In this episode of the AG45 Soul Aligned Strategy Podcast, host Katherine Breuss interviews Mitch Prejbeanu, a Romanian immigrant and owner of Paul’s Jewelers. Mitch shares his journey from Romania to the U.S., detailing his various business ventures, including his current successful jewelry shop. He discusses the importance of hospitality in business, his plans for creating a unique customer experience by incorporating a cafe in his store, and the value of tailoring services to a focused market. Mitch candidly shares lessons from his past businesses, including the challenges of running a cafe and the realization that specializing is key to success. The episode emphasizes the significance of aligning one’s passion with business to create value and impact.

Contact Mitch – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mprejbeanu/

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Katherine Breuss: Welcome everyone to the AG45 Soul Aligned Strategy podcast. I have with us here today, Mitch Prejbeanu. I am so horrible with remembering names and this is why I was horrible at remembering a second language. Apologies on that. Prejbeanu. Beautiful. Beautiful. So I really wanna welcome Mitch to the show and I am going to pass it over to him. And Mitch, can you just let everybody know about you as well as your business because he has got a fine jewelry store called Paul’s Jewelers. So would love, I’m gonna pass it over to you and would love to hear about it.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Sure, sure. So my name is Mitch Prejbeanu. I’m originally from Romania. I moved here when I was 18. So a friend of mine used to say that I’m more American than he is. And he’s probably, because he lives in Romania, he’s probably more Romanian than I am. So two-thirds of my life has been spent here in the United States. So I ended up owning a jewelry store first, a repair and manufacturing facility. That’s just downstairs from here. And then the jewelry store that’s on the first level at High 100 International in West Dallas. I have 15 employees. And we work directly with the public and with other jewelry stores around town, around the state, and around the country now. So that’s what we do. We don’t import any jewelry. We make most of everything that we sell. We make them here in-house.

Katherine Breuss: Wow. Okay. Yeah, I was gonna actually ask you that. So it’s okay, interesting. Because a lot of jewelry, my understanding, a lot of it is imported.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yes. All the stores in a mall—Kays, Jared’s, Diamonds Direct—they’re actually all the same corporation and they own like 20% of the US market and everything they do is imported. And then they manufacture overseas and they’re basically a finance company. We’re an actual shop, so I invite you all to come and visit us. I’ll give you a tour of the shop.

Katherine Breuss: Very cool. I love, actually, I really love hearing stories in particularly when it is homegrown. When things are made here. Not that, I’ve lived international, I think we should still be international. I have no issues with that, but I do love when it’s, I hear the manufacturing’s here and it’s made here because it is so rare this day and age.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yep.

Katherine Breuss: So I am—okay. So Mitch, I’m really curious, why jewelry? What got you into this business?

Mitch Prejbeanu: So I kind of stumbled into it. I went to school for Economics and International Relations. I never really went into that area. I moved to Florida to get an MBA. I started working in a really nice restaurant and I never got my MBA. I moved back here in ’98 to take care of my parents, and I started doing credit card processing. I also worked in some other restaurants here locally. I sold CNC parts for machinery. I opened a cafe and opened and closed pretty quickly. And so in 2016, one of my friends worked for the repair and manufacturing shop, and the owner was looking to retire and he wanted him to take over, but he didn’t have any business experience. I did, the limited business experience I had with the cafe. So we partnered and we took over the business. So that’s how I became part of the jewelry business. But I don’t do any of the work myself. I always say I hire people that are very talented, local artists. And Paul’s Jewelers was one of our customers and she approached me four years ago now, and asked me if I wanna buy the store and the building. And at first I said, “No, why would I want to do retail jewelry?” That’s, the industry has been in decline for like 40 years now, but the custom and repair parts of it are the only ones that are still doing well because people that appreciate that part of it, repairs are needed. So, and she said, “You can also have the building and there’s room for your company downstairs.” So I went and visited the following day and we both agreed that the space downstairs was perfect for our shop. So her father built the business thinking that that would be the shop. It hadn’t happened until 2022, three years ago, three and a half years ago.

