Miki Pavlov, a former member of CEED Macedonia, discusses marketing business, Creative House

This week, CEED’s Global Community Manager, had the pleasure of interviewing former member of CEED Macedonia, Miki Pavlov, who recently moved to New York City following his longtime dream of running a business in the United States. He leveraged the knowledge, tools, and connections that he cultivated in the CEED community in order to grow his business and achieve his dream.

Pavlov started his digital marketing firm, Creative House, in 2010, focusing on the opportunities he saw in digital marketing, believing that first-mover advantage combined with his experience would give him an important edge. From its inception, Creative House strived to be an innovative marketing company with solutions for social media platform. Since then, it has expanded into both events and digital marketing. Today, the Macedonia team focuses on the creative work in content while their partners in New York run the company’s operations and conduct most of the sales.

Pavlov began working with CEED in 2015. In the same year, he visited New York over one week as part of a group of 15 entrepreneurs attending meetings with New York-based business leaders. He was so inspired by the trip that he planted the seeds to move to New York City permanently. He did, with wife and children in tow, in 2017 where he opened the second headquarters of Creative House. Pavlov found new employees, always a challenge, through the New York Marketing Association. NYMA is a community of innovative marketing thought leaders which comes together to learn about developments in the field from their fellow members.

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One of the key steps Pavlov had to take in order to move to New York was to enable his employees operate more independently. First he promoted some of his longtime employees and handed them more responsibility and ownership for their successes and failures. This process of ceding power is critical for entrepreneurs looking to grow beyond the startup stage. A common thread among CEED entrepreneurs is a struggle to balance the desire to reclaim their lives outside of their business and their inherent reservations around relinquishing control of the business they built from the ground up.

CEED aims to provide both tactical and emotional support for navigating this critical phase in the lifecycle of a successful business.

For this reason, one of Pavlov’s challenges in New York was that nobody provided a CEED-like service in the states, making networking with fellow industry members, especially fellow entrepreneurs, difficult. Pavlov had come to appreciate the structured crowdsourcing opportunities he had in Macedonia. To overcome this hurdle, he volunteered a lot of time building up NYMA, helping it grow as a crowdsourcing platform. He is now on the board.

Pavlov’s drive to help support the NYMA was fueled by his discovery that American entrepreneurs valued networking and personal relationships as much as Macedonians, which surprised him. However, he notes that sales relationships differ stylistically as American firms rely more heavily on cold calls to generate business.

While Pavlov takes pride in all Creative House’s work, his team’s partnership with the Macedonian Wine Association has a special place in his heart. His New York-based team supported events for them in New York City, New Jersey, and Chicago. Following these events, Pavlov managed to secure placement of Macedonian wines at a donation dinner hosted by Donna Karen attended by major celebrities.

Overall, Pavlov found a willingness to be aggressive yet patient essential to succeed internationally. If one wants their business to survive in the United States, Pavlov recommends a bigger budget and more time to strategize than would expect because the product needs to be perfect to succeed in the American marketplace. For example, price competitiveness alone will not achieve success in the United States unlike in less developed markets. Moreover, in the marketing services industry, Pavlov found that segmentation by industry and service are advantageous. Accordingly, Creative House focuses on digital  arketing for medicine, real estate, and wine. The firm also does event marketing with an emphasis on wine-events, a narrower portfolio than its equivalents in the USA. In all, opportunities for rapid growth exist if one is willing to first devote the time, accrue the financial resources, and find the business niche needed.