Stelian Bogza is Business Development Director and Benefit Online Co-founder, an “online shop” platform through which employees have the possibility to choose different benefits such as meal tickets, holidays, training or sport sessions, depending on the employer’s budget. As a businessman, he has over 10 years’ experience in finance and banking. He is also very enthusiastic and preoccupied for the people around him. He is usually dedicated to his family and small personal whims.

Trainart: What do you like most about your job?

S.B.: Before anything, I strongly believe that you have to like a “job” very much in order to have quality results and bring you satisfaction. The best part of what I do at the office is the people: both those from my team and partners or clients we work for. I am very delighted I can meet new people every day who inspire me, with whom I can exchange ideas and business or personal opinions, that we channel our efforts and principles for the same causes… all these aspects and many others make my job very enjoyable. 

Trainart: What is the most important lesson you learned from your experience?

S.B.: With time I had lots of important lessons (professional and personal) which helped me reach this moment in my career, without which I would not have been capable of making an important step and, according to some, a very brave one: going into the entrepreneurship field.

In this stage I could realize completely and honestly how important people you work in a team with are and how personal success depends a lot on the people you work with in the same company.

Trainart: Tell us about a situation you had to face with the help of creativity.

S.B.: I reckon that for certain positions in a company, creativity can be one of the differentiating factors when you hire somebody, and studies have shown that those companies which took that aspect into consideration became more profitable and had more success.

A clear example in our company when creativity (translated to the operational flow) brought us a lot of satisfaction was the way in which we handled the accessing by employees of companies and tourism vouchers, a benefit which was completely unsuccessful at first because of the difficult way you placed and order and used hotels/boarding houses. Once I thought “creatively” together with my team of a simple way to use this benefit, materialized through simply accessing hundreds of hotels and boarding houses through the Benefit platform (as an online booking site) and not by offering the employees the tourism tickets to show at the reception desk, this service became the second most used benefit on our platform and has made happy thousands of employees so far.

Trainart: What was the most difficult decision you had to take in the last year?

S.B.: It’s simple: distancing myself from the corporate world, a system which offered financial safety and a predictable life and take the entrepreneurship road, which had a lot of challenges and moments which managed to take me out of the comfort zone and from which I learnt extremely useful things from a professional and personal point of view.

Trainart: How would you describe your career in a single sentence?

S.B.: My career was one so far, always upward, full of ”beautiful” people who inspired me, from whom I learnt and who changed my way of perceiving life with great satisfaction and trials.

Trainart: If you had the possibility to travel in the past, what would you like to do differently?

S.B.: Even if I could travel in the past, I don’t think I would like to change my life in any way, neither professionally, nor personally… still, looking through an adult’s eyes, I think I would have been more efficient with my free time and I wouldn’t have wasted it on certain things which (looking back) didn’t bring any value to me.

Trainart: Tell us briefly a life situation in which you felt Empowered/Resourceful/Spectacular.

S.B.: The most appropriate and recent context in which I feel I can provide all I have learnt so far, that I can inspire people to be better and more optimistic, and the results of what they do (together with the team) are exceptional if we change for the better other people’s lives… I live this context every day since I have become an entrepreneur, and through the flexible benefits solution which our company developed for Romanian companies, we see how we make employees happier and more motivated at their workplace.

Trainart: What are Stelian Bogza’s life values he could never give up?

S.B.: Everybody guides his/her life after a set of principles and values, which remain the same with time. For me the most important are: family, who will always be first in the choices I’ll make, respect and love for people, no matter the color or the environment they come from.

Trainart: What are the smallest life pleasures or whims you could never let go of?

S.B.: Life would be staler and more lackluster without these personal moments which miraculously help us stay positive in a darker reality. My pleasure comes from reading magazines (ex. National Geographic, Esquire) on a weekend morning, eating an exquisite dish in a restaurant I’ve known for a long time… and not forget the pleasure to capture photographs/places/situations which inspire me in a certain moment and which I share with others through social media.

Trainart: What fictional characters do you think you resemble most and why?

S.B.: I realize (sadly) that I have never thought of that (maybe only in my childhood when I was a ninja turtle or Zenga, the goalkeeper  ) but if I think about it now, out of the hundreds of characters I met through books, plays or films, I think I feel more like Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s character, who was always optimistic, courageous and full of desire to know everything new.

Steve Jobs, the emblematic innovator, said that “the only way to accomplish wonderful things is to love what you are doing.” Stelian seems to confirm this. Putting passion into entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in passion, he successfully managed to set a business focused on people’s needs.