Curious, Transparent, Human: A Leader’s GuideBook

What makes a leader?

The BEST Foundation strives to uplift young people to creatively express themself and allow them to become the future leaders of the world. Yet, it is unclear what exact qualities and actions define someone as a leader. Therefore, we must learn by example. This new section will share stories of leaders, all inspiring professionals who have built their careers around more than results, in order to showcase leadership looks like in practice. Each interview will focus on one of our partners and consequently explore the experiences, setbacks and convictions that shaped each of them, and ultimately, ask what it means to make a difference.

The first interviewee of this new section is our dedicated supporter Reny Mitkova - eutrepeneur and author of Podcast Jobnite. Reny Mitkova is a long-term and quite dedicated supporter and sponsor of our mission and has taken part in our annual fundraising event Impact Jam and our Student Leader Wrap Up Seminar. Last year, members of our team had the honour to be part of her podcast last Christmas.

1. Tell us about yourself and your professional journey.

My professional journey started almost as a joke. I met my future business partner during a business trip to Cyprus. When he later came to Bulgaria to set up a call center for debt collection, he invited me to become his partner and help him build the company. I literally laughed.

At the time, debt collection in Bulgaria looked very different. I told him: “Debts here are collected by big, tough guys, not by people sitting in a call center. This business will never work.” He told me this was temporary and that around the world debt collection was already becoming a professional, structured industry. I was 26 and thought: why not give it a try?

For a while, I actually had two jobs. I worked in our new company in the mornings and for a US consulting business in the afternoons – conveniently, my boss and clients on the other side of the Atlantic were only waking up then. And then I had my first daughter. Suddenly, working two jobs and raising a baby no longer looked like a particularly brilliant plan. So one night I had to choose. I chose the new company almost entirely on intuition. It was new, I was building something from scratch, and I felt there was more room for me to learn, grow and prove myself.

That decision shaped the next 24 years of my life. The company that I was convinced would never work grew from five people into one of the leading companies in our market and became part of the international EOS Group. But somewhere along the way, my definition of success changed. When our son, our third child, was born, I remember looking at my life and thinking: this is actually more than I ever dreamed of. I was running a successful company and at the same time I had this big, slightly chaotic, very close family.

This year, my husband and I celebrated 25 years of marriage and 30 years together. And when people ask me what I consider my greatest success, this is probably it. I am proud of the company we built. Of course, I am. But I am even prouder that I didn't have to lose my family in order to build it. I don't believe success should come at the expense of your life. And I don't believe career and family necessarily have to be an either-or choice. It isn't always easy. I certainly haven't found a magic formula for balance. But I do believe it is possible to build a career you are proud of without sacrificing the people and the life you love.

2. What does “make a difference” mean to you?

I believe success comes with responsibility. If you have managed to climb a little higher, you should reach back and help someone else climb too. There is this strange idea that it is lonely at the top. I think that's nonsense. The top can actually be a lot of fun if you bring enough people with you.

Today, a large part of my personal mission is financial education. It came naturally through raising my three children and realizing how much of our relationship with money begins at home. My goal is to help more than one million families build financial freedom. It is big and perhaps a little crazy, but I like big goals. Still, “making a difference” doesn't require a million people. If I help one person feel a little more confident about money, make more conscious choices about their life or feel brave enough to dream bigger, that already matters to me.

One family is enough to make a difference. A million is simply the direction I am walking in.

3. What is one lesson or experience that has had the greatest impact on you as a leader?

One of the most valuable pieces of feedback I have ever received was also one of the most painful. In 2007, someone very close to me decided to leave the company. When she left, she told me: “You cannot work with partners.” It was brutal. And it was true.

I was too controlling. I wanted things done my way. I was so focused on results that I hadn't learned how to make enough space for another strong person beside me. I describe this moment in my book „We Аlways Pay” because, looking back, it was one of the turning points in my development as a leader.

It made me ask myself a very uncomfortable question: What if the problem isn't the other person? What if it's me? That sentence started a long journey of finding my own voice as a leader – one that brings people together and inspires rather than commands. Today, especially when a decision is difficult, I want to hear the voices around the table before I make it. People don't need to agree with me. In fact, sometimes I need them not to.

