“It’s time to be my own boss”, pharma executives like Roberto Musneci (ex-GlaxoSmithKline), Dragos Dinu (ex-A&D Pharma), Nicolae Voiculescu (ex-Novartis) and more recently Laurentiu Scheusan (ex-Actavis) and Dana Stanciulescu, former head of Teva Romania said to themselves. On their business cards is now written “adviser”.

Beginning a new chapter

“We are talking about an unexplored market”, Nicolae Voiculescu said last summer, shortly after he stepped down from Novartis only to lay the groundwork of a new pharma advisory firm together with Ion Nestor, partner at Nestor Nestor Diculescu Kingston Petersen (NNDKP). It was a business that later on attracted Dragos Dinu as shareholder, the former head of A&D Pharma, the country’s largest pharma group, and Alexandra Petrila, with Novartis.

Other executives started their own advisory firm and began working on their own. “I was considering opening my own business, given the fact that all my peers who joined the advisory industry, were already successful entrepreneurs. In fact, I think that I never had the time or the courage to devise my own start-up plan”, Dana Stanciulescu (photo) told Wall-Street in an interview. “I am always on the run, because for the moment, I am my sole employee. But I hope that as the business grows stronger, I will be able to create my own team of advisers”, she said.

Stanciulescu stepped down earlier this year from Teva Romania for Core Invest Consulting, her own start-up in advisory that became operational in May. “The first contracts were for business development services and advisory in the establishment of a local subsidiary of a newly-entered French company, said the former executive that hopes for €50-60,000 sales by year-end.

Dana Stanciulescu joined the pharmaceutical industry in 1993 as medical representative for GlaxoWellcome (current GlaxoSmithKline). She s