualities and image, as well as thanks to the trust they have in him as an entrepreneur.

Plamen: Haha, this is a very interesting question. I can say how my partners and clients see Ani. She is definitely our gentle smile and dimple, whose word, at the same time, does not become two. We have many friends and partners and for everyone we are a positive couple they can rely on.

Has it ever happened that you were mistakenly associated with each other in a business context and how do you react to that?

Anita: Yes, it has happened, but if the project they associate us with is not common, I just explain that it’s better for them to talk to Plamen directly about the topic. Our businesses are personal and there is not a very high probability that our partners will get confused. Even in the show “The Secret of the Entrepreneur” it is clear who is who and what they do – I am the host and face, but Plamen is the producer, organizer and decision maker.

Plamen: We are very strong together, but each of us possesses a unique individual presence that stands out. Rather, they associate us personally as temperaments with each other, while at work we act very differently. I am very happy and proud when she achieves peaks and I am glad that the common - if there is such - association is that we achieve successes and support each other.

How do you maintain the boundary between personal and professional when it comes to family image?

Anita: As I already said, Plamen and I are “shot rabbits”. Neither he nor I imagine that we have found our other half. We are not halves. Each of us is a complete whole and functions perfectly on its own. The thing is that we liked each other, we saw how good it is to live life together and we want to make it even better. Together. So we don’t keep boundaries between personal and professional to build a family image. We just focus on our work, while people without work watch us – on social networks.

Plamen: There is no trace of a boundary. We live what we work and work what we live, literally. For better or worse, we are entrepreneurs and work while we rest. We love what we do, we love the game and have fun constantly. Yes, there is tension quite often and we are “in the jazz,” as Ani likes to say, but accepting that this is part of the game makes life easier. This perspective helps us a lot to live easily with each other. It helps us to understand each other and to avoid the banal resentment “but are you on the phone again” or “are you working again.” Yes, sometimes we need to disconnect, but for the most part, we discuss the next project of one of us at 3 in the morning and generate ideas. This energizes us.

Do you think that the family structure makes you more credible and stable in the eyes of clients and partners?

Anita: Either you are credible or you are not. Personally, I never mix people's personal and professional achievements. We have examples of many successful business leaders who have failed families. There are also many people with zero professional achievements whose families you can envy.

So – no, I don’t think that anyone will work with me just because I am with Plamen or respectively if they don’t like him – they will stop working with me because we have a relationship.

Plamen: This is a proven fact not only in business but also in politics. It is not a sought effect for us, but it certainly has an impact. Nowadays, it is very important and indicative to be able to build real relationships with a quality and valuable person. Because it happens less and less.

What principles and habits do you try to pass on to your children related to entrepreneurship and personal branding?

Anita: All children love to be cunning. That’s why I teach ours that getting something through the back door with cunning or tricks is a huge mistake. First, because it is not a victory and they will not feel satisfaction. And second, because they will fall in the eyes of others and lose something very important – trust. I also teach them to be proactive, not to be ashamed to communicate and express their opinion. It is also important to be able to share and help others. A giving hand never remains empty.

Plamen: To be natural. To improve. To acknowledge their mistakes and correct them. To learn from them. Recently, I read an interview where I saw a big stupidity that “successful entrepreneurs do not talk about their failures.” On the contrary, we fail daily on different scales and we need to learn from that. We need to learn to lose with dignity and realize that “loss” is just as temporary as “victory.” The next morning you get up again and start anew.

Do you have family rituals or stories that you use in your communication outside (for example in personal brands, publications, lectures)?

Anita: We don’t have family rituals and stories, but we both love humor and self-irony and use them constantly and everywhere.

Plamen: One very important family ritual is “the hug”. We are all big huggers at home and not a day can go by without it. Since it is understandably not appropriate to use this ritual outside constantly, we use its lighter form, which is expressed in sincere and natural communication with the people we interact with.

What are the biggest challenges when building parallel – two businesses and one family identity?

Anita: Time. 24 hours a day is nothing for people with so many personal and professional commitments. Very often I work while he drives. He works while I cook. It often happens that the kids play in the sand on the beach while we are both on our laptops. But that’s the situation and it’s not bad at all when it gives you meaning and a feeling that you are building, not wasting your time pretending to be successful on TikTok and Instagram 😊

Plamen: We would have big challenges if one of us were a complete snob. At the moment we do not face huge challenges. We even work together on some projects like the TV show I created and in which Ani is the host “The Secret of the Entrepreneur,” as well as I perform as a sales representative and general worker in her painting and wine business😀

Do you see potential one day to combine your efforts in a common cause or brand?

Anita: Yes, and it will happen at the exact moment when it is meant to.

Plamen: We are already doing it. The merging of efforts somehow became natural. It’s just that we both burn for each other.

If your family were a brand – what would be its slogan?

Anita: “Life is a shopping bag, don’t let it fly away alone with the wind, tear its handles from overfilling” 😊

Plamen: Believe in yourself and act! This is the slogan under which I published my first book “Entrepreneur” 8 years ago and now looking at Ani I discover that she also fills it with meaning. I will be interested in her version of our family slogan (smiley)

What do you want to leave as a legacy – not just a business, but a brand, values, and humanity – to your children?

Anita: I want to leave my children a huge dose of inspiration. I want them to know that great personalities lived before them, who did not think only of themselves, but made supreme discoveries for the advancement of humanity. I want them to carry this desire to change the world for the better. The world changes only through the change in us – the desire for growth, the desire to help. I want them to know that life is short and every day is precious. I don’t want them to waste their time, I want them to live with every breath – consciously, being present, giving.

Plamen: That “the impossible” does not exist.