Success stories

Ilda is a young dentist who accomplished a specialization in orthodontics in 2014. Having an entrepreneurial spirit she initiated her own business by opening a dental studio. Dr. Giovanni Manes Gravina is a professor in Specialization School of Orthognatodontics at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). He has also been running his dental studio in Rome successfully since 1990 along with being consultant of orthodontics in several dental clinics. 

Ilda’s aim when she participated in the programme was to develop her startup on top of offering high quality services to her patients. Being eager to further develop professionally too, she looked for cross-country opportunities, and thanks to the local contact point in Albania she found out about Erasmus for young Entrepreneurs. 

From his side, professor Gravina expressed a strong will to be part of the programme to widen his network to other countries.

The six-months collaboration with prof. Gravina was very successful. From the beginning until the end of the exchange, Ilda was fully involved in almost all the tasks performed by a dental business owner. This included appointments scheduling, clients relationships management, suppliers day-to-day management, marketing and promotional activities, team meetings and strategic decision making. 

She has also provided consultancies to other dental studios on top of offering specialized dental treatments to patients while using the tailored made software for dental clinics. An important part of the exchange was exploring new opportunities of joint collaboration from their respective countries. One side of this, was the involvement of prof. Gravina in the events Ilda organised  with  partners in Albania. 

Besides further boosting up professional capacities as orthodontist, Ilda acquired additional entrepreneurial skills as well as learned to use new tools to manage her business through a tailored software. It is worthy to mention that based on the experience gained in Italy, Ilda has developed a new business model by practicing orthodontics as a consultant in cooperation with other dental studios. This was a new approach in Albania which has shown good results over time.

In the beginning of 2020, Ilda planned to extend her services to include dental tourism in her services and had started some preparations in this regard but had to postpone them due to coronavirus crisis. Her business, like many other entrepreneurs was hit Ilda's business but Ilda remains optimist.