About
Cristina Balaceanu
The name goes by Cristina and I’m originally from Romania. At the age of 9, I moved along with my family to the beautiful country of Italy where I was eventually brought up. Learning new things within the niche I loved was something I’ve always enjoyed. Throughout high school and university, I took an educational path in accounts, finance, and business administration. When I was 18, I started my first part-time work experience while studying at UniCredit Leasing SPA, and they offered me a full-time job within the company once graduated from high school – it was indeed the beginning of my corporate career!
My Story
Malta
After six years of invaluable work experience, I decided to go for something new within both my life and career. I wanted a new challenge, and for the first time in my life I decided to move to a new country, completely alone with no job and a brief knowledge of English. It was very challenging to say the least, but I was so determined to succeed and indulge myself into the beautiful Maltese culture.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that’s totally fine! My first work experience in Malta was at Popeye’s Village, a former 1980’s film set used in the musical ‘Popeye’. Nowadays, it has been turned into a theme park village, where I managed to land my first job as an animator. It was in the beginning of the Christmas season, so my manager came up with the funny idea of dressing me up as Santa’s Elf. I mean, he had a point in doing so as I had no prior experience in animation and barely spoke any English.
Fast forward nine months later and I became the Animation Supervisor, leading a team of animators as well as a number of internship students. In just a short space of time, I levelled up from Santa’s Elf to creating the programs, dance routines, scripts of shows and selling videos/pictures to many tourists. I showed a lot of ambition to learn and grow, which earned me another role within the company to handle the promotional materials in order to attract more people into visiting the theme park. It was indeed my first feel of success in Malta.
When I turned 27, I felt the need to get back to a corporate position and continue developing my managerial skills. It was at that time when fate got me in touch with two Israeli investors, where I was challenged to create and develop a printing company for them in Malta.
After a year of hard work, I had proudly built the basics of the company. One thing that was of great personal satisfaction was the fact that after just a year, the business was overflowing with a chain of repeated customers and long-term relationships – something which was showing all those involved that we were heading in the right direction.
Business Coaching
Malta
101 Business Coaching Sessions
Experience
My Journey in Business Coaching
My first experience in Business Coaching started back in 2018. As a client of a start-up fitness studio in Malta, I could notice that the business was sometimes lacking proper planning and promotion. After proposing myself to help, we indulged in long discussions about what could be done. Along with the business owners, we concluded that the financial aspect was somewhat disorganized, as well as the prices and packages they were offering.
Exactly here was the start of my journey as a Business Coach, where I understood that with my skills, I could be of great help to similar entities. Results kicked in after the first months, as I was trusted with all the strategies, planning, and restructuring of all the different areas within the business.
A few months later, my brother (who was still living in Italy) proposed for me to join his firm. As a first impression, everything looked to be working smoothly – well, up until we reviewed some numbers from previous years. There, things started to look a bit ambiguous. I took the lead and personally hired a team of professionals, and together we discovered a large sum of money being deviated from the company and hidden by one of the partners. Together with my team, we managed to help in regaining his share from the profits, as well as part from his business partner.
Additional Experience
Back to Malta
Following that, in 2019, I moved back to Malta and discovered that the Fitness Studio I first coached had scaled and opened another studio in a second location. It was a pleasure for me to assist again in the planning and coordination of new Personal Trainers recruits, hire a videographer to present and advertise the business growth, as well as introducing an Internship student into the company to keep inputting data without any extra investment from the business owner.
A few months later, one of my digital printing clients Hirise Group, expressly asked me to work together towards his business goal, and the necessary steps to take to achieve it. We collaborated for more than 6 months, and the results that kicked in continued to show me the difference my kind of help can make. Here, I continued to prove to myself how much I enjoyed seeing my work helping other businesses grow and flourish.
In this case, satisfying is just an understatement!
Another great experience was working with WhiteFrost in July 2020, when I was assigned to coordinate the workflow during the company’s transition period. Along the way, I was also trusted to smoothen the administration, social media communications, and customer care service. Throughout my time, I had successfully refined the recruitment process, training new employees, overseeing wages as well as the cash flow records.
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