Lately we got a chance to interview one very inspiring personality, Māris Simanovičs, SSE Riga graduate (class of 2001). His story is a story of a true success, moreover, he knows about investing and consulting as much as needed in order to be a CEO and run his own business.

His student life started when he was 17, and his career started at some point during the studies. Māris had numerous jobs while being a student at SSER, for instance, during Financial Economics he worked in 2 places and managed to pass the course from the first attempt. The only course he actually failed was Marketing.

After graduation he worked in LMT (Latvian Mobile Phone), which was a really good shot, since being a financial analyst in an excellent company opens horizons of a real life experience. Additionally, Māris with some of his SSE Riga friends established a project connected with SMS marketing, which in fact turned out to be his first failure. Apparently, it was too early for the market as people weren’t able to receive a lot of spam yet. In addition, technologies were costly. Still this failure brought some experience to him, for instance, how to make an “annual report of nothing”, or understanding that one have to lose money in order to make them later.

That wasn’t the only failure he met on his way! He got involved into the fashion business. It was a retail shop, and as Māris commented on it “You know, there are 4 Ps in marketing. So we had none of them.” Though, the funniest thing about it was that he and his companions managed to sell the shop straight before its bankruptcy.
Another experience he faced was investing. He and his friend, a financier and a lawyer (which is a perfect match according to Māris, by the way), made a huge investment in real estate in the centre of Riga, and managed to sell it just before the crisis. It was an extreme experience, since they took an incredibly big loan, and its interest was supported by the rental payment.

Māris was running for the position of the chairman of the board in Latvenergo and appeared among 3 finalists chosen out of 46 applicants. Although he didn’t get the position in the end, he said that the process of selection itself was very interesting and valuable as he made a lot of contacts.

As for now, he is the CEO of Green Dot Latvia (Latvijas Zaļais punkts) and Eko Investors. Additionally, he owns a business in the consulting industry. And you can be pretty sure that he won’t stop at this point because his life story is all about setting goals, which is hard to achieve, sometimes even impossible.

Māris gave to us some advice on how to set goals: even when you think something is not realistic enough, don’t give up. Also don’t push too hard: if you feel something isn’t working and moving ahead, let it go, because in the end you might find out that it is just a wrong way of acting. As to more material advice, Māris recommended to get additional education in the legal field. Although the education at SSE is very valuable, law might be very useful in the business world (Māris himself received a Master’s degree at the University of Latvia).

The last piece of advice from Māris is not to be a smartass in the office during your first job experiences. He said that only after 5 years after graduation he started to understand how silly it is when a fresh graduate comes to a workplace and is all cocky. Arrogance can only lead to lost opportunities.

To conclude, we might say that we were extremely inspired by Māris and his story. He built himself. He is for sure a person who thinks “out of the box” and “knows the stuff”. We are very thankful to him for his interview and would like to wish him a lot of other adventures on his path of a true success.

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