This interview is with Filip Pesek, CEO, DonnaPro.
For readers meeting you on Featured, how do you describe your role as CEO of DonnaPro and the executive support problem you’re solving for founders across Europe?
I run DonnaPro, a virtual assistant agency built exclusively for CEOs and founders.
The problem we solve is deceptively simple. Founders across Europe are spending 10, 15, and sometimes 25 hours a week on work that does not require their specific expertise, such as calendar management, email triage, travel logistics, stakeholder follow-ups, project management, and other ad hoc tasks. They know they should delegate, but every attempt has ended in frustration—training someone from scratch, watching them leave three months later, and starting over.
We built a managed service that removes all of that friction. When a founder hires us, they receive a pre-vetted Executive Assistant backed by our internal Account Managers, Quality Managers, and IT team. The EA does not just complete tasks; they learn how the founder thinks, anticipate what is coming next, and manage outcomes independently.
My job as CEO is to ensure that this system continues to work as we grow. That means hiring the right people, maintaining quality, and staying close to client feedback. We are still a young company, and I intend to remain hands-on with the strategic initiatives that matter.
What pivotal moments or decisions most shaped your path to leading a fully remote, specialized EA company?
Two moments stand out.
The first was hitting a wall while running my marketing agency, Spark. I was growing the business but drowning in operational details. I had an assistant, but the delegation never worked properly. I often spent more time explaining tasks and managing the assistant than the time I was trying to save. When I finally figured out that the problem wasn’t the people but the system around them, everything changed. That realization became the foundation for DonnaPro.
The second was the decision to serve only CEOs and founders. Early on, there was pressure to go broad—serve anyone who needed an assistant and cast a wide net. But I’d seen what happens with generic VA platforms or agencies. They try to serve random solopreneurs, middle managers, teachers, doctors… everyone in one funnel. The result is assistants trained as generalists who can’t deliver at the level a CEO actually needs.
Saying no to everyone else meant we could hire differently, train differently, and build systems specifically for how founders actually work. That narrowing down is probably the single best business decision I’ve made.
Inside your Simple Operating System, what single metric serves as your early‑warning signal to slow sales or speed up hiring, and why?
The metric we watch most closely is Executive Assistant capacity relative to incoming client demand.
In our model, we do not slow sales when demand increases. If our marketing and lead generation systems are working, the correct response is to accelerate hiring, not throttle growth. Our system constantly tracks how much assistant capacity we have relative to signed clients and near-term pipeline. When that gap starts narrowing, it is a signal to intensify recruitment.
We intentionally hire slightly ahead of demand and maintain a strong talent pool so that when a founder decides to work with us, we can match them quickly with the right assistant instead of asking them to wait weeks.
The only scenario in which we would deliberately slow sales is if scaling began to impact delivery quality. Protecting the client experience always comes first.
Fortunately, we have seen the opposite so far. As we scale, quality has not only remained stable; it has actually improved thanks to stronger systems, training, and quality management.
In long‑term EA relationships, how do you preserve deep client context during handoffs so the client never feels like they’re starting from zero?
This is something we obsess over because a bad handoff can destroy months of trust in a week.
From day one, every client relationship generates structured documentation. SOPs, meeting recordings, communication preferences, decision patterns, and recurring workflows all live inside our systems, not just in the Executive Assistant’s head. If context exists only in one person’s memory, you are one resignation away from starting over.
Assistant handoffs are actually rare for us because we invest heavily in culture and retention. But when they do happen, the new EA does not simply read files and jump in. They shadow the existing EA long enough to absorb the real context that cannot be captured in documents: how the founder prefers to be briefed, which topics are sensitive, and how their communication rhythm changes during stressful periods.
Our Account Managers and Quality Managers also maintain their own relationship with the client, which creates continuity during transitions.
The client should never feel like they are explaining their business from scratch. If they do, we have failed.
Within your “DonnaPro Tribe,” what recurring ritual most reliably strengthens both camaraderie and day‑to‑day execution across countries and time zones?
The thing that works best isn’t what you’d expect. It’s not a weekly all-hands or a virtual happy hour. It’s our peer knowledge-sharing sessions within the EAs.
Here’s how it works: when an EA encounters a tricky client situation—say a founder is going through a fundraising round and suddenly their communication needs change completely—and they figure out a smart way to handle it, that becomes a case study for the whole team. Not a polished presentation. Just a real person explaining what happened, what they tried, and what worked.
