The CEO and one of the co-founders of Data Masters, Filip Petrovski, was one of the three speakers at the 40th Business Cafe Macedonia, a prestigious networking event where the Macedonian business community shares their knowledge and experience. Petrovski, Nikola Bubevski from Native Teams, and Angelina Blazheska from FitKit shared details about the businesses they co-founded, their professional and personal experiences, and answered questions from the crowd.

With the two life mottos: “work to learn, not to earn” and “everything is possible, the impossible just takes a little bit of time”, Filip Petrovski finished answering the questions from the moderators of the panel, previously fully addressing all the aspects of running Data Masters: the company beginnings, the expansion to Portugal, the importance of knowledge-sharing culture within the company and many other aspects of everyday work.

The CEO of Data Masters pointed out that the first steps of setting the foundations of Data Masters are directly related to the expansion of the company in the Portuguese market.

“Before Data Masters was founded, the professionals that worked in the Data Science field in Macedonia could be counted on one hand. When we were starting, our goal was to educate the market, bring knowledge and collaborate with Macedonian companies. That is our approach, and behind that approach, the goal is for the top management of the companies to accept our ideas, gain their trust and help clients with their transformation.

Additionally, we want to implement what we’ve learned from working abroad. That essentially is why we’ve opened a new office in Lisbon because Lisbon gave us tremendous opportunities and knowledge, and plenty of people in Lisbon helped us become what we are today.”, Petrovski pointed out.

He also spoke about the work of Data Masters and the necessity for domestic companies to be aware of the importance of data.

“The Data Masters approach consists of consulting, implementation and education. The consulting part has a certain flow: First, we learn about what’s needed for the client/company to achieve based on their needs, priorities, and current opportunities, then we focus on designing and implementing the solution, and finally, providing training and mentorship for the employees to raise the awareness and the analytical maturity of the company.

If the world’s biggest and most successful corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook (Meta) earn billions of dollars based on our behavior by maximally utilizing the data we’re creating on their platforms, the day will come when every company will need to turn towards itself and use their data”.

In the Q&A portion of the panel, Petrovski answered questions from the attendees of the event, talking about the Data Masters Academy as an essential element for developing high-quality professionals inside our company.

“The Data Masters Academy is for everyone interested and wants to learn the basics of Data Science, the tools and skills needed to work in this profession. We also collaborate with companies, creating an individual tailor-made approach for every collaborator. It is important to note that the Academy is primarily created to serve Data Masters as a company. It helps us to build people for our projects and to develop staff.

The logic behind the Academy is the following: our colleagues are lecturers. Sometimes the lecturers are experienced consultants, and sometimes these are younger professionals between 25 and 26 years old. We motivate every employee of Data Masters to share their knowledge, and our point of view is that when you can share something by simplifying it for others, only then do you truly understand it. This helps us build employees ready to communicate with a client, answer a difficult question, share their knowledge and also this way we build and define the knowledge-sharing culture within the company”, underlines Petrovski.

Regarding running a company with 50+ employees, Petrovski says the responsibility is quite large and that thinking about all employees and the future of the projects of the company is not a 9 to 5 job, but always gives maximum effort and recommends the same to everyone.