Company: BugaBalance – Practice for Regulatory Impulses and Inner Order (I work as a freelance alternative practitioner)
Founder: Buga Barac
Date of foundation: April 1, 2025
Industry and company: Health

What drives you? What is your motto? "
Health is the new wealth" – holistic therapy for body and soul in harmony.

What is your start-up about and what makes it special?
In my practice, I pursue the goal of helping people achieve better health and quality of life. I combine body-oriented therapy (ISBT-Bowen) with psychotherapy and health counseling, because body and soul are inseparable. I see people as multi-layered entities, not reduced to symptoms or diagnoses.

What are your first successes?
I am grateful when I can help people become pain-free and feel more at ease. One patient suffered from back pain her entire life – unsuccessfully treated. After a short time with me, she was pain-free. Now we are working on consolidating this condition. Experiences like this fulfill and motivate me every day.

What is your professional background?
In my first career, I worked in business—analytical, goal-oriented, efficient. But I lacked meaning, depth, and humanity. So I quit my job, passed the naturopathic practitioner exam, and started my own business using the therapy methods I had learned to help people holistically.

What prompted you to start your own business?
A disastrous change of employer gave me the decisive impetus I needed to follow my inner calling and invest my energy in meaningful work with and for people.

Who advised you, who are your helpers and mentors? I was inspired to
follow my calling by a fellow naturopath. Fortunately, I was able to rely on the support of my family at all times. A good place for me to network was the founders' breakfast at Heimathafen. Ms. Zimmas from BWHW was also very helpful as an advisor.

How did you experience your first days as a founder?
The first days as a founder were very exciting. Of course, there were a few more challenging hurdles that I had to overcome as someone working in the healthcare sector, which were less enjoyable, but the joyful feeling of soon being able to follow my calling and support people outweighed all that.

What was your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it?
My main challenges were creating a hygiene plan, finding suitable practice premises, and ordering listed hygiene and therapy items for the practice. However, the hygiene training course I had to complete helped me a lot in creating the hygiene plan.

How do you promote your business? What is your best marketing idea?
To promote my practice, I had a professional website designed and built (which took a long time and was expensive), I use Google Ads, I have an Instagram account, I use word-of-mouth advertising, and I collaborate with doctors and pharmacies who display my business cards and flyers.

How did you finance your start-up? Fortunately,
I was able to rely on my family's financial resources and easily take out a kind of private loan.

What dream would you still like to realize?
My dream is to support as many people as possible on different levels—physically and mentally. In my health counseling, I want to show them the path to remission and self-efficacy so that they no longer view type II diabetes as their fate, for example.

Please complete the following sentence: If I had more time, I would... travel
the world to learn about and study other alternative healing methods.

What is your special tip: What would you recommend to founders? It was
a very good decision to find practice rooms that I can rent by the hour. If this option is available, I would recommend it to others in a similar way, because it reduces the initial pressure and fixed costs.