The good leader is recognized during inevitable business crises

Introduce yourself – what do you do, which areas of activity are of interest to you?

My name is Aleksandar Dzhadzhаров and for the last 20 years I have been involved in marketing and sales, and since 2017 I have been the founder and manager of GoOnline – a digital marketing and advertising agency.

When did you realizethat you wanted to bean entrepreneur, not just an employee?

My first “attempts” in the business world were when I was 10 years old with my brother and a neighbor's child, we decided that we would sell ice cream of our own production. We gathered our coins, bought cones from a pastry shop, took eggs from my grandmother's chickens and milk from the neighbors. Our “production” was helped by our grandmother and we set up a stand on the street at 35 degrees. We managed to sell a total of 3 ice creams before we ate them. It wasn't a very successful project.

Being an entrepreneur was not a goal, but to some extent it was a natural step in my professional development. I started from the lowest position, gradually reached a point where I managed a team of 40-50 people. After 10 years in television, I transitioned from “the other side” to an agency and made the decision that it was high time for a change and thus I redirected myself to digital marketing and created the advertising agency.

What were the most defining moments in your professional path so far?

In 2006, I accidentally came across an ad from GTV, that they were looking for employees for the Sales department, with payment based on a percentage of signed contracts. At that moment, I was a sales representative for a large factory in Gabrovo, I had free time and met many representatives of different businesses. I knew nothing about television, but I decided to give it a try. After 4 interviews, they offered me a job with a labor contract. This was a turning point that determined a large part of my life afterwards.

In 2015, I received an offer and joined the Bulgarian team of one of the largest advertising agencies in the world (Dentsu). During this period, a strategy was launched in this agency, according to which everything had to be digital by 2020. There, I had the opportunity to get acquainted and delve into the digital world from a marketing perspective at an extremely high level, thanks to the opportunities for exchange of experience and knowledge at the international level.  

Was there a turning point that changed your vision for success?

Success is measured in different ways – high position, high income. Personally, my perception of success underwent a radical change in 2017, that was the moment when I realized that my children were growing up almost without seeing me, because I often worked over 10-12 hours a day, inclusive of Saturday, Sunday, and during family vacations. Realizing this fact made me change the way I perceive success

Professionally, success is creating a team that is ready to follow me in any endeavor because they believe in me.

How has your role changed over time inbusiness – from creator to leader?

At the beginning, you start with an idea, shape it and adapt it according to the market, but you are alone or with a few other people. As the business develops, new additions join the team and your responsibilities change. At one point, it is no longer enough to find something different to offer to the market, a large part of your time is now occupied by relationships between people, their motivation and convincing everyone of your ideas. Whether you are a good leader is shown mainly during crises, through which every business inevitably goes.

Where do ideas come from in – intuition, market, need?

Curiosity and experience! A person should never lose the desire to learn and try something new, and in the field of digital marketing, especially in recent years, I have something new almost daily. On the other hand, not everything that is a trend has a stable foundation and you need to sift through what would be useful for both the agency and its partners.

How do you understand when an idea has value and potential, and not just sounds good?

I am one of those people who are obsessed with data and analyzing them, but part of the analysis process is also how much this idea has the potential to change a given niche. Even now, our team is working on offering a new format for sales on social media for businesses, as part of the process we conducted conversations with potential partners to check their attitude, as well as gathered data from those using a similar variant.

How do you approach the creative process – do you have rituals, methods, or do you relyon “the moment”?

Conducting brainstorming with as many team members as possible, regardless of their position, without hierarchy, without restrictions on the ideas offered. The only rule is that there are no “stupid” ideas. And I try to provoke them by giving suggestions in different directions, often quite extreme.

What inspires you outside of business – art, people, travels?

Family, motorcycle trips, and challenges.

What are your unchanging principles in work and life?

Act as you want others to act with you. Nothing should be at any cost. Recently, I had a conversation with a client to point out shortcomings in his business that urgently need to be addressed. He agreed with me and we agreed to terminate our work because he was not ready to solve these problems.

Always look for the next hill to conquer. You set a goal, achieve it, and you should already have set the next one. And if you don’t succeed, you check what the reasons are and continue.

What does the word “success” mean to you today – is it different from 5 years ago?

The opportunity to achieve a balance between work, family and my personal life, without harming any of the three. For me, this is true success and a goal that I have been trying to achieve for the last 5 years.

What place does ethics have in entrepreneurship according to you?

You can always find a group of people to deceive and quickly make some amount, but that is for a short time. A stable business cannot be built on such foundations. Ethics is at the core of building a business that will continue to exist. On the other hand, a distinction must be made between ethics and competition. Competition is a positive thing for every business.

Do you believe in the balance between personal and professional life or do you accept that it is an illusion?

I believe in our desire to try to achieve balance, but in different periods of life and our professional path, one or the other will have the advantage.  

What is the most valuable lesson that you learned “the hard way”?

Don’t expect to be appreciated. I am from the generation that was trained to wait to be appreciated, without being an active party in this process. Over time, I realized that this does not happen and if you want a real assessment of the work done, efforts, and results achieved, you have to ask for it.

How do you motivate yourself in moments of doubt or failure?

I delve into the reasons. I review everything again, look for what I missed, where I went wrong, what I could have done differently.

What legacy do you want да оставите behind – as an entrepreneur, but also as a person?

As an entrepreneur, it is to create a company that does not need me to function, with established processes and a name in the market.

On a personal level, the people who have known me and with whom we have worked, should be able to say that I have influenced them in some way. Fortunately, I can say that with a large part of the people who have been part of the teams I have managed, we still keep in touch or when we see each other at an event after more than 10 years, we happily remember and talk about “the good old times”.