“You shouldn’t waste your life on your fears.” Iryna Dobrutska on her 21 years of entrepreneurship
14 May 2024 15:11
EXCLUSIVE
Salateira’s founder and creative director, Iryna Dobrutska, has been in business for 21 years. During this time, she has been involved in landscape design, hosted events, opened a kebab shop, and even travelled to China to work.
The main conclusion that the woman entrepreneur has made during this time and which she shares with others is that fear has no place in our lives. Iryna Dobrutska spoke about this during the information and motivational event “MamaBrand“, organised by Kommersant Ukrainian 
“It was 2008, and I was still doing landscape design. The day before, I had received a lot of advances in dollars, and I distributed all this money to my contractors. Here, overnight, everything changes in our country, and in the morning I wake up and realise that the exchange rate is completely different. I start calling all my contractors, but they don’t pick up the phone.
And after a while, a client comes to me with security guards and machine guns and says, “Well, where is the owner? I don’t understand what’s going on: all the contractors have disappeared, the money has been taken, and that’s my experience. I decided then that I would never do business again and went to work for Leonid Chernovetsky. I was engaged in landscaping the city of Kyiv, then I worked as a presenter, opened a kebab shop, and worked in Vietnam and China,”
– said the founder and creative director of Salateira.
She believes that this situation helped her feel her fears and work through them in the future.
“That’s how I lost my fear – I was experimenting all the time. If I even survived those guys who came with machine guns to look for the ‘mafia queen who abandoned everyone’, what can we say?
Of course, you can invest in a business and it will fail, it can happen. But this shouldn’t stop you from realising your potential. Now is the time when we all understand that life has an end. And it can end at any time, so you have to live here and now,”
– says Iryna Dobrutska.
Read more about Iryna and her business here:
Iryna Dobrutska, artist and creative director of Salateira: "The chain restaurant business should be simple, clear and inexpensive to implement"
Read all the materials of the MamaBrand project here:
Women entrepreneurs named 7 unexpected components for startup success in Ukraine: motivating results of the special project"MamaBrand"
