A young visionary reshaping the Romanian office market

By Anda Sebesi

At 27, Vlad Buzoianu became the CEO of Cluj Business Campus, one of the major office projects in Cluj-Napoca, developed by Felinvest SA. His work focuses on creating office campuses that host entrepreneurial communities, based on the “new urban” concept. As a result, his office building designs are client-oriented, making him the first Romanian entrepreneur on the office market who positions his business in the B2C segment, which ultimately means that the end users of the buildings he designs are the visitors or the tenants’ employees. With this in mind, Buzoianu launched “the experiential office,” a concept that creates experiences that help employees become more productive, have a more active lifestyle, and keep their mental, physical, and social health at high levels. This business model has been validated by large corporations like WeWork and represents a trend that Buzoianu believes will become the new normal in the office segment worldwide.

Through his work, Buzoianu succeded to transform Cluj Business Center—once a common office building—into Cluj Business Campus (CBC), a project that hosts a community and offers a wide range of services: office spaces, residential, restaurants and catering, a park and football pitch, a podcasting studio, coffee shops, a fitness club, indoor and outdoor event locations, a kindergarten, an international school, and Romania’s first hybrid medical clinic.

Buzoianu

now has a new project in the pipeline: Wildhills, a 190,000 sqm country club that also includes a business incubator, facilitated by an investment worth EUR 6 million in Jucu, near Cluj-Napoca. The project is due to be completed in 2024. “During our making of Wildhills, we faced unpredictable changes in logistics, supply chain, and budgets. We managed to overcome them through creative workarounds, scheduled delays, persistence, and mental and financial resilience,” Buzoianu says. He also notes that in the office business sector, the first wave of downsiziang in office occupancy that happened between 2020 and 2022 did affect the company’s major office project, CBC. “We brought that back to 100 percent and even stronger leases through a complex strategy that positions CBC as an ideal HQ in the current global working environment.”

In terms of his leadership style, Buzoianu says he believes it is that of an excited visionary. “My vision and excitement for what we are doing has helped secure the onboarding of talented people in order to make our vision bigger and better. From there, my role has been to make sure our shared purposes are aligned with our individual ones and that we are overdelivering on our promises while enjoying work. This was essential because you need to make work fun in order to overcome inevitable hardships, especially in the case of visionary or innovative businesses that pave new paths in their industries.”