New companies: social capital as useful as the financial one

CITTRU project “Become a Successful Entrepreneurs” gives not only opportunities to get funding to start up a company, but it provides a lot of useful contacts with other young entrepreneurs. “In my case” – acknowledges Małgorzata Świstowska, who established Gżegżółka, language school for foreigners – “participation in the CITTRU project gave not only access to money, but also a lot of valuable contacts with other people, who have also established their own companies.”

It resulted in cooperation with several of them. Graphic studio prepared advertising materials, another company designing Internet pages dealt with Internet ads.

In the next stage – she continues – we are planning to collaborate with two other firms: one offering e-learning services and another having its own sound studio. In my opinion, this kind of cooperation is possible because trainings in CITTRU gave us not only knowledge how to run a company, but enabled us also to establish friendly contacts with one another. One of positive outcomes is that our relations are based on trust and that is really crucial when doing business together. Another thing is that within “Become a Successful Entrepreneurs” project CITTRU team has chosen a group of 22 young people, which are eager to work and cooperate in an entrepreneurial spirit.