Katherine Breuss: Wow. That’s really cool. There’s a couple things that, well, there’s a lot of things that strike me, but there’s a couple things. One, the fact that you left your home country and came to a new country and, you know, I’ve lived overseas and I know how exciting that can be. I also know how hard that can be too, and cultures are different and everything. And so one, first of all, hats off because that, you know, it’s, people who have never done it before, it’s hard for them to understand all that goes with it. And I just think that’s really cool. So what would you say was the hardest thing for you leaving Romania and coming here, and then what was the most amazing thing?

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah, the hardest thing, probably the language. I only started, I was 18 and I only started about the year before. I had private tutors come to my house and tried to teach me English, but when I got here, it was a little different. So that’s probably the hardest part. Getting used to Milwaukee, this was 1986. People would come out of the bowling alley at three in the morning, pretty drunk, and they would get into their big cars driving. I’m like, “How, how is this possible? This is not, there’s something wrong here.” There’s no drinking at three in the morning in Romania and driving, so I hope that’s, I think that’s gone away a little more than almost 40 years ago. But Wisconsin drinking culture is horrible. The most amazing, I mean, just going into a store. I think we stopped at a C-store that night when we came and when I saw the supermarket, then how everybody has like 12 kinds of bread, the choices were overwhelming, but at the same time, exciting. Coming from a communist country where there was one kind of bread, one kind of olive oil and one kind of flour. Here, there’s all these choices, which can be both bad and good.

Katherine Breuss: I was about to say, we probably have too many choices now, but I mean, yeah, that’s why I like Costco because they only usually have the best you can get. Everything and you don’t have to make a choice.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Exactly. It’s interesting. So Costco—

Katherine Breuss: So last country I lived was Australia, and there wasn’t like, the supermarkets aren’t as big, at least where we were here. And when I came back here and I walked into Costco, I remember being like, “Oh my God, this is massive.” I mean, it was just like, I don’t know what to do. And you get used to it.

Mitch Prejbeanu: They don’t have a lot of choices though.

Katherine Breuss: No, they don’t. No, they, they pre-shop for you.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. No, they really don’t.

Katherine Breuss: And it’s, I mean, because I’ve got a family, there’s five of us, four kids and myself. I love Costco because it’s like, wow, I can get so much. But I know how difficult it can be just assimilating or getting into a new culture. But then on top of it, so all the countries I lived in, English was the first language. So in fact, a lot of people don’t know this. Singapore, English is the first language in Singapore. Even though a lot of people will speak Mandarin and Malay and other languages, but they speak English. I cannot imagine, first of all, getting used to a new culture and then on top of it, not being able to speak the language. And so that’s a pretty huge mountain to climb and to do it. And now you are a business owner, you know, so you came from a different country, you couldn’t even speak this language. And now you are a business owner a couple times over, running a fine jewelry store. I mean, that’s just impressive. It humbles me and I can appreciate, not all of what it probably took you to get there, but I can appreciate a little bit. So thank you.

Mitch Prejbeanu: I also employ other immigrants and I always say that we try harder than everybody else, than the people that are born here. I was, it wasn’t, I went to MATC to learn the language. And I credit my professor that took me and the Colombian girl, she saw the most potential in us and took us to UW Milwaukee and made us register for classes after the first semester. So.

Katherine Breuss: I love it. I met, I was just at one of my clients, they had a company picnic today, and I was there, and there was a hundred employees and several of them are immigrants. And I was speaking with one, I was very humble because this family built this. They started their business 28 years ago out of their home. They now have this amazing company that has employed many families. And the impact of that is huge. And this one employee who happens to be an immigrant, not from here, was almost in tears saying, “I appreciate this company so much and what they’ve done for me, my family and me,” and he’s one of the hardest workers. And it’s really like, I mean, I was in tears when he was telling me this. I was just like, this is, this is why I love small business and small business owners, because the impact you all have, not only within your own family, the employees, the community, everything.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. Yeah. I do feel responsible for, not just for myself, but for all the employees and their families.