People bond faster over solving real problems together than they do over icebreakers. Our team is spread across Sweden, Portugal, France, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and more. Most have never met in person yet. But because they’re constantly learning from each other’s actual work experiences, there’s a genuine sense of being on the same team.
It strengthens execution because good practices spread organically. One EA discovers a better way to manage a CEO’s inbox, and within a week, three others are using the same approach with their own clients.
When pairing a European CEO with an EA, which specialized competency most strongly predicts success in your experience?
In my experience, the single competency that predicts success the most is not technical skill. It is mindset combined with communication clarity.
A great Executive Assistant does not just complete tasks. They think alongside the CEO. That requires the confidence to ask clarifying questions, the discipline to communicate early when something feels off, and the judgment to understand how the founder prefers information to be presented.
Most operational skills can be trained, such as:
- Tools
- Inbox management
- Scheduling systems
- Travel planning
Those are learnable. What is much harder to teach is ownership and the instinct to communicate proactively.
When an EA has that mindset, everything else attaches naturally. They anticipate problems, surface decisions at the right time, and adapt their communication style to the founder they support.
In other words, the best assistants do not just execute tasks. They become an extension of the CEO’s thinking process.
What is the most reliable remote hiring test you use to validate that competency before an EA is placed with a client?
Our biggest advantage is that we do not believe a single remote hiring test can predict whether someone will succeed as an Executive Assistant to a founder.
At the end of the day, we are not hiring a skill set. We are hiring a person who must fit our culture and also operate comfortably inside the world of the CEOs we serve.
We do use demo tasks and practical exercises as part of our process, but they are only one signal among many. What matters more to us is how the candidate thinks, communicates, and whether their mindset aligns with the kind of founders they will support.
Our hiring process, which we call the HR Time Vault, runs for about 30 days and includes several stages. Candidates go through written interviews, live conversations, and multiple Google Meet interviews with different people on our team. Throughout the process, we analyze how they explain their thinking, how clearly they communicate, and how they handle situations that have no obvious right answer.
We also review their background carefully, call past employers for references, run personality assessments, and evaluate how well their profile matches the specific founder they might eventually support.
The demo tasks are graded internally, but they are not decisive on their own. We have seen candidates with very high task scores who were not the right fit, and others with slightly lower scores who performed exceptionally well because their mindset, communication style, and ownership mentality were exactly what the role requires.
By the time someone completes the full process, we are not relying on one test. We have seen the person from multiple angles and can confidently decide whether they are ready to represent DonnaPro with a client.
Where does AI add the most measurable value to your EA workflows today without degrading the human relationship CEOs expect?
The biggest measurable value AI adds to our workflows today is in information processing and preparation. It helps Executive Assistants turn large volumes of raw input into clear, structured outputs much faster.
Founders generate an enormous amount of unstructured information every day, including emails, meeting transcripts, voice notes, documents, and scattered ideas. AI helps our assistants summarize conversations, extract action items, organize research, and prepare structured briefs before the CEO even looks at the material.
The key is that AI handles the mechanical layer of the work, while the human EA owns the judgment. The assistant still decides what actually matters, how information should be framed, and how it should be communicated to the founder.
Used this way, AI does not replace the human relationship; it strengthens it. By removing the noise and administrative friction, the assistant can spend more time understanding the CEO, anticipating needs, and supporting real decision-making.
Operating across Europe, what operational challenge unique to this region surprised you most, and how did solving it change your playbook?
Honestly, nothing fundamentally surprised me, and that was intentional.
Before launching DonnaPro, I spent about six months researching the industry. That included extensive mystery shopping of existing services, studying the operational models behind them, and pressure testing my own experience working with an Executive Assistant for eight years. A meaningful amount of time and resources went into understanding how this market actually works.
Going into the launch, I had only three core theses I wanted to validate.
- Whether the demand we believed existed among founders could actually convert into real clients, either through organic channels like SEO and AI discovery or through direct response marketing.
- Whether we could build an exceptional team of Executive Assistants across Europe.
- Whether we could retain clients at a rate meaningfully above the industry average.
None of those were easy to prove. There were plenty of operational challenges and learning curves along the way.
But because the initial research was deep and the hypotheses were clear, we were not dealing with existential surprises. We were mostly executing and refining the system we had already envisioned.
In that sense, the biggest lesson was simply confirmation that disciplined thinking before launch dramatically reduces the number of surprises after it.