Roman Sledziejowski, a Polish-born American businessman, began his professional career in New York City at Salomon Smith Barney, Member of Travelers Group at the age of 17 where he worked for the investment bank part-time throughout his final year of high school.
At the age of 18, he became the youngest National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) licensed stock broker in the United States and began working full time as an Investment Associate at Smith Barney, a Member of Citigroup.
In 2002, Roman Sledziejowski became the Vice President of Investments at Prudential Securities in New York City. Then in 2004, he was promoted to the position of First Vice President of Investments.
At the age of 25, Roman Sledziejowski became the Senior Vice President and Investment Officer of Wachovia Securities. At the time it was the 3rd largest investment firm in the United States with over 10,000 brokers working in 700 office locations and $680 billion in assets under management.
While at Wachovia Securities, Roman Sledziejowski began to make personal investments in multi-family rental properties in New York, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Through various partnerships, Roman Sledziejowski purchased and re-developed nearly 400 residential units between 2004 and 2009.
In 2006, Roman Sledziejowski founded Innovest Holdings, a New York City-based financial holding company. Innovest Holdings operated through four main subsidiaries: TWS Financial, LLC: a full-service broker dealer based in Washington, DC with over $500 million in annual market transactions, servicing primarily foreign high net worth individual clients and international financial institutions. TradeWallStreet.com: one of the leading online Broker/Dealer platforms at the time, catering to individual investors. TWS Investment Partners, LLC: a real estate investment and finance company with over $100 million in real estate projects and TWS Capital Partners, LLC: an offshore investment advisor with client assets exceeding $1 billion.
In 2007, Roman Sledziejowski co-founded MyPlace Development, Sp. Z o.o., a Poznan, a Poland based real estate development company. His co-founder, Sebastian Kulczyk, served as the company’s CEO. Roman Sledziejowski served as the company’s Chairman of the Board, until early 2010. In December of 2009, RJS finalized the sale of his interest in MyPlace Development for $7.3 million in cash to Kulczyk Real Estate Holding SARL in Luxembourg.
In 2013, Roman Sledziejowski co-founded Savant Strategies, an international management consulting firm that provides management consulting services to middle market companies primarily in Latin America, Europe, and South Africa. Then in 2021, Roman Sledziejowski took on the role of Vice Chairman at Savant Strategies.
We recently had the opportunity to interview Roman Sledziejowski to find out a little bit about what makes him so successful.
What are you most excited about?
The business world is changing very rapidly, primarily as a result of innovation and advent of new technologies. Barriers of entry for most businesses have dropped significantly, fostering more competition as a result.
While COVID-19 was a global tragedy, it created tremendous opportunities for businesses which were able to make the transition online, virtual learning, remote working and online sales and marketing created new industries overnight. Many of these trends will be with us for decades to come, as they have shifted the business landscape and revolutionized entire industries.
The innovation we are seeing in nearly all business sectors nowadays is unprecedented. These are very exciting times to be helping businesses grow.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
There is no such thing as a typical day for me. While there is an obvious need for some routine, I always strive to make each day different from the day before. I do this by reshuffling the order in which I tackle tasks at work, hold meetings, and take care of personal chores.
I am not the type of person who works well in a tightly crafted routine environment; I get bored very quickly and my productivity suffers as a result.
How do you bring new ideas to life?
I am quite methodical about the process of filtering ideas and deciding whether they are worth bringing to life in the first place. I spend a lot of time researching various aspects related to an idea at hand and attempt to assess just how feasible and promising it is.
If I determine that a certain idea makes sense to pursue, I immediately “hit the ground running” and stay on top of it until it is implemented. What makes the process easier is that at this point I have already done a lot of thinking and research relating to the idea, which enables me to have a schematic of a roadmap for bringing the idea to the reality stage.
One of the things I am proudest of is how Savant Strategies has been able to grow because of referrals from existing clients, it is the validation of our innovation and client-centric approach to everything we do.