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About me

I am Anca.

I was born and raised in Bucharest, Romania and I am very proud of that.

I lived in Luxembourg for five years and in Amsterdam for two. And a while ago I have returned to Bucharest.

I grew up in an organized, hardworking family that valued the free time that my parents have always spent in my presence. Yes, I know, I have always been pampered.

I got in touch with the business world from an early age.

Ever since I was five, in 1990, to the eternal question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I invariably said that I wanted to be a business girl. My father, an aviation engineer by profession, had become Technical Director at Jaro, the first private airline in Romania. I liked going to his office, sitting in his office chair, and imagining that I ran the company.

I think that the one eighth of Greek blood flowing through my veins helped a lot here, my maternal grandfather coming from Kefalonia, the island of Ithaca, 100 years ago. An adventurous spirit, he boarded a family ship and sailed to a richer country. He met my great-grandmother, a modern lady of the time, and stayed in Romania. He must have loved her very much. I know from my mother that she smoked a cigarette and went out to drink juice on Regală street, a cosmopolitan street in Brăila.

I grew up, I started to choose what suited me at that age from everything around me.

I was fascinated by movies with women who break through in life, strong, tireless, victorious. I graduated from ASE, Commerce and SNSPA David Ogilvy, I worked at Realitatea Media as a Brand Manager at Superbebe and in parallel, I convinced my mother, a pediatrician doctor, to start a business.

University did not satisfy me, it was purely theoretical, so I started a business as soon as I turned 19. I thought that if I applied what I learned in college, I would gain more. I opened a clothing store, a concept store, as there were not many in Bucharest at that time. We bought old furniture from Lipscani and organized a store where we put a lot of soul, in addition to a lot of work. We went to fashion events in Europe and chose clothes we would have liked to wear. They were of good quality and with a commercial addition of only 30%. I wanted to modernize the Romanian woman.

It was awesome!!! But I’ll tell you about it another time, in great detail.

Unfortunately, Romania was not prepared for what we had to offer. So, we had to close the store and my mother opened a medical recovery clinic. There I learned what services mean. It was something else entirely.

And the clinic was a modern, cheerful concept; people came there to recover, they needed that.

Dad already had his own aviation company. I worked in parallel for both companies and in addition, together with a friend, I started organizing events. A busy period of my life but full of satisfaction.

I went to the USA, Florida to be exact, for three weeks, to do a training for the aircraft parts trade. And I discovered an industry in which 93% were men; a friendly, luxurious industry, talking about the millions of dollars with great ease. An industry where travel is the order of the day and where you can find friends all over the world.

That was in 2010. Since then, I have remained passionate about the aviation industry.

I am now Vice President (and minority shareholder) at an aviation company, APOC Aviation, which has a turnover of several tens of millions of dollars, where I am developing the engine department. This means that I buy, sell and rent engines for the Airbus 320 family and Boeing 737. As customers, I have some of the largest airlines in the world but also banks, investment funds, other leasing companies.

I really like to travel, do Zumba, stay on Instagram, and read (especially during flights). I like going to brunch, to go to luxurious restaurants (but I also like to go to small, authentic, Italian family restaurants, to eat spaghetti al pomodoro and to drink house wine). I have (we have, as we are two), a mini-collection of champagne (when you live in Luxembourg and you are 2 hours away from Champagne, in France, it is quite easy to have such a collection) and we always find reasons to reduce it (and when a deal doesn’t come out, it’s another reason to drink champagne, I am upset).

I am ambitious (taken to extreme many times), perfectionist, very organized, I never get to a meeting on time, lucky, hardworking, I laugh all the time, very Latin (my blood boils in my veins), faithful.

And I decided to make this blog to show everyone that you can (with a lot of work but also with luck) to be a successful woman in business, to have a personal life, to have time for friends and to give back to society. Of course, I was extremely fortunate to have been born in the family I love so dearly. Without my parents I would have been nothing, they taught me (and invested a lot in me) to get here, they supported me in any madness because they have an open mind to the new.

This blog will not tell you necessarily beautiful stories but it will show you a lifestyle that I wanted, which others will surely want, a busy life, with joys and failures, what means to be accomplished, in a world of men, far from home and that I would not change for anything in the world.

I hope you like what I have to say and come back to read more.

And if you want to follow me on social media, you can find me on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Kisses.

Anca

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