Welcome to Atraktos, the "Megala Pos" show, Founders' Edition, powered by Endeavor. Hello! My name is Pericles. I'm Maria. I am Anna Maria. And I am Sotiris. Nice to meet you guys, I'm Gianna and this is Kotsos. Nice to meet you. Tell us your story please. My name is Gianna, as I told you. I grew up in Thessaloniki. My parents were not really strict. Although I needed a lot of adults to manage me when I was little, as I was very lively. It may not seem like it now, but I was very lively back then. I was also not a very good student. I didn't go from school to university. And so I went to a private school in Thessaloniki and studied marketing. Then I joined the company my dad had with his brother and his cousins, which is a company that produces canned fish, sardines, tuna, tuna salad. I hope you are eating something. Fish, nothing? We eat fish. Okay. We're on a good truck. This is were I'm currenty as well, after 20 years. When your family found out that will you continue the family business, what was their reaction? I believe they were happy. It is certainly very difficult to be in a family business - basically it is very difficult to work with your family. It's really cool because they're people you know and we in our own business are luck to have as owners four people of the family, so we are together with our cousins, we are a very big family. It's very nice to work all together but at the same time it is a bit difficult because you have to maintain the balance which would not be needed in some other work environment. For example, my dad had to take a step back, so that I can take a step forward as I also am the youngest kid of the family. I think he wouldn't be very happy at first. Not because it was me, but because he too obviously understood that he was growing older that he has to take a step back, that the new generation is coming to take over, so I believe the main emotion was happiness and sadness, he was happy for me and sad for himself. Is there a person who inspires you currently or did in the past? Has that person changed? I think the inspiration comes from my parents, they were both business people So our every day gatherings and especially on the weekend were always business conversations, so we were getting something both me and my sister from these family gatherings and each one of us has taken a different track in her life. But my mentors were definitely my parents. When you finished University and came back to Athens did your father ask you to take over the company, or was it your decision? The truth is that I grew up in a home where all Iheard about was this job. I liked the idea and I was dreaming of the day that I would start working there. Never did I imagine I would also lead the company after a few years. Everything happened much faster that I was expecting. Surely my father didn't push me into this job but he was also trying to figure out if I could actually do this job, because on one hand it's a family business, but on the other hand, it's still a business which has to make profit, independently whether your kid works there or some other employee. So if the company wasn't family founded do you think it would have the same success? I believe its family profile is very important so I think it would be as successful as it is now and I think that growing up in such an environment, would make me a different employee to someone else, that is if I worked somewhere else, I wouldn't work in a different way. But it's also something personal and if one has grown up listening about a certain initiative they have more responsibility and willingness to succeed as our company has been successful the last hundred years. You love the company more. Naturally. You also spoke about goals and being successful. How do you think one becomes successful? With a lot, a lot of work. Success in not a one-man concept. Usually there is one person that everyone knows, but there is a whole team behind them which makes success possible. When you have set a goal, there is a team that pushes efforts to make it happen. I'm not making this happen on my own, of course. So one thing to wisely choose your teammates and by covering all the range all the cycle of information, you end up getting to your goal and being successful. Has your career been influenced by the fact that your a woman? That's a question we heat a lot the past years. The past years women are active professionals and equal members of the labor market. I don't this my gender has influenced my career by making it harder or easier. However, I'm positive that during my career I felt that certain people doubted me because I am a woman which only gave me more power and courage to live up to these conditions over the next years. You started this company during the economic crisis didn't that scare you in case it didn't work out? The truth is I would love this company to have been my idea, but unfortunately and at the same time fortunately it goes way back to my grandfather you was working with food. Our grandparents had a food importing company so they didn't produce the food in Greece, they imported it from abroad. And my father's generation made the factory in the 90's in Kilkis. I took over the company, became General Manager during the time that the crisis was actually happening, it was a hard time, there were many challenges - and challenges are not at least for me, something negative, only positive. Where do you see your company's profit in 5-10 years from now? The last years, we were a company that was making steadily 28-30 millions, with some higher points and some lower points over the years. But last year with much joy we managed to reach 38 millions versus 31 millions at 2021, so in the next ten years we see our future close to 45-50 millions. We hope and we strive for this goal. Is there a balance between your personal and professional life? It's true that this is an every day challenge. There are times that such balance doesn't exist but there are also periods that I manage greatly and I have managed to have a very good work-life balance the last years which has been very hard to achieve. Sometimes I lose it, because not all months and days are similar. So I would say that overall, I do have achieved it - and I say this with much pride. How did you do that? There was a period of time in my life that this balance didn't exist, so my professional life was working against my personal, because the opposite would almost never happen. By creating the right team at my workplace and by having people that can help you each by their own role to close a project or manage your every day life, that makes the stress much less, so one needs less time if they have a team that works collectively, instead of choosing to work alone - so this way my work life became much lighter and my personal life now exists, so you balance it out much easier. Why is volunteering important? Volunteering has been crucial over my career. All these years I'm a member of YMCA. It's a christian team of young people in Thessaloniki. With which I was going to summer camps as a kid for many years, these were the best summers of my life. And I have made some amazing friends through this camp. The same organisation brought us to the center of Thessaloniki helping outin various volunteering activities, whether that is kitchen soups for people in need, or by helping single parent families - and by the camp we ended up becoming trainers of the kids by going through this whole procedure and after being trained. So I would say volunteering is one of the most fundamental elements and should be one of the basic elements to any childhood because it teaches us the worth of offering to anyone that has a bigger need than we do. How do you think our qualities define us? At 100%. Our qualities are founded in our family and the school environment where each of us ends up. So the qualities given by my family were of course lots of love, kindness - and that translates to my adult life in volunteering, the urge to offer to a more vulnerable social group and definitely the merit of justice the foundation which I have been taught by my parents. This is what I would like to share. Thank you! Thank you! You explained everything very nicely. I'm glad. Since you like it and you have also heard so many people, thatt's only positive. Thank you! You're free to go.