Being an entrepreneur, a wife, a mother and a teacher are not easy, especially when these challenges are amplified by a situation full of uncertainties like the current one. But Ioana Mucenic has managed to cope with a context that has never been faced before.

“It’s been a very complicated year. I didn’t have maternity leave. I was in my second trimester when the pandemic started, in March. It was a very stressful time then because it was a big shock and it was a time when I felt very unwell also physically. And then I had a period where I didn’t know exactly how to proceed, I felt very sick and I tried to get back on my feet, and to be more structured and organized and to realize that it’s not the end of the world and that it’s just a challenge”, says Ioana Mucenic, CEO at Minio Studio advertising agency.

Being both an entrepreneur and now a mother, Ioana Mucenic’s main challenge is to find a balance between the office and being a parent. “As an entrepreneur, I have always been hands-on, in the sense that I know what’s going on with the projects, I’m in constant contact with colleagues and clients and that takes up a lot of my time and it’s clear that I don’t have the same time I had before, even though I try to work as hard as I can, so one of the main challenges is this: to try to keep running the business, but doing things differently. Doing more things while working less. That’s a big challenge,” she points out.

Changing the way business is done is also a challenge for the Minio Studio CEO. “I realize every day that we have to do business differently. (…) This does not mean slowing down, it’s a different way of doing business. And I have to admit that I don’t know how to do this. There are a lot of changes in that respect. There are a lot of business processes that are changing and I have to find solutions”, adds Ioana Mucenic.

On the other hand, the fact that since March she could no longer plan anything in the company she founded was quite a shock for Ioana Mucenic, as she is also the kind of organized person who always makes plans. “It was a big blow, the fact that we didn’t know what was going to happen the next day and how we could do things, but we went ahead. We couldn’t stop, even though there were all kinds of talk at the time about closing companies. I can say that during this period we had a lot of support from colleagues. We made plans from one month to the other we planned against our annual plan. We planned month-to-month targets,” says the advertiser, noting that the pandemic “certainly changed us a lot”.

“The advertising industry is a reflection of society. It reflects what’s going on in society and the business environment and those have changed tremendously,” she continues.

Moreover, even though, at the beginning of the plan the company had a very ambitious business plan with a lot of goals, Ioana Mucenic says: “Almost nothing of what we planned will remain valid for next year”.

In terms of the advertising market, the entrepreneur estimates an overall decrease of 10-20%. “I expect the overall market to go down. There is an interest to increase the digital component, but still at an experimental level,” she concluded.