After visiting the Soft Uni building (Open Doors Situation Center) and seeing the amount of time, effort, and emotion that hundreds of volunteers were putting in daily, I decided that there must be more that I could do from a small business owners perspective.
So, I wrote our team to let them know that Mike was turning the office into a safe place for a family to sleep and asked them to support me by taking on more work to free up my time to help in other ways.
Fast-forward a month later – I now spend a couple of days a week working in the city helping where my skills are best spent. I also “repurposed” two of my junior developers (Rado and Nikola) to “volunteer” as well, currently building 3 different websites for Open Doors. I have also offered up Topvines services to Zadobroto when the need it for anything tech related.
In a just a couple of days we have whipped up the English site. https://opendoors.center with two more in progress.
But, the Topvine love doesn’t stop there . Yana and Petar are going above and beyond 7 days a week to help Katie and I + the families we are helping.
To give you an idea of the kind of boss I am, it goes like this.
- Yana find me an apartment with xyz – just get it done!
- Petar, test this software and have it up ready for me to play with by the time I get back from lunch.
- Petar / Yana here is the nearest ….. insert anything? And how do I…. insert anything?
- What are you doing right now? Nope, stop that, you are coming with me to translate.
- Petar, where is the best banitsa, I’m hungry.
Most tasks I assign also end with GOOD LUCK, but there isnt one thing I have thrown at Yana in the last 2 years that she has not been able to solve or find, and Petar has a heart of gold always willing to help the boss.
I really appreciate our whole team eager to step in and help at any time of the day, any day of the week. They inspire me to work even harder.