2014-05-04

CEOs Blog Post: Tooliers – The GPS for Your Business Success!

By Ozana Giusca, CEO + Founder of Tooliers @ Tooliers Inc

Tooliers is THE platform with business growth tools to help small companies get BIG, by performing a diagnosis to identify their real problems, and undertaking a growth program, where they receive tailored step-by-step actions Tools are offered in an organized and structured manner, to solve real problems.


What’s the vision you follow with Tooliers?

The vision for Tooliers is to become THE platform with smart tools for small and mid-sized business owners. To help small businesses get big, with tools instead of professional services, in an organized and structured manner. To leverage technology to make the best practices and latest business theories available to small business owners, for a fraction of consulting fees, with same or better results.

Tooliers is also a marketplace for consultants, coaches and trainers to make their strategic tools available to small businesses.

Tooliers will offer tools as a service, fully automated. Additionally, it will offer growth programs, where various tools will perform part of the job, and where the human touch will be present only where automation cannot solve the problem.

How did this vision develop over time?
It all started with my consulting business being stuck and not growing. I went to a course, and I learnt so many tactics and techniques to grow my business. But then, I said to myself it would be more valuable if I apply all those techniques on our clients. This is how Business Lens emerged, as a tool to identify the growth potential of any small business. The tools became automated, as I wanted to deliver the same quality results to all our clients, regardless of the consultant working on the project. Then we created tools with each module of the tool.  Now we have tools on strategy, marketing, sales, HR, culture, motivation, innovation and even the leader herself. We look at everything that maters for the growth of the business.

We then put the platform underneath all these tools to make them available online, and create a much larger impact in the world, by offering such tools to all small businesses, globally.
Then users told us that it is indeed helpful for them to know where they need to focus on to grow their business, but wanted to know HOW. This is how the Growth Programs emerged.


What is your most important competence to develop xx and what do you consider to be your most important resource?
I have a broad understanding of business, and have worked with small businesses for 14 years now. I have seen what is stopping them from growing, and I have also seen the ones that make it. I also know most of the best practices used by the large companies to achieve their success, and I am now able to adapt them to the small businesses. I can easily identify the gaps within any business, and provide solutions and recommendations for massive growth.  I have a well-developed ability to observe and adapt things to growing any business.

I have written a book with 101 tactics to take the company to the next level – this is a great asset that Tooliers can leverage upon. Such tactics are the basis of lead generation and lead nurturing for Tooliers, in various forms and shapes: emails, blog posts, videos, slide shares, iTunes, social media posts, etc.


Why will Tooliers hit the market?
Small business owners have so many problems, and not always the solutions. They are afraid to even think of using consultants, as they believe consultants are expensive and don’t offer much value. Tooliers is the no brainer alternative, as it offers solutions with automated tools, and it only costs 5% of the typical consulting services. So clearly it is worth a try. Once business owners use it, they will realize the power it gives them, and will stick to it.

The impact of Tooliers is the same that booking.com, opodo or expedia had for the travel industry.  They made it more efficient. Or the same as ATMs lead to increased efficiency of the banks by replacing a large part of the cashiers’ jobs (that did not bring much value added).  Tooliers is slowly going to replace brain work with tool work.

Author: Ozana Giusca & Salomé Wagner

Profiles
Tooliers, GPS for Business Success = Business Growth Tools

Ozana Giusca CEO: Small Business Growth Expert.

About this blog:
When I joined 42Angelitos as professional recently, I was impressed by the founder’s entrepreneurial spirit. Though I am used to work in a start-up environment, the case in our team seems different to me. So I decided to let the CEO reply to a set of questions with the aim to understand where their unbreakable enthusiasm comes from. Their answers are just inspiring!


2014-02-24

Our CEOs Blog Post. Vlad Bodi, Founder + Happy Executive Officer @ Hppy Apps Inc

Hppy Apps is an employee engagement software that enables companies to track and manage employee happiness, through mood tracking and anonymous feedback. Vlad Bodi founded Hppy in 2013. 

A few months ago, Hppy launched the feature of anonymous conversations between management and employees. Just after 3 months, more than 300 conversations are going on via the platform.

