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Meeting Andrei Rosca is a must have for entrepreneurs eager to succeed and find inspiration in other success stories. I first met Andrei in the digital space by reading his blog. Four years later, I keep on reading his articles, attending his mentoring sessions and closely learning from his talks in well-know Romanian conferences.

He started his entrepreneurial career at 17 and has kept on going strong ever since. Now, at 27, Andrei manages his own Social Media agency: Spada. Curious by nature and entrepreneurial by heart, I asked Andrei a couple of questions eager to know more about him and his experience so far. As always, enjoy!

Briefly, for our readers who are not familiar with your agency, what is Spada all about?

Spada is a social media agency focused on building communities (Facebook Fanpages, Linkedin Pages and Groups, company blogs etc) and deploying social media campaigns on Facebook, Linkedin, blogs and other emerging social media channels. We have a powerful focus on generating and reporting measurable results for all of our campaigns, because we strongly believe that there is more to social media than “just being there”.

What are the most important principles you abide by in order to ensure an efficient communication process through the social-media channels?

Well, social media is firstly about transparency. So we believe in two-way-communications and direct, sincere dialogues with the target. Social media is also about listening, so most of the time we try to listen carefully before we take any action. And we believe those principles apply not only to any social media channel, but also to any type of healthy communication between two people.

Could you please give us a few examples of successful social-media “solutions” that you’ve implemented so far in business campaigns you’ve worked on?

This is a short question, with a very very long answer. I’ll keep it short. We’ve succesfully used Facebook and blogs to generate leads and sales for magazines and also for restaurants or business workshops. We also used Linkedin to generate leads for B2B companies and, of course, we’ve designed and deployed Facebook applications with very different objectives, from building a prospect database or raising the number of email subscribers, to reaching a very high number of targeted people in a short time.

Many companies have blogs, but they do not know how to effectively use them as a communication tool and convert awareness into business leads. On the other hand, your blog has a number of prestigious awards, what’s your secret? 

In fact, more important than the number of awards is the fact that our blog really does generate leads. And the secret is very simple: it wad built to generate leads! This is one of the main reasons we have a company blog. In fact, anyone following Spada in social media will easily see that we never open a communication channel “just because”. We only do it if we know that our target can be touched through that channel, and if we know that this will increase revenue. Because in our opinion, that’s what marketing people do. Directly or indirectly, they should drive sales.

You’ve had a lot of entrepreneurship experiences so far. You started your first start-up when you were only 17 years old. How did it all begin and how did you find the courage and the necessary resources to try that at an age when many young people have no idea what they’re going to do with their lives?

Courage is overrated. The courage-problem occurs when you feel you have a choice. When deep inside you feel that there is only one way you could go (though this is never true), then courage doesn’t matter. I always knew that I will have to build my own system, because clearly every other system around me was somehow flawed. Or so i thought. So, for me, there wasn’t a choice between the courageos entrepreneurial way or the other less courageous roads I could take. The choice was easy. The question was only HOW was I going to get where I wanted. And here I am, ten years later, still working to solve this.

Which are, in your opinion, the characteristics of a successful business? What matters most: the originality of the idea, the manager’s skills, the employees’ dedication or a combination of other factors?

I don’t believe in great ideas. I believe in great, near-perfect executions. I am also a people-person. I could happily spend my life watching and helping people grow, so from this point of view, I do believe that people are the most important asset of a company; although I’ve learned that if you put good people into bad systems, you’ll get bad results.

Last, but not the least important, I would say that the success of a business is mostly determined by the personal development of the entrepreneur leading it. In every guy leading a company there is a mix between a manager, an entrepreneur and an expert in something. Each of them is useful, none of them is sufficient, but I think succes comes from managing this triangle and knowing when to let each of the three step up and lead.

What piece of advice would you give to a young entrepreneur?

Work hard but never forget why you started doing this. If it was all about money, go for the money. If it was about social recognition, go for it. If it was about freedom, happiness or any other concept to hard to grasp, but clear enough to not let you sleep at night, I hope you’re following it. Else, contrary to how you might think of yourself, you haven’t built the system, the system has built you.

You’re a great book lover, the creator of bookblog.ro, president of Invictus Association, do you have any spare time left? 

Spare time? No, usually not. But I do have a lot of “free” time that I use in other ways than working. I draw, I run, I swim, I coach, I play chess, I take long walks and many more. In fact, I never work more than 7-8 hours a day. I’ve had my 18-hours-work-day for a time long enough to understand both the pros and cons that derive from it, no matter how passionate you are about what you’re doing (and I always was).

But if you want a more professional approach to this question, I don’t think great entrepreneurs should have to work 18 hours a day. If you’re doing it, you are either not efficient enough, or not living enough. It might sound harsh, but it’s just my way of looking at entrepreneurship.

We also love books and love getting to know more. Could you recommend a book on the challenges of setting a start-up for our readers?

The E-Myth Revisited – Michael Gerber. It will make your worlds spin.