Irina Georgieva, co-founder of Enterprise League, a business platform for companies. 

With 2 business degrees up her sleeve, Irina co-founded Enterprise League with the purpose of helping small businesses to directly collaborate with each other, eliminating the middleman. Irina is actively involved in setting the direction of the company and works tirelessly to ambitiously scale the business platform to every country around the world.

Can you tell our readers about your background? 

I was born in Macedonia during the transition from Communist Yugoslavia. I attended business school both in Milan, Italy, and Buckingham, the UK at the University of Buckingham. Upon completing my bachelor's business studies with first-class honours, I continued to obtain a masters degree in Service Management with a distinction. 

Upon graduating I worked for several small companies in Marketing and got to experience the main struggles small businesses face on a daily basis. This experience turned out to be of key importance for starting Enterprise League.

What inspired you to start your business? 

After the Communist regime collapsed, criminal privatisation of many state-owned companies took place leading to thousands of job losses. During these tough times, my father took the risk to start his own company. He adopted the latest technological innovations and started the first TV broadband company in the country. 

Throughout the past 25 years, I have been a prime witness to the struggles he was facing by running a private business. I grew up barely seeing my father, as he was always away on business trips and working late hours. This truly showed the struggle and dedication it takes to start and run your own business. Moreover, it exposed the cruel reality that the opportunities are privileged to a few people with key connections.

During my time working for several small businesses, I once again experienced the challenges that small business owners face every day. That if you lack a business savvy and connected personal network, your access to valuable business partners, suppliers, and other business collaborators is extremely limited.

This experience along with the entrepreneurial environment that I grew up in, served as a major inspiration for me to want to start my own business and help small companies collaborate more efficiently.

Where is your business based?

Enterprise League is based in London. My co-founder and I work from here, whilst the rest of our team is remotely based in several European countries. 

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?

When we identified the problem that we wanted to solve, we started conducting a thorough analysis of the present solutions and how well they meet the needs of small businesses. 

Once we developed a clear vision of how we can help small businesses collaborate with each other quickly and easily, without depending on the middleman, we embarked on the adventure of creating the product. 

During our product development stage, we worked closely with several businesses, who we identified could benefit from Enterprise League. These early adopters gave us input on the functionalities and had the chance to test the platform first hand whilst in beta. 

Thanks to such collaboration with our customers, we were able to specifically target their pain points with our solutions, thus avoiding any guesswork. 

Nowadays we continue to work in partnership with several companies that act as a representation of our target market and have also turned into marketing affiliates for Enterprise League. 

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business? 

So far we have seen the highest rate of conversions through our word of mouth efforts. We invest a lot of our resources into our customer experience and go above and beyond to meet their needs and make sure they get a positive experience with Enterprise League.

This approach has brought us a lot of new members that come from referrals and recommendations. We firmly believe that by focusing on the customer experience we will achieve exponential growth in users and maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction. 

Another great way we are raising awareness about our business platform is through our business blog. The blog is focused on providing knowledgeable and value-filled business content, primarily of interest to business owners and small companies. In order to ensure our content is of the best quality and provides actionable steps to our readers we regularly work with industry experts to create reliable and trustworthy content based on industry experience and facts.
The blog has proved to be an excellent medium to generate new organic traffic that is not reached through our other marketing channels.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them? 

When we just started Enterprise League we faced the challenge to assemble a great team. The team that is leading the company is one of the most important key aspects that contribute to its success. In the first several months we had hirings and firings which taught us that quality people are not easy to find and it requires time to truthfully identify them. 

Another challenge we faced was working with an external company. This was in the early stages when the platform was being built and we had to collaborate with an external company to tackle some items that our internal team wasn’t yet capable of doing.

Here we decided to work with a company from Poland which we didn’t have any experience with prior to this. So in order to minimise the uncertainty and risk of failing in this chapter, I did extensive research about the options we had and chose a company that offered a workshop service. This meant we can visit their headquarters to speak more about our needs in person, which made sure they understood our platform in depth and ensured their delivery to be of the expected standard. This proved to be the right approach for the situation and our collaboration was successfully executed. 

