Starting a business is never easy, especially from a teenager’s perspective. At EA – The Entrepreneurship Academy we value our students and their chosen paths towards becoming successful entrepreneurs. With this being said, we invite you to take a look at Sabin’s approach in terms of what establishing a business really looks like through a 20-year-old student, and also what challenges can be encountered along the way.
As far as I am concerned, starting a business is one of the most beautiful things I encountered up to this point in my life.
My name is Sabin Petrea and I’m a second-year student at EA – The Entrepreneurship Academy. I decided to share my story due to my passion for the business environment, and for helping people in deciding to follow their dreams, regardless of their history, or knowledge. All of my life I was a sportsman, a very talented handball player with a lot of potentials. During my career, I got injured and lost the ability to play any competitive sports. From that point, my whole life took an unexpected shift and I knew that I needed to shift my focus towards something else.
During high school, I changed my decision many times regarding my future and the path I want to follow. In the 11th grade, I started to grow a passion for streetwear. I started looking for hoodies and different pieces with designs that would have an interesting and original look. After some time, I started to feel frustrated because the clothes I was aiming for were supposed to be different, out of the ordinary – I couldn’t find that.
That’s when I decided to start designing clothes, creating worth buying, long-term wearing products. Only after I started working on the idea, I realized I didn’t know anything about the fashion industry, this mobilizing me to start documenting the things I needed to learn before starting this business. After many great lectures, I realized that this is the field I want to profess in. Being still in high school made me drop the business idea, for the time being, starting after finishing with the exams and getting accepted into EA – The Entrepreneurship Academy.
Starting university was a very happy moment in my life because I could finally jump on establishing my business. The first thing that I did was setting up the legal part of the business. It took me approximately 30 hours of work because I wanted to do every document by myself. I started working on a Tuesday and Friday afternoon I picked up the SRL papers from ONRC.
Being a student-entrepreneur is a pretty hard job because you want to attend all the courses, but you also want to maintain your customers happy. So every day you have to juggle between courses and business. One of the things that made me realize that I like what I’m doing, is that while I’m attending a course, whenever I get a piece of information I create a scenario and imagine the outcoming of the implementation.
Another important aspect that made me realize this is my career is the fact that, before the pandemic started, we were having courses from 9:30 AM to 1 PM, a break until 2:30 PM, followed by another course until 6 PM. At the end of the day, I would find myself very energetic, keen to learn more, and never feeling like I was studying. My brain would go like “Are we actually done for today? It’s just been a few minutes”, but in fact, a whole day had passed and I couldn’t even realize it. One thing I recommend to future students is coming prepared in advance with at least one business idea. This is a great helper at the beginning of university, enabling you not to lose any second, but to start following your dreams. Another important aspect to take into consideration when starting EA is fully attending all of the courses provided by the university. There is a lot of information that you must not lose, together with the opportunity of meeting the experts teaching our community. It enables you to create new connections and maybe successful partnerships within this amazing entrepreneurial world.
SOOTH made me realize that having a business is extremely difficult. You must be there any second, prepared for anything, making sure everything goes as planned. At first, I thought that having a business is a piece of cake. Not long after I started to develop my first business, I realized that wanting to be an entrepreneur, versus actually working upon becoming one are two completely different realities. After the first month of having a business, I concluded that you need to work 24/7 to succeed and achieve the milestones you have set for both yourself and your business. If I would compare my life before and after university, in other words, before and after starting a business, I would say that my thinking moved towards a very analytical one. All the decisions that I’m making now are very hard because I must think in advance.
The decision-making processes that I’ve managed to develop so far enabled me to think on a long-term basis, thus helping me to enlarge my vision and grow my business. This was all based on both personal and entrepreneurial firsthand experiences this faculty enabled me to confront.
By the time I finish this university I want to have at least 3 projects in my portfolio. At the current moment, I’m developing a streetwear clothing brand that is focused on delivering qualitative and long-lasting apparel. Right now I don’t necessarily know what my next project will consist of. It will definitely be something that matches the institution I’m learning at and the people I am surrounded by. Soon, I plan on opening a business that will have a powerful impact on nowadays’ society. I’m going to take advantage of all the things that the university has to offer, starting from contacts, continuing with receiving great support, finishing with the opinion of all the experts.
All in all, being an entrepreneur takes a lot of work, but if you are passionate about it, everything will come naturally.
Stay tuned at:
https://www.instagram.com/sooth.ro/
https://www.facebook.com/sooth.ro
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabin-petrea-87665220b/
Sabin Petrea, 2nd year, founder of SOOTH