What’s needed to make the vision of employee happiness come true? Vlad tells us:

What’s the vision you follow with Hppy?
“Help companies improve employee happiness at work, by using strategies driven by employees. We live in a world where users shape businesses, and employees are one of the main users of a business. They live it. But what drives employee happiness is very hard to pin point. There are so many factors influencing it, that there is no one cure for all. We aim to help companies understand what drives their inner happiness, in order to align HR strategy with employees.”

How did this vision develop over time?
“We started by aiming our tool to online communities, but shifted to enterprise focus in Q4 last year. There is potential in this market and even though there still is some resistance, we see people like the concept. Who doesn’t want to be happy in the end? We are seeing that with a small user count we are able to gather quite some data, so we are looking in the future at BI information opportunities.”

What is your most important competence to develop Hppy and what do you consider to be your most important resource?
“The passion I have for team culture and happiness is surely the most important one for Hppy. I have built up hands-on experience and knowledge in this field in the last years, and I love using it every day. My most important resource is time. Time is invaluable, and while anyone else can give you anything in return, no one can ever give back time. For Hppy, it’s also time. Every day someone works on Hppy, or uses Hppy is an investment for life. Those moments, belong to us for life. You might have expected me to say team or people here, but the reason I didn’t is in the semantics. I never liked considering people as resources. It sounds wrong.”

Why will Hppy hit the market?
“As we come out (running currently) from the industrial age, people start paying more attention to their lives. Worklife is a big part of our lives, as we spend in average about 5500 full days working in our life time. We should make sure they are memorable. While there are solutions out there for feedback management or employee engagement, we will make sure we add the happiness dimension to the discussion between employees and managers. We don’t compete in our market, we complement it.”


Profiles:
Tracking and managing employee happiness.
Palo Alto, California

Vlad @vladbodi
Founder of Hppy. Passionate about life, adventure and happiness. .


Author: 
Salomé @SalomeWagner

2014-02-07

The CEOs Blog Post. Cosmin Ciobanu, CEO + Founder of Octonius.

“The strength to follow your path without fear, the absolute and undeniable trust in your feelings.” 
Cosmin

When I joined 42Angelitos as professional recently, I was impressed by the
founder’s entrepreneurial spirit. Though I am used to work in a start-up
environment, the case in our team seems different to me. So I decided to let the
CEO reply to a set of questions with the aim to understand where their
unbreakable enthusiasm comes from. Their answers are just inspiring!

The answers below come from Cosmin Ciobanu, the founder and CEO of Octonius.
Octonius offers file management over the cloud and is available in the AppStore.
Octonius 2 has been launched by mid January 2014. Just one week after launch,
Octonius already manages over4 million files from Dropbox, evernote and
GoogleDrive.

What’s the vision you follow with Octonius?
“Octonius started as a solution to our daily problems as freelancers & developers.
We needed a fast and simple way to track and manage your online files from your
phone. Most of the times we need to just check and review what the Team did,
send it back or collect a group of files from different clouds and share it with the
client. This was the basic idea.”

How did this vision develop over time?
“Octonius became a delightful experience for the power users. And we are
devoted to make it even better - there is a lot of work to do, making it easier to
track and manage online files, easier to collaborate without boundaries and
without extra efforts. It has to become effortless to manage files from your
mobile device. Work does not mean office in 2014.”

What is your most important competence to develop Octonius and what 
do you consider to be your most important resource? 
“The strength to follow your path without fear, the absolute and undeniable trust
in your feelings. No matter about your strengths as a founder, there is nothing
you can do without the A-Team. They are the enthusiasts and hard working
people that help you get the work done. Together - with family support and a
great team of founders - you are limitless.”

Why will Octonius hit the market?
“There are many solutions for cloud storage management, yet none of them were
able to keep things simple and to view the cloud storage from the users
perspective. You must think out of the box and in order to create value, you have
to simplify and reduce a lot. This is our mantra. Productivity doesn’t mean “more
features, more productive”, but keeping the focus on the user, on how your users
will work, how they wish to solve their problems. This is what Octonius is doing:
we take what is broken and we fix it.”


Profiles:
octoni.us
Fantabulous file management for the cloud. Palo Alto, California
@OctoniusApp

Cosmin Ciobanu
 @ciobanucos
Founder of Octoni.us, enthusiast entrepreneur, father, husband. ♥ ♜ Freiburg &
Rocamadour.
about.me/ciobanucos


Author: 
Salomé Wagner
about.me/SalomeWagner
@SalomeWagner