Dan Lazarescu, a former shareholder in Medicover medical service provider and in TotalSoft software company, says that after having worked with Medicover for 10 years, where he also filled the general manager position, it is high time for him to start a new business.
Lazarescu, 61, founded, together with other shareholders, a plant manufacturing natural products in Salonta, Bihor county, a business he considers as having a very high growth potential.
"I work with projects, I build a business, it grows up and leaves home. This is what's happened with Medicover, too," he says.
Thus, in 2005 Lazarescu exited all the businesses he had at that moment in Romania, mainly Medicover and TotalSoft, as he says, and applied for an investment in production, through SAPARD programme, which generated Canah company.
In figures, the story of Canah can be summarised as a SAPARD project that resulted in an investment of 1.7m euros, a plant with a processing capacity of 1,000 tonnes of hemp annually and 20 tonnes of harvested hemp seeds, waiting to be turned into natural products, such as hemp oil or hemp flour. However, for Dan Lazarescu, the resulted business is the upshot of several ideas and opportunities.
"I read a book "Everything about Hemp" and was fascinated with the idea. Thus, I found out this plant worked in four therapeutic areas (...). And I kept this idea in mind," says Lazarescu.
Second, his exit from the two important businesses he had left a void that needed to be filled.
He was unwilling to speak about the stock held in the two companies or about he sums he collected following his exit.
What drove him to start the new business was the increasingly wider coverage of natural therapies in North America and Europe.
"At the beginning, we wanted to export, we planned to seal contracts with Italy and Germany, but in the l