Over the years I have learned that people become truly committed when they feel seen, heard and understood; when they know where we are going and understand how their individual work contributes to what we achieve together. I am also a strong believer in radical transparency. I have always tried to be honest with our colleagues when we are having a fantastic year – and equally honest when we are failing and need everyone's effort to pull ourselves back in the right direction.

I have learned that people can handle much more truth than leaders sometimes give them credit for. What is much harder is asking them to give their best when they don't understand what is really happening.

4. What qualities and skills do you believe help shape a resilient leader in today’s world?

Curiosity, above everything else. The world changes too quickly for any leader to believe they already know enough. You have to keep learning, asking questions, listening to people who think differently from you and, sometimes, being willing to admit that something you strongly believed in was simply wrong.

I am 50 and I think I am more curious today than I was at 30. There is always another book I want to read, another idea I want to explore, another person I can learn from. For me, the moment you think you have figured it all out is probably the moment you start falling behind. But curiosity also requires a certain relationship with failure. If you are constantly trying new things, some of them simply won't work.

And this part has never been easy for me. I hate losing. I wish I could tell you that years of leadership have taught me to embrace failure gracefully. They haven't. Losing still hurts.

What I have learned is not to let a loss define me. I have learned to ask what it can teach me, to choose my battles more carefully and – something that was much harder for me – to forgive myself when I lose one. Because resilience is not about winning all the time. It is about staying curious enough to learn from what went wrong, adapting and continuing.

You don't have to win every battle. You just have to remember which war you are trying to win.

5. Is speech and debate a valuable way for young people to develop skills for their future careers?

Absolutely. In fact, I think speech and debate may be even more valuable today than they were ten years ago. Information is becoming incredibly easy to access. AI can summarize it, analyze it and even help us build an argument.

But it cannot outsource our responsibility to think.

Critical thinking, curiosity, communication and the ability to defend a position – while genuinely listening to the person who disagrees with you – will become increasingly valuable.

You can be the most talented specialist in the room, but if you cannot explain your idea, defend it or inspire someone else to believe in it, very few people may ever discover how good you actually are.

Speech and debate teach young people not only how to speak, but how to think – how to build an argument, question information, listen to an opposing view and change their mind when the other person has the better argument.

In the age of AI, I can't think of many skills that will matter more.

6. What inspired you to support BEST Foundation and its mission?

It started with a LinkedIn message from BEST Foundation's Executive Director, Vanya Zlateva. She invited me to speak to a group of young people about money management. I almost never say no to invitations like that. But before I even met the students, Vanya herself impressed me. Here was someone who had built a successful career and then decided to leave a well-paid profession because she felt the need to do something meaningful for young people.

Then I gave the lecture. During that first lecture, I made a comment about gold and investing. A young woman in the audience immediately challenged me: “But why? I buy gold every month.” And we started debating. I loved it. She wasn't sitting there politely accepting something simply because the person on stage was older, supposedly more experienced and had “CEO” somewhere in her title. She had her own view and she was perfectly comfortable defending it.

I remember thinking: this is exactly what we need from young people. Not people who simply accept what they are told, but people who ask “why?”, challenge ideas and are confident enough to defend their own.

That room was full of that kind of energy. I left completely energized, and I have felt the same at every BEST event since. So I am still not entirely sure who is helping whom. I may support BEST, but these young people give me an enormous amount of energy in return – and I need quite a lot of it for the high-speed life I have chosen. :)

7. If you could give one piece of advice to young people who aspire to become leaders, what would it be?

At 20, I wanted to make a lot of money. At 50, I think it is far more important to know what kind of life you want to live – and then learn how to make money serve that life.

I learned this the expensive way. I have wasted an impressive amount of money in my life simply because I wasn't clear enough about what really mattered to me. So my advice would be: start with the life, not with the money.

Ask yourself what you want your days to look like. What kind of people you want around you. What you want to learn and experience. What you are willing to work incredibly hard for – and what you are not willing to sacrifice. Then think about the money you need to make that life possible.

You don't need to be rich to live well. But you do need to know what “living well” means to you. Money is a wonderful tool. But it is a terrible definition of success.