SILVIU GUGUI: I PROMOTE A CULTURE THAT MAKES PEOPLE FEEL APPRECIATED

Every online shopper in Bulgaria knows about eMAG and has certainly ordered at least one item through the platform, which offers anything one can think of. The company was founded in Romania and has subsidiaries in Hungary and Bulgaria. A highly-experienced professional in telecommunications, online and offline retail, sales management, and strategic planning, Silviu Gugui from Romania has accepted the challenge to manage the Bulgarian market.

How do you feel as a manager of a Bulgarian team?

Bulgaria is a very important country for our group, being the second place where we developed our business, after Romania. I have a 10-year experience in managing offline retail. In my very last job before this one, I was managing the offline part of eMAG’s retail business. This new step for me felt natural but also challenging. I am very proud of my team, we had one of the best years we could ask for together, growing a lot as a team and driving a very important growth for our business and further developing the online market in Bulgaria.

Are there any specific local cultural differences to which you have to adapt?

I feel like we have more in common as a culture than we have cultural differences. I think I can relate to a lot of the culture in Bulgaria and the country is evolving at a similar pace as my home country. My team helps me better understand the particularities of every moment and I am very happy to say that I have wonderful, engaged, and motivated people around me.

How would you evaluate your experience so far and what are your next professional goals?

My experience so far allowed me to understand the retail business from both an online and an offline perspective, to learn how to talk to people and how to help create strong and engaged teams. My passion is technology so I hope that my future will keep me close to this field in one way or another. I strongly believe that if your professional life is close to what you enjoy doing without being paid, you will have no regrets looking back at your life at a crossroads. Having said that, I also enjoy strategising. I used to play professional chess when I was a little boy, and I was successful, at one time being city champion in my category in Bucharest. Probably that is a big part of the reason why I enjoy finding solutions and discovering the best way to move forward with every decision I make.

I have two other things driving me: One is performance, and the other one is the team around me. I think these two things are actually one thing, because, in my experience, people do not feel happy if they do not know that they’re doing a good job. So, driving an office culture that is based on meritocracy is the third thing that my current job offers me and is something that I will look for in any future job in my career. I promote a culture that makes people feel appreciated for the effort that they put into being great at their job and drives them to always look at our business from a customer perspective.

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