Shortly about Sefini Consulting founder expertise and experience

Hello and thank you for visiting my profile page.

     I am Svetlana Žikić – Founder of Sefini Consulting and entrepreneur in various spheres of business consulting.

 

EXPERIENCE

I have entered into entrepreneurship challenge after 25 years of work at a large river shipping company and one small microfinance institution. During this period I was personally and directly responsible, or worked as team player, in various business operations in the fields of: commercial, import, finance, control, planning, marketing, cooperating with auditors, etc.

Divers practice gained me wealthy experience in strategic and operational matters. It helped me in good understanding of systems’ functioning, better identifying and problem solving skill and cooperation with large number of people, both internally and externally, as well.

This has also contributed to building my self-confidence to continue further career by relying on own strengths and skills.

 

EDUCATION

 

  • I am a graduate Economist by education since earlz 1990s. Following and since the early 2000s, I have been attending large number of seminars and training from various fields of management, finance, control, etc.

  • I would like to highlight the successful completion of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management course – Certified Microfinance Expert in 2017.

  • I work still on my further education and in 2019 completed course – Expert for online Conversions, following the demands of the markets, trends and the necessity of acquiring knowledge from the domain of online marketing.

 

MENTORING

 

I consider Mentoring, as a form of support and a way of transferring knowledge and experience to young people, lets say mostly important for their success, whether for students or entrepreneurs. There is always a valuable knowledge to be shared with them or the challenge they need advice for.

However, for the start-up entrepreneurs, mentoring help is necessity, the needed help in defining steps and guiding through administrative procedures.

 

  • I have gained mentoring experience by working and cooperating with the Center for Strong Youngsters – program designed to empower the Youth – their users. Cooperation started from the beginning of 2018.

  • Following, I mentored the startups at the Startuplive event in Belgrade.

  • Since 2019 I have participated as a Mentor for 2 accelerators: FasterCapital -from UAE and Female Founders from Austria.

 

NETWORKING

 

I consider as essential, professional networking with people from similar business areas. During my work at the Microfinance Institution I attended a large number of seminars, workshops and conferences at European Microfinance Network and worked in working groups with colleagues from other European countries. This gave me a good insight into their job approach and the way of working outside of Serbia.

After the founding of Sefini Consulting, I continued membership in EMN – European Microfinance Network, given the importance of resources available to me and the potentials for further cooperation.

Today, I’m continuing with networking practice. I actively attend events that I find useful in acquiring new knowledge, adopting good practices, and tracking trends in areas I have been involved in, dealing with, or studying to integrate them into the scope of new activities.