Born New Yorker Alan Orlic is living proof that love for one’s homeland grows proportionally with distance, just as idealization does, which is why he decided to move to Croatia, settle down with his family, and start his entrepreneurial journey here. However, Orlic is not a typical second-generation immigrant, as he did not visualize his Croatian life by the sea, ‘a grain of salt and a drop of wine’, which might have been logical considering that his parents are originally from Dalmatia; instead, he moved to the completely opposite side of the country, to Osijek, a city he only knew from friends’ stories. He liked those stories so much that he decided to put down ‘his roots’ there.
Romanticized Croatia
– We moved our life from New York to the Slavonian metropolis, and we had never been here before; we came into the unknown – recalled Orlic, who is now very satisfied with his decision, and both he and his family are in love with the city that provides them with everything they dreamed of in America. He dreamed of his business, which is why he decided to start ‘something of his own’ immediately after arriving, and that ‘something’ was a franchise business, specifically an English school for children.
There were, he cannot forget, quite a few expected and unexpected challenges; sorting out documents and various paperwork took longer than he thought, as did finding a space, but everything somehow fell into place, worked out, and the franchise proved to be the right choice, as he says he had all the support and knowledge from those who developed the system from the start. Once the business stabilized in Osijek, after three years, they began to expand and opened another branch in Slavonski Brod, but after so much time spent in Croatia, the romanticized image of his homeland began to change somewhat.
– When Adriana started kindergarten, I began to notice differences in the way people in Croatia perceive education. There is blind faith in a system that is full of gaps. The American school system is not perfect either, but according to my experience, it had a different dimension. The difference is that students in the USA have more practical work; for example, we experimented in chemistry, biology, and physics at school, and we had a similar approach in our English school, and then I realized that if children can meaningfully learn English through well-conducted workshops that they attend only once a week at our school, they can also learn about the world around them, about nature, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, and thus the idea for Tinker Labs was born in 2016 – explained Orlic.
