Meet Jenya Semenkova

We recently connected with Jenya Semenkova and have shared our conversation below.

Jenya, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
I am a strong believer that every situation has a solution. You just have to find one! If you make mistakes along the way – those are not really mistakes, but rather learning opportunities that shape you as a better leader. Just keep your head up and move forward!

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I’m originally from Odessa, Ukraine. When the war in Ukraine started, I was terrified thinking that my country and my heritage would be wiped out. I felt that I had to do something to bring awareness to Ukrainian history, culture and cuisine. Together with my mom, we launched our Ptashka brand, featuring nalysnyky – Ukrainian crepes with fillings. We went through our family recipes and picked 6 flavors: 3 sweet and 3 savory. My personal favorites are mushrooms and cheese, apples and vanilla sauce and farmer cheese and raisins fillings! We started in February of 2023 and, fast forward to the present, we are now in 36 grocery stores in Michigan. This incredible support from our community is very encouraging and motivates us to move forward and expand!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I originally worked in the healthcare field. I was a Sr. Manager of Operations at one of the large health systems in New York. Even though the health care and food industries are very different, the approach to organizing an efficient enterprise is the same: stay focused on the goals and your mission; big problems/obstacles can always be divided into smaller, more doable tasks; work on time management and multitasking skills – as a start up, you have to wear multiple hats at once – you’re a production manager, an accountant, negotiator, marketing manager – and all these responsibilities are happening at once , so you should master your multitasking / time management skills in order not to fall behind and get everything done by deadlines! Once you get to the “established” business phase, you can delegate and start hiring more people – but before that everything is on you. Never give up!

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
The challenge we are facing right now is expansion to other states – how to build a successful marketing strategy to build up demand for our product and how to produce a higher volume at the same time? These two things must happen simultaneously, otherwise if you just produce more – but customers don’t know about your product, you will have a slow turnaround. And if you have a successful marketing strategy, your products will be flying off the shelves, but if you can’t re-stock on time, you will be in a tough spot as well. So, this is our current dilemma.

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