For years, she built a successful career in marketing, sales, and the IT industry, held a director position, and had what is typically considered a secure and successful career path. Then she decided to start over. This is a brief outline of the story of Ana Milas, who left the corporate world and opened Figura Bistro in Zagreb’s Srednjaci, a concept focused on healthy and nutritionally balanced food.
‘I thought I knew what it meant to run a business. Then I opened a restaurant,’ she recently wrote on LinkedIn, and this clash of experience and a new industry is the starting point of a new episode of Lider’s podcast. Podcast host Mislav Kuleš talks with Milas about what happens when a successful manager in the corporate world becomes a beginner again, what it does to the business ego, and whose advice is worth listening to. They also reveal what it looks like to open a bistro, whether healthy food can be a serious and scalable business, and if customers are really willing to pay for what they claim to want.
Milas also discusses the advantages and burdens of entering the hospitality industry as an outsider, how her marketing experience helped her build Figura, and how much her personal brand has become part of the business model.
And after everything she knows about hospitality today, would Ana Milas make the same leap into the unknown again? The answer is provided in the new episode of Lider’s podcast available on YouTube, and the most interesting clips can be followed on Lider’s social profiles.
