with Maria Szandrach

Instead of becoming a therapist right away, you went into finance and strategy first with Thomas Reuters, which is a technology company, the McKinsey, which is one of the top consulting companies in the world.

So in the fact that you got in there just as prestige.

So what pulled you in that direction?

I think I maybe early on discovered that I like a lot of different things, but I'm not maybe like the best in any in particular compared to like other kids at school.

So sometimes they would, let's say do like, I don't know, gymnastics or, or something like since a child or play a particular instrument and then go to a lot of competitions and sort of like their path was like career path was like pretty much set from, from when they were young.

And I was, um, thinking as a child that, um, that because I have so many of those different classes and I can like, um, like find the common language of people in like the.

horse stable and people in the field harmony and all of those like very different contexts, right? And types of people and personalities.

I generally figured that I really liked the sort of like complex problems that are requiring like aligning, let's say of a lot of different people, understanding their intentions and their needs.

And sort of like combining a lot of skills, understanding a lot of, let's say like parallel patterns, right? And how things connect rather than specializing deep in one thing.

So that was definitely guiding my choices when I was looking for careers that could fit.

And entrepreneurship is definitely a very strong fit because you basically need to sort of make sense out of chaos and solve the problem that no one was able to, let's say, solve before in that way.

And consulting companies are also to some degree fitting, let's say, this profile or such predispositions, because there you also end up working with a company, with a client who could be any industry, any country.

So you sort of get emerged in this very new environment and you need to understand what is the problem.

So a little bit like therapy in some ways, because you really need to like understand how this whole like replay a detective, which also I think a lot of clinicians identify with.

So understand kind of like, so let's say a company comes with a problem, presenting problem and says like, oh, we cannot, for example, figure out this one market or like we just see that there are sales fall.

And then as a consultant, you basically need to go and talk to those different departments, understand like what are their Not only let's say like numbers, but also like the different interests, right? There was like some sort of like politics in a bigger company.

Everyone has like some sort of interest that might be conflicting with other teams.

And then you need to like sort of disentangle this whole bundle and start like working on possible solutions and then work with the client on solving the problem.

I just found it very interesting.

I was also considering at some point being a therapist, but I also really loved this kind of business aspect and, and numbers.

So I sort of like found that, I guess, a job that was like merging the, the two.

I, I just love how you just compared being a consulting and being a therapist, like, cuz I've been doing consulting for many, many years and I've never put that analogy together, but yeah, there's a lot of similarities.

Yeah.

Right.

like culture, economics, like what's holding you back? What are the obstacles?