First class act
Anna Goracz, general manager and founder of Allegro Event And Conference.
Toward the end of her final year at Warsaw's respected Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music, Anna Gogacz came to an awful realization after playing the piano for eight hours a day over five years, she was never going to make it as a world-famous concert pianist.
"I just knew I would never win the Chopin competition and I just knew I would never travel the world playing concerts," Gogacz said.
Instead she took a turn at organizing events and conferences and formed her own company Allegro.
Created in 1992, it has gone from a one-woman entertainment booking business to a first-class firm with a staff of 16 employees, specializing in organizing extravaganza annual meetings as well as picnic days, product-launch events, conferences and Christmas parties.
"The one skill that I have is a genetic aptitude to run a business because nobody has taught me how to do that," said Gogacz, sitting in her immaculate office in the Warsaw suburb of Zoliborz.
It's seven years since Gogacz last touched a piano, but her self-styled obsessive drive for perfection the same trait that got her through music school also turned out to be her savior after graduation.
Gogacz says two of the six students in her music class of 1989 went insane when they realized they wouldn't be musical successes. Meanwhile, she kept her feet firmly on the ground.
Rather than living the mediocre life of a music teacher, she opened her own music school for primary and secondary students, called Ama. A year later, her ambition was the creative force behind Allegro.
It came alive after the director of the Marriott Hotel saw her students performing Christmas carols in the hotel's foyer. He asked if she had other bands at her disposal.
"And of course I said yes," Gogacz said with a laugh.
What followed were nights spent cruising the clubs and bars of Warsaw, finding bands and drawing on her own musician friends to play in the Marriott. Bookings at the Sheraton Warsaw Hotel & Tower, Bristol Hotel, the Mercure hotel and the Hotel Jan III Sobieski hotels quickly followed. Soon she was organizing events for hotel clients, and ultimately, sourcing her own clients.
Gogacz has booked can-can dancers, jugglers and clowns, and even put a company president on the back of a circus elephant. She's exploded more fireworks than the Sydney Olympics, shot laser beams through the air with the precision of Capt. Kirk, and organized catering for 900 hungry people at a company picnic.
The blonde-haired, black-leather-clad Gogacz, who is not lacking in self-confidence or self-promotion, starts listing Allegro's clients.
"If we're going to start boasting, there's Andersen Consulting, or accenture as it's called now; KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Banks now: Citibank, Pekao, PBK, Dresdner Bank and Deutsche Bank. Automotive companies...."
The list goes on and on, including big guns like Mercedes, Kraft Foods, and Christian Dior.
"I think I'm a good leader, which is necessary," Gogacz said. "I think I have a very good contact ability when it comes to clients and I also have vision. I look into the future and I know where I want to be in five years." Showing a modicum of restraint she refused to reveal exactly what her five-year plan is, for fear of tipping off her competition. And she wouldn't talk about her company's profits, or her age for that matter, which at a guess would be the other side of 35. But Gogacz did say that in the short-term, she is revamping Allegro's management structure to deliver a better product to her clients.
"[I want] a hotel approach to the customer where the customer is everything. I feel this is still not a very frequent case in Poland."
And how will you do this?
"First of all, I try to teach myself," Gogacz said. True to her word, she completed a management course at the Warsaw School of Economics last year, and attended two semesters of the MBA course at the Leon Kozminski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management. She has also hired a management consultant.
Being entrepreneurial by nature, Gogacz says the hardest thing was learning to delegate. As for balancing her work and private life, Gogacz said that's another struggle. She calls Allegro "my child" and spends long hours at the office. She said her partner understands her dedication, "because he's in the same industry."
"I always tell myself I should enjoy life more, but somehow I was programmed this way to make things perfect, to make them better and better."
And what of Gogacz's much-loved Ama school? She sold it in 1998 to focus on Allegro, but the school subsequently went broke.
"It was really sad because I created it," Gogacz said. "But if you run a business, you need talent."