Katherine Breuss: It’s beautiful. So Mitch, I wanna ask you, so this is the Soul Aligned Strategy podcast. And so what we, our foundation is working with business owners on that soul aligned piece. And so my question for you on that is, what do you see is soul aligned to you and what is the impact that when you are more soul aligned than when you’re not?

Mitch Prejbeanu: So I think I’ve just been discovering this in the last year, year and a half, and we figured that my superpower maybe is hospitality. So I love having people in at my house, in my business. So that’s what I decided that, that’s why I was attracted to restaurants, which are hospitality-based, but they’re terrible businesses. They’re so hard and difficult to run. But I thought of applying that to jewelry and having the customers be our guests, and they come in, we offer them a cup of coffee, a cookie. So I’m working on a whole new program where we’re gonna have a little cafe inside of Paul’s Jewelers that we’ll serve coffee and cookies to our customers and hopefully more than that. Champagne.

Katherine Breuss: Yeah, sure, sure.

Mitch Prejbeanu: We always have champagne on that. Sure. I love doing events.

Katherine Breuss: Yeah. Yeah.

Mitch Prejbeanu: So I don’t wanna have any sales. We had a retirement sale a couple months ago for the previous owner, and people thought that we’re going out of business. We’re, no, we’re doing better than ever. And I don’t wanna have any more sales. I wanna have events where people come in and we share what’s new. So that’s, hospitality. I think I got that from my parents and I wanna apply it to my business here.

Katherine Breuss: Yeah, I noticed because you worked for a couple restaurants and then you started a cafe and then you closed the cafe. And when you were telling me this, I was like, huh, there’s something here about hospitality. And I hear you on that because my career started in hospitality as well. Both, doing the whole being a server and a bartender, putting myself through school and then working in the corporate office. And there is something I absolutely love about that industry, but you hit the nail on the head. It’s a terrible business.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yes, it is. But I do love hiring people that have restaurant experience. They’re, I mean, once you’ve dealt with hangry people, you can deal with anything. Jewelry is a piece of cake. The previous owner asked me, “You don’t have any retail jewelry experience. How are you gonna manage this?” I said, “I worked in a restaurant before. Don’t worry about me.”

Katherine Breuss: It’s true. I mean, I keep saying to my kids, I’m like, go work in a restaurant. Go work in a restaurant. You are gonna learn so much about working in a restaurant. You learn so many crucial skills by working in a restaurant. And not one has taken me up on it. Well actually, two are at the age where they could anyway, but they call me. They’re like, “It’s too hard work. The work is too hard.”

Mitch Prejbeanu: You gotta start early. Yeah. Yeah. I know.

Katherine Breuss: So very cool. So I actually, who is your ideal customer? So you want to do events and you want, it sounds to me like you wanna create this experience for them. So tell me who your ideal customer is.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Absolutely. So my hobby lately has been marketing, so this is getting people in the door. So we have two target audiences. They’re mid to late-age women that have inherited jewelry from their mother or grandmother, and they want to redesign it so it speaks to them. And the other one are of course, younger men that wanna get an engagement ring. And they don’t wanna buy from the mall store. They want something special because most likely their fiancée doesn’t wanna copy everybody else. There’s a joke that there were like three women that met, and the two of them had the same ring because they went to the same store. The third one comes and says, “I had this custom made.” That’s nice. That’s really, really nice.

Katherine Breuss: I love, I like unique when it comes to anything. So I love when I go to smaller towns or villages and they have the boutique little shops and whether it’s clothes or anything. Because I like different, there’s something so special in my humble opinion about custom.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Absolutely. So we’re a custom shop. We’re probably not good at selling jewelry that we have already in our showcases. We sell more custom pieces than jewelry that we already have. So.

Katherine Breuss: Well, so it’s interesting back to the soul aligned and you said your superpower, and I love that you use that word as well because we use that word superpower because we all have our human superpowers. And when we can harness that and translate it into our life and into our business, it’s just wow. And so you realized hospitality is your superpower. And so then you started creating this experience. So in terms of jewelry, so what is the impact of you doing that?

