I graduated from the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2000. Since then, I have attended and completed many other management and project management courses. As the COO of TotalSoft, I am in charge of all the company divisions and I am responsible for a turnover of €24 million, with profitability levels exceeding 20%. I have been holding this position since January 1st, 2012, and before that I was the director of Charisma ERP and the GM of TotalSoft Serbia.
An MBA had been on my to-do list for a long time, but it was only in the Summer of 2013 that I managed to get all the planets to align at work and at home so that I could allocate enough effort for the MBA.
The reasons are obvious: I have been practicing management for over 10 years, so I have amassed a lot of on-the-job experience. It was high time I synthesized all my knowledge in a more academic form and saw how others did this job.
The choice was very simple, as I had had long-going professional relationship with Tiffin University and I knew the level of professionalism they deliver. The fact that the program is entirely conducted with American professors weighed the heaviest. Moreover, Tiffin University held a very good position in the rankings.
For me, graduating from the program meant reaching an indispensable milestone in my career. I can now say that, yes, it marked a significant change in the way I approach business situations and in my professional perspectives.
There were two very important components which I added to my portfolio: I learned to ‘see through’ a company’s financial reports very quickly and I understood how important the non-financial metrics of a business are.
Balancing work, family and school was extremely complicated. It is extremely complicated to make an omelet without breaking some eggs. You will inevitably fall behind on work tasks, turn in school assignments late, you start speaking English in meetings where there are only Romanians and so on. It’s a lot of fun!
My personal life was not sacrificed during my MBA; that would be too strong a word. I worked more. I believe the hardest was seeing all my friends go to the seaside on weekends while I was going to school. In fact, the word weekend disappeared from my vocabulary for two years. Graduating from this program meant reaching an indispensable milestone in my career.
Daniel Mateescu, COO of TotalSoft, the largest ERP-type software producer in Romania, is the graduate of the EMBA program at Tiffin University.
Article published in Ghid MBA
