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Venture Connect Foundation organises the sixth meeting of the Venture Mentoring program, which started in March 2012. Every month a Venture Connect mentor will meet entrepreneurs in order to come up with answers and solutions to the business problems they encounter.

Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez, Corporate Affairs Officer at GECAD Group, will moderate the sixth Venture Mentoring meeting on the 15^th of October at HUB Bucharest, starting at 15.00, dealing with an interesting topic for all Romanian entrepreneurial projects: communication and branding.

Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez has a wide experience of over 8 years in communication and branding for tech, e-commerce and financial services companies, but also personal branding. Her passion for technology started while working as a specialized IT&C journalist at Ziarul Financiar. In 2004, she accepted the challenge to switch roles and joined Radu Georgescu’s initiative as PR specialist for GECAD. In only a month, Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez took over the entire GECAD rebranding process, while also being in charge of launching new brands like ePayment, Axigen and later Avangate. Between 2010 and 2011 she worked on transforming ePayment into PayU as the brand consultant and presently she continues her collaboration with the financial services company as its PR & Communication Advisor. As communication advisor she has also worked for other technology, public facilities and auto production companies.

“I received the Venture Connect invitation to join the Venture Mentoring program with huge enthusiasm. This kind of sessions benefits the local, young entrepreneurs’ community greatly, by offering an objective, new vision for solving the problems of start-up owners. The meeting on the 15^th of October has the purpose to highlight the importance of communication and branding for a company, be it start-up or an already actively engaged company on the market. It also aims to explain certain prejudices regarding communication and marketing in the technological branch”, says Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez, Corporate Affairs Officer GECAD Group.

The session on the 15^th of October, entitled „Communication and branding for start-ups” has the following debate topics on the agenda: brand identity and positioning, the importance of product branding, company brand and shaping a powerful personal brand. The meeting moderated by Iuliana is the first of the Venture Mentoring series endorsed by Publica publishing house, by  giving out three marketing and branding books for the most active attendees.

“We conceived the Venture Mentoring series with the desire to be close to Romanian start-up community throughout an entire year and at the same time, to build an environment for continuous learning and improvement devoted to entrepreneurs. So far, participants have identified, through Venture Mentoring many benefits: from practical solutions for the problems presented during the meeting to networking and the acquisition of new clients. We are happy to construct a community of young, ambitious entrepreneurs around Venture Mentoring”, states Ana Maria Andronic, Senior Associate Biriş Goran and Venture Connect Co-Founder.

So far, 80 companies have participated to Venture Mentoring meetings with mentors such as Radu Georgescu (Chairman GECAD Group), Ana Maria Andronic (Senior Associate Biriş Goran law house), Marius Ghenea (FIT Distribution President and business angel), Dragoş Rouă (online antrepreneur) and Peter Barta (Post-Privatization Foundation Director). There are four more meetings planned until the end of the year.

“The Venture Mentoring sessions are an extraordinary opportunity, not to be missed! For a moderate fee, you can spend many hours in a friendly environment, with extremely valuable people from whom you’ll certainly get critical information for your business’ development. For Smart Bill, the Venture Mentoring sessions contributed not only to improving our business strategy, but also to growing the number of our partners”, asserts Mircea Căpăţînă, Co-founder and Marketing Manager Smart Bill.

To participate in the sixth Venture Mentoring meeting, please enrol by visiting www.ventureconnect.ro. The meeting will take place at HUB Bucharest, which will also be the host of the VentureConnect event on the 27th of November. The ticket costs 150 RON.