Mitch Prejbeanu: Well, it’s a work in progress. I’m just now planning for the remodel, which will happen in January. So this is, it’s, I hope we attract the people that appreciate that, appreciate a new experience. Somebody said it is gonna be like a Michelin star restaurant, but without the fancy prices. It’s simple coffee that we’re gonna custom roast for our customers.

Katherine Breuss: Oh, yeah.

Mitch Prejbeanu: And cookies that we’re developing. We just have the samples today, the first samples. Delicious.

Katherine Breuss: Oh, nice. And I love that you said roasted there because I will say, and America, don’t get pissed off at me for saying this, but America coffee is horrible to the rest of the world. I mean, there are some shops, I’m not gonna say all, there have been some that are getting better, but Starbucks people, that is not, that is not coffee, that is just sugar drinks. They’re just giving you sugar drinks. And so I love—

Mitch Prejbeanu: They’re milk dealers. Oh, they are?

Katherine Breuss: Oh my gosh. Yeah, they spend more money on milk than on coffee. And their coffee isn’t even that. It tastes burnt all the time. And I know so many people are gonna be like probably swearing at me for saying this. But funny enough, Australia, and I never understood this when I was in London at the time, when I was in London, coffee was horrible there. They started bringing some Italian and French cafes and stuff, but coffee wasn’t great and there were Starbucks on like every other corner and I’d meet Australians, and my ex-husband’s Australian and my kids are all Australian as well, but they would go on and on about coffee and I’d be like, “What are you, are you from Colombia or something? Why are you making such a big deal about coffee? You’re from Australia. Don’t you care about like kangaroos and like Vegemite? What is this about coffee?” And then I became kind of a coffee snob because then there would be some good cafes and they were coming from Australia. And then when we went to Australia, oh my God. Because there’s such a heavy Italian and Greek influence that came in in the sixties, I believe it was. Oh my gosh. You could go to like a BP or a petrol, a fuel station, gas station, right. And you would still get great coffee and I miss it. So I’m gonna come, I don’t have any, I’ve known to buy jewelry for, but.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yes. So we will sell the bags of coffee here after we talk to the roaster. He is here in Milwaukee. We’ll also, that’s another business idea because I need to start another business. It’s selling coffee to other jewelry stores, personalized, their own specific roast, their own blend. So.

Katherine Breuss: Love it. I love it. Oh my gosh, I can’t drink coffee this late, but as we’re talking about it, it’s making me like salivate.

Mitch Prejbeanu: I just finished mine.

Katherine Breuss: Oh my goodness. It’s too late for me. But, well this sounds really cool. There was, and I believe it was in London a long time ago. We went into, it was a jewelry store, custom made, and they had an art show there. And so they had local artists and they had all of their art around and it was such, and they had champagne. It was like from five to nine kind of thing. And it was the coolest thing. Yeah, it was of course.

Mitch Prejbeanu: So yeah, we have some local artists on our walls as well.

Katherine Breuss: Very cool. Well, I definitely wanna be, like any events you have, I definitely want to be included because it just seems like a very cool—

Mitch Prejbeanu: Coming up in October. So we have a customer appreciation week, or the keys I told you about the keys, the unlock the treasure chest. October 16th is OSA and West Dallas Chamber of Commerce event, is our third annual Bourbon and Bling event.

Katherine Breuss: Bourbon and Bling.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. So the night starts slowly, like at five, and the more people drink the bourbon, the more they buy the bling. Maybe we should have a casino night too. We should. Bourbon and Bling.

Katherine Breuss: There’s a bourbon club that I am a part of. I don’t actually drink bourbon, but I just thought, oh, cool. Like this would be a cool thing. And they, Station 815, I think it is. I, it’s a restaurant downtown, it’s called.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Okay. Could be.