How do you stay focused?

I believe there are two ways one can stay focused, by eliminating the distractions or by beating up the distractions with more important reasons why you should work hard.
I remind myself every day of our mission and the goal we are striving to achieve. I remind myself of the impact and importance our platform will have when millions of companies start using it. This fuels me to keep pushing forward and stay focused. 

How do you differentiate your business from the competition? 

We are extremely focused on the client/user experience. We want to build a product that will be easy to use and will deliver them with the results they require. Therefore we put the client at the center of everything we do. Our users participate in every decision we make regarding new features, updates, releases, etc. Furthermore, we work with them on a personal level to help them better navigate through the platform and easily learn how to use its functionalities to their advantage.  

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business? 

Prior to the pandemic, we were actively collaborating with business events, to reach our target business audience. This was the prime marketing solution for a business platform such as ours. Now we work with online events, which are still effective but lack in comparison to the conversions we used to get through physical events. Additionally, besides collaborating with events we also participate in many business related events. Here we have various members of our team that join to spread awareness about Enterprise League and its benefits to companies. 

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs? 

Before deciding to start Enterprise League, I spent a few months contemplating whether I am ready to do it or not. I spent time reading books, researching, doing all sorts of things to try to get as ready as possible. But what I later found out was that the perfect moment will never come. You should just take action and work on making your business idea come true. The best advice I can give is to do your best market research, evaluate your opportunities, and take action.

Additionally focus on building good habits and skills for continuous self-improvement. Strong habits will help you develop processes that work for you, stay focused, and reach your goals. Stay analytical of yourself and keep identifying ways you can improve and perform better. 

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?

Slack is arguably my favorite app. It helps me stay connected with my team wherever I am and it’s super-efficient and easy to use with all their integrations.
I love reading the Entrepreneurs by Forbes, it's their blog dedicated to entrepreneurs and small business. I regularly find inspiring stories of entrepreneurs doing marvelous things for humanity and the environment, as well as trendy news stories.
My favourite book is Principles by Ray Dalio, I love using it as a guide or a sort of workbook to help me navigate through life and business. It contains extremely valuable and actionable advice that can help anyone better achieve their goals. 

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?

The project management tool Asana which we use on a daily basis is my favourite way to organise our projects and tasks. It helps me maintain control and overview of all our operations as well as it aids our team to stay efficient.

Who is your business role model? Why? 

I would have to say Steve Jobs. He showed to be an extremely innovative leader and a charismatic pioneer. I admire his charisma and passion to bring his vision to reality and create the largest telecommunication company in the world. His achievements are an inspiration and I believe that many entrepreneurs aspire to achieve even a quarter of what Steve Jobs managed to achieve. 

How do you balance work and life? 

I have to admit it is often difficult to put a line between life and work, especially since my mind is constantly thinking about what’s next for Enterprise League. I do try to limit my working hours to a certain extent and regularly practice yoga and tennis. Another way I am bringing balance is through friends and family. I have allocated my evenings to meet up with friends with the goal of avoiding work talk. Maintaining such a balance and having hours of the day where you disconnect from your business really gives me a fresh perspective the next day. This helps me stay fresh and productive. 

What’s your favorite way to decompress? 

Yoga is the best for me. My work is very desk oriented and getting to stretch for 30-60min gives me the refreshment I need to finish the day productively. It is great for both my mental and physical health. 

What do you have planned for the next six months? 

For the next six months, I expect to see Enterprise League play a significant part in helping businesses out of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Many companies will turn to the platform in search of business deals and collaborations to fill out the gaps left by their clients and business partners. 

To better address this need, we are working hard to quickly scale the platform to more countries besides the UK and USA where we have a solid presence. The aim is to create the world’s go-to place where business happens. 

How can our readers connect with you?

They can find me on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-georgieva-b994815b/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/irina.geor

or email me: irina@enterpriseleague.com