I started my first business at 18, with Bucharest Popcorn, and since then I have been through manufacturing, distribution, transport, insurance and online. More than 20 years of working with banks, suppliers, customers, employees and, inevitably, the state. If someone asked me what I wanted most during all that time, I would not say “lower taxes” or “more customers”. I would say: fair rules.
This year a great many Romanians took to the streets for the rule of law. I do not want to write about politics or parties. I want to write about something simpler and, I think, more important: what a fair society actually means for someone who risks their money and time to build a business. Think of it as a personal manifesto. You may not agree with every point, but at least you will know where I stand.
Predictable rules, applied equally to everyone
The first thing an entrepreneur needs is not help from the state. It is predictability. Knowing that today’s rules will still apply a year from now, so you can make a plan. When the tax code changes several times a year, when an emergency ordinance (a government decree with immediate legal effect, widely used in Romania) appears overnight and applies from Monday, you are no longer doing business. You are guessing.
The second half of the rule matters just as much: the same rules for everyone. You cannot have a meticulous inspection at the small shop on the corner and a lenient glance at the company with friends in high places. A law applied selectively is not a law, it is a tool. And over time everyone learns not to follow the rule, but to look for the person who can bend it.
Competing on merit, not on connections
I know the saying that has been going around for decades: “in Romania you only make it cu pile” (with connections, literally “with files” pulled for you by someone on the inside). I have heard it from young people who have not even tried yet and from older people who gave up long ago. I understand where it comes from. There are sectors, especially those that depend on public money, where the game really is played that way. But I do not think it is the whole truth.
All my businesses were built with private customers. Someone who visits a website and orders flowers does not ask who your friends are. An online store choosing a marketing platform looks at results, not names. The market, when it is allowed to work, is the fairest referee I know. The trouble starts when the state, which should be the referee, steps onto the pitch and starts picking winners. I wrote more about this when I looked back on 20 years of entrepreneurship in Romania.
The cynicism about connections is, in fact, merit’s worst enemy. If everyone believes only relationships matter, nobody invests in quality any more. A fair society starts precisely with the people who refuse to believe it and build anyway.
You pay taxes and you get something back
I have always paid my taxes on time. Not out of heroism, but because I want to sleep well and not depend on anyone’s goodwill. But the contract between citizen and state has two sides. I pay, and the state delivers: roads you can actually drive on, hospitals you are not afraid to walk into, schools that prepare people for today’s economy, courts that settle a dispute in months, not years.
When you feel you give a lot and get little back, the temptation to work around the system appears. That does not justify tax evasion, but it explains it. The answer is not to cut taxes to zero, but to make the money visible. Digitalisation would help enormously: a state that makes you queue with a paper folder for a document it already has in its own database is not treating anyone fairly. I wrote about this in my piece on a state that lags behind its people.
Respect for those who take risks
In public discourse, the “boss” is often the villain: the one who gets rich on the backs of others. Sure, such people exist. But most entrepreneurs I know are people who put their savings, their home or their peace of mind on the line to start something. Some succeeded, many did not. All of them created jobs and paid salaries and taxes before earning a single leu themselves.
I have been through good times and very hard ones. In 2009, in the middle of the crisis, I had to sell the majority stake in my online businesses because the alternative was bankruptcy. That same year I started Floria. A fair society does not treat the person who failed as an outcast, nor the person who succeeded as a suspect. Risk taken deserves respect, whatever the outcome.
Fairness towards the people you work with
Fairness is not only something you demand from the state. You owe it, in turn, to the people who work with you. For me that means a few simple things:
- real contracts and salaries declared in full, not “the minimum wage on paper and the rest in an envelope” (a practice still common in parts of the Romanian economy);
- wages paid on time, even in bad months;
- clear rules for promotions and bonuses, tied to results, not to who you like;
- respect for people’s free time;
- honesty when things go badly, instead of empty promises.
An entrepreneur who complains about the state’s injustices but treats employees with the same lack of respect has little credibility. The change we want starts at our own desk.
Zero tolerance for corruption, and transparency
Corruption is not only a moral problem. It is a hidden tax everyone pays, including those who have never handed over a bribe. When a public contract goes to the “right” company, the better firm loses, citizens get a worse road, and young people conclude that honest work is not worth it.
Zero tolerance also means small things: not offering a “little something” to speed up your paperwork, turning down a contract that comes bundled with a commission for someone. It costs you in the short term. But every refusal makes the system a little cleaner. And transparency is the cheapest antidote: public budgets anyone can read, tenders visible online, decisions that come with reasons. What is done in the light is usually done more honestly. That is also why I believe that one prepared person is worth ten unprepared ones: competence needs a fair arena to show what it can do.
Giving back to the community
The last point in my manifesto is the most personal one. A fair society is not built only with good laws, but also with people who give something back. For several years I ran Știri de Bine (“Good News”), a positive-news site, precisely because I felt a voice was missing that would also show what works. I have gladly spoken at courses and events for early-stage entrepreneurs, because at 18 I would have loved someone to warn me about the mistakes I was about to make.
Education is, for me, the best investment there is. A young person who learns to think, to build and to take risks is worth more than any subsidy programme. If every entrepreneur helped the local school a little, a local NGO, or two or three young people just starting out, we would change more than any law ever could.
What I can do, starting tomorrow
I do not believe a fair society comes from above, through a law or a providential leader. It comes from millions of small decisions: a tax paid, a bribe refused, an employee treated with respect, an informed vote, an hour of volunteering. The people who took to the streets this year showed that many of us want this. The hard part is what we do on all the other days.
What would make you say, hand on heart, that you live in a fair country? I would love to hear from you, because a list made together is always better than one made alone.