Ioana Burca

I attribute my success to hard work and believing in myself, but most of all, to being inspired by my father. He's what I call the impossible man because he's very old school and you cannot please him no matter what you do. I think I've worked so hard my whole life to try to please him or make him proud, even though he doesn't show that side of him. I'm 44 and I'm still waiting for that day, but that pushes me to work really hard. My mom has also been instrumental, showing me how to be a really good mom while she was an amazing stay-at-home mother and the most amazing cook I've ever had in my life. And my husband, who works with me, teaches me to try to be patient and see things in a different light. He's the most optimistic person I've ever met, everything is kumbaya for him, and coming from a communist background with very strict parents where there were no hugs or I love yous, he's taught me to see the glass as always half full. I'm so grateful for him because he helps me see things differently than I would without him.

The best career advice I've ever received is to not be so hard on myself. I'm a perfectionist and I give a thousand percent every single day, every hour, and I'm definitely too hard on me. I need to sometimes take a break and appreciate everything I've accomplished, because I tend to just go next, next, next. Okay, great, check the box, what's next? I don't take the time to appreciate all of the accomplishments because there's always so much to do. So patting myself on the back and appreciating what I've done would be good advice. I just heard it last week from one of my best friends who also now works with us for the past year and a half, so that was his advice to me.

Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do it, or you're too young, or you're not knowledgeable enough. If you feel it and you have that knowing, then keep going. I've had to climb mountains in this industry. Back when I started, it was 90-something percent male-dominated, and I was in my 20s, so imagine nobody took me serious. I've had people telling me I want to speak with the man in the company, but by the time I asked them to just let's get through the meeting, give me a chance, and by the time the meeting was over, I won them over. Now, 15, 20 years later, I have those same people calling me and they only want to work with me and nobody else. I would say master what you're doing, because that way it becomes easy. When you know what you're doing and you're knowledgeable, it's hard for people to not take you serious because you've become so good at it. Now we live in a world where there's so much to know, it's hard to master anything. So I would say whatever you're passionate about, what your job is, just master it, and then people will automatically just trust you.

The biggest challenge in our field is that there is so much to know, and most people who meet us don't even know we exist. We're like the men in black in the business world - people just think a millwork company goes in and makes it happen, but that's not the case. It's very hard in this business to find people because we are such a niche. For example, if you work at a tile store, you have to learn all there is about tile. If you work at a glass company, you learn about glass. But in what we do, we have to know the codes, what works, what doesn't work. We have to have our licenses. We have to know everything about dozens of different types of materials - glass, veneer, resin, laminate, fabric, leather, lighting, different types of flooring. You have to know what fits in an elevator, what doesn't fit in an elevator. There's so much to know, and the challenge is it's hard to find good people who have the capacity to learn as much as you need to learn to do what we do. That's why we have some of our employees who have been here for 18, 19 years, because it's difficult with the generation today to get them to learn this much, to open up their mind and say, this is all you have to know, because I think it's too much for most people these days.

The most important value to me is passion. When you're passionate about what you do, you don't have to try so hard to promote your company or be salesy. That's always what I've done since day one - I'm so passionate about what I do that people just gravitate to me. For the longest time, we never even did any marketing, people just talked about us. When you love what you do, it shows, and I never think about coming to work because I want to make money. I'm coming to work because I love what I do, and the money comes. In my personal life, my family comes first above anything else. I'm a mom of 3 boys and they keep my plate very full. I homeschool two of them, and my husband and I work together, so everything is all intertwined. My family and my work are my biggest passions, and there's not much time left over for anything else. Ballroom dancing is also my passion - my whole family begs me to go back because they never saw me that happy before, like I was when I was dancing.