Sinisa Rudan is one of the millions of students around the world participating in Global Entrepreneurship Week Nov. 15-21. He is founder and owner of Magic Wand Solutions Studio, an IT consultancy and outsourcing company. Sinisa is also the multimedia editor of InfoM, a Journal of Information technology and multimedia systems. To learn more about Sinisa’s work, visit his website.

Sinisa Rudan

Magic Wand Solutions (MWS) offers clients innovative IT solutions — information systems, Web/CD presentations, Internet marketing campaigns — driven by everyday research, enriched with a multimedia approach.  I would like to share with others some principles that have helped MWS become the successful company it is today.

Entrepreneurs should find the balance between their personal mission and the mission of their business.  I choose clients and partners that offer challenging interdisciplinary projects that cry out for creativity. At MWS, we have several well-known organizations and celebrities as clients or partners in Serbia and around the world.

Most IT “geeks” have not finished studies that would give us management skills, and that is a problem. Even if you are the best in your field, you still need to make your team the best. I suggest attending a variety of business management seminars among others.  After receiving certification in internet business planning and marketing, we built several business plans for our projects and offered more complete solutions to clients, from development to marketing. Now we focus more on complex international projects.

Often beginners make the mistake of focusing only on production. Never devote less than 10 percent of your resources to research and improvement of your processes. Only this way can you provide cutting-edge solutions.

Although it is nice to be an IT consultancy and outsourcing company, it is even nicer to enjoy building our own products. At MWS, we are finding new ways to make our own ideas appeal to investors and customers.

I put myself 100 percent into a project, but I often see people who — after putting themselves 75 percent into it – say, “I have put enough of myself into this” or “I don’t want to lose more time!” The truth is, if the project doesn’t achieve success, then all of the invested time is lost.

We are taught to take business rationally, to focus on profit. However, I suggest that if you feel a particular project is good for you — even a non-commercial one — take it, because it will advance your skills or expand your network, possibly bringing you other, more-profitable projects. Choose projects you love. Do your business from the heart, and business comes to you!