Ivo Piskov

A few years ago, I briefly ran a Business consulting company based in Luxembourg, called PCL. While I am no longer with them, for the short time I was on board, we manged to turn the company from one of the many small local start-up adviser businesses, to one of the leading business advisory service providers in the heart of Europe.

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I was born in Bulgaria and I’ve loved Bulgarian yogurt since my childhood. I have also made my own yogurt ever since I can remember. When I moved to the US, I continued to do so because it was easy, economical, and most importantly, the yogurt I was making was far superior to the yogurts on the market. As it turned, a lot of people who tried my yogurt thought so too. So when more and more of them started asking for the starter so they can make yogurt themselves, I had one of those ‘a-ha!’ moments and set up a small online business around selling that starter. Fast forward to today, the same online business still exists. It produces and delivers the same great Bulgarian yogurt starter, which makes the world’s best yogurt, to clients in 78 countries (and counting).

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While I studied, worked and lived in the US, I was fortunate to brush elbows, shake hands, work with and side by side, have drinks, share loughs, and learn from the best in many industries: Jeff Bezos, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sidney Frank, Larry Ellison, Jay Abraham, Zig Ziglar, Warren Buffet, Jay Z, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Aniston, Anne Hathaway, Ema Watson, the list can go on.

I am an old-school Wall Street banker with 20+ years of experience in finance, IT, economics, marketing and sales. A part of it I accumulated during my years at Goldman Sachs, where I looked after the strategic development of several of the main bank’s business lines. I like to use the phrase old-school, because I was with Goldman before, during, and after the financial crisis so I can say I’ve seen some good times and some bad times.

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I am a vivid whisky enthusiast. I have a nice e (and constantly dwindling) collection of various single malts and blends. I’ve been a part of the whisky scene and milieu in New York, London, Islay, Luxembourg, Sofia, etc. for as long as I can remember. I love hanging out at the Brandy Library in Tribeca (NYC), the Boisdale in London (the one adjacent to Chelsea), and the entire island of Islay (Scotland) especially in May when their whisky festival is. People often ask me about my favorite dram, which is yet to be discovered but I have a special place in my heart for Caol Isla rare auld editions.

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A few years ago, I teamed up with a long time whisky expert, and we turned our passion for whisky into a profitable whisky online business, that allowed him to expand his whisky sales and tasting brick-and-mortar company into an internationally recognized online whisky business.

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I’ve been a MENSA member since a young age. Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is open to people who score at or above the 98th percentile on a standardized, supervised IQ test. My IQ score was 168 when I tested. They say that your IQ goes down with age so I am not sure how relevant that is anymore.

I’ve been fascinated by the Internet ever since the Internet came into our lives. I remember when Netscape Navigator ruled the world and it took a good 5 minutes to load a text page with a single image, and that was before dial-up sped things up! Those days are now long gone but my passion for all things web is still as alive as it was back then. And as you might have guessed, I have turned that passion into an ever expanding online business. It started in the late 90s with creating websites for a handful of clients, and has since then turned into a large scale international online business that provides hassle-free support and all-round care for business, personal and eCommerce websites.

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I have been fortunate to be around, be involved, and experience firsthand the birth and growth of companies and services, which are nowadays synonymous with the Internet – Facebook, Google, bitly, Instagram, etc. An interesting fact — I was a part of a small group at Brown, who were the first people outside of Harvard to get their hands on, explore, and sign up for a new social network called The Facebook. In fact, my Facebook ID was a 3 digit number (FB have since then changed their IDs format several times). Many of my colleagues and friends from college are still at top executive positions at FB, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle, etc.

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I’ve practiced and applied my online business developing strategies in over 400 industries. Not all of those have been for profit. I have done a lot of pro-bono work as well. For example, I helped develop my school’s alumni association from 3 scattered groups that met occasionally, to an international non-profit association with 27 active clubs in 13 countries.

While at Goldman, we launched a philanthropic initiative called 10,000 Small Businesses. We designed the program around helping small and mid-sized businesses grow. We wanted to help 10,000 small businesses boost their bottom line, hence the name of the initiative. The program pledged $500 million in various aid — from education and financial backing, to services and networking. The program proved to be so successful that it launched in the UK and soon after that it became a global initiative. It was widely popular on Social Media too — in Feb 2014 we launched the Twitter handle @GS10KSmallBiz  In Dec 2015 the account had over 18,000 followers. Profiles of the 10,000 Small Businesses graduates can be viewed on the Goldman Sachs YouTube playlist titled: Meet the Owners: 10,000 Small Businesses in the US. It still runs today and although I am no longer with Goldman, I still work with clients graduates from the program.

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I am a passionate foody and a fairly good cook. I love Bulgarian food, not only because it’s my heritage but also because it’s great. I always love to prepare traditional Bulgarian dishes and I have also published several Bulgarian cookbooks (some are available on Amazon). I’ve often been approached and am often consulted by food magazines and online journals when it comes to Bulgarian cuisine.

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I have many years experience in managing full SDLC and building trading platforms for investment banking. In my early years in Goldman we were doing FinTech before FinTech was yet a word. My team built proprietary trading software from the ground up in more than one banking area – securities, fixed income, investment management, etc. The experience includes all stages of the SDLC – from getting business requirements to creating front to back end systems to ensuring continuous global support. A little known fact is that my team pioneered Scrum agile development framework in the banking industry.

I am always on the look out for exciting and challenging opportunities. Usually clients come to me but it’s been in more than one occasion that I had approached potential clients who operated in areas, which fascinated me and about which I wanted to learn more or get involved with. Needless to say those have always turned out to be a great win-win collaborations.

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My technical experience accumulated over the years combined with my business knowledge in areas like finance, academia, entrepreneurship, non-profit and government make me a valuable contributor for any type of business – from startups to established companies. As a result, I have built a comprehensive knowledge base and a network of connections that spans across US and Europe. I have worked with many teams where our joint expertise allowed us to deliver customized solutions to a wide range of problems.

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I spend a good chunk of my time mentoring startups, SMEs and company executives on various topics other than online business and internet sales. My favorite ones include UI/UX, software development best practices, management skills, decision making, leadership, negotiating skills, process improvement, change and process management, risk management, etc.

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Apparently I do a great at managing people. I do this on a daily business, and I have managed teams for more than 20 years now, including project management, interviewing, recruitment, career development, performance reviews, etc. My 360° reviews have always come back in the 98th percentile.

I have always been and still am quite hands on with many technologies. The reason for this is simply because I love doing it. I have done design, development, testing and support of multi-tiered distributed computing systems, SOAs, web applications, mobile software development, etc. I have a deep understanding of UX and an eye for UIs that work. I have a natural talent for building attractive sales pages that actually work.

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When I work with clients we don’t just go in and do all things online. A big part of and a requirement for running a successful online business is a smoothly operating main business lines. So we go in and implement, and often pioneer, improvements to many existing underlying business and technology processes – we introduce standards and best practices, aim to deliver quick wins, automate manually or labor intensive processes, adopt quality enhancing development tools and application of agile, scrum, lean, extreme, Kanban, etc.

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My clients satisfaction rate is one of the highest in all the industries that we operate in. The businesses I work with enjoy a 97% on average client satisfaction rates.