Katherine Breuss: But if you like bourbon, maybe check that out because they meet once a month and they try different bourbons and whatnot. So, and Mitch, I could keep talking about all of this stuff with you because it’s really cool. But I wanna ask you this about the soul aligned piece in terms of, I’m curious about, you opened a cafe and then you had to shut the cafe. And I’m curious about that in terms of what was your biggest, what was so hard about it and what was your biggest lesson that you learned from that experience?

Mitch Prejbeanu: The biggest lesson was that you cannot try to please everybody. You just have to focus on your market. We had sandwiches and we roasted our own meats. We had beef, we had ham, we had turkey that we roasted in our oven. We got this really cool oven that would clean itself at the end of the day. But it was delicious. And we, I think we tried to sell the sandwiches, like a six or seven-inch sandwich for like $7. This was 12 years ago. And people would come in and say, “But I can get a sandwich, a five-foot whatever, a foot-long sandwich at Subway.” And I said, “Why are you here?” We’re like three times as good as Subway. Why are you asking me to match Subway? So when we first opened, we also tried to sell salads. Well, not a lot of people eat salads. And my partner wanted to have like 24 different salad dressing offerings and that’s a lot. I know. No, I learned you have one salad dressing and you have vinegar and oil and that’s it. If people don’t like it, they can get it somewhere else. So specialize in something, do it better than anybody else. And I think you’ll be successful. I think we tried too much and we were probably ahead of our time. And we were also trying to source the vegetables from the local farmers. We had like a club with other restaurants, an association, like a co-op with other restaurants. And people say that they wanna eat healthy, but in the end they go for the Big Mac or Taco Bell.

Katherine Breuss: And it could be too, like maybe even where it was located or even the times. Like, it’d be interesting if you’d opened that now, if that would be any different. I mean, I don’t know.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. With what I know now. Yeah. Yeah. And it was too complex. So we, I figured, I think we had like 180 ingredients that went into our food. And we closed for like three days and we redid the menu and we had like 30 ingredients that we could operate a lot more efficiently. Get rid of all the salad dressings. Then yeah, it would have worked if I had put the time into it, but I was burned out of waking up at three in the morning and go to bake the bread and everything. So.

Katherine Breuss: Yeah, that reminds me actually, I think I remember growing up and there’s like a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. Yeah. And you see the guy going, “Time to make the donuts,” and he is going in at like 3:00 AM to put that oven in.

Mitch Prejbeanu: To put the oven. That’s exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. I had back issues, so I had to go to a chiropractor. I had sleep issues, I had to go get the sleep study work. I stayed there overnight to measure my sleep, so it just wasn’t worth my health. So.

Katherine Breuss: No, no, I would say that would not be very soul aligned because I would say that you’re not, well, you’re not, you weren’t getting the results you want. And you were definitely, it sounds like you were not enjoying the journey.

Mitch Prejbeanu: No. So the idea was the same. I like cooking. I love having friends over so I can cook for them. I thought a restaurant would be very similar to that. But it’s not.

Katherine Breuss: No.

Mitch Prejbeanu: When you try to sell something, it’s not. And I was tired of telling people to pull out their wallets and so on.

Katherine Breuss: Well, you know, it’s interesting is that you aren’t giving up that love. You are now figuring out a way of how to integrate it into your current business and then thinking about the people who you are serving. What might make sense for them that they might, that there’s an alignment there with what you are offering and what they want.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah, absolutely. I believe that, I’ve learned, and I think everybody does. Every business that I’ve been through and I’ve worked for, I’ve learned something from it. I’m not that smart, but I’m curious. So I retain everything that I’ve been through. Even the credit card processing part of it, I worked for a few years.

Katherine Breuss: And do you feel that entrepreneurship or business ownership, that is in your blood? Like is that something, owning a business is always something that you feel was what you wanted to do?

Mitch Prejbeanu: I believe so, yeah. Yeah. I think I’m a risk taker and yeah. I think it is. Yeah. It’s probably in my blood. And the both businesses I took over an existing business that was stable, not super successful because both owners wanted to retire. But I feel a responsibility for, I’m a caretaker of both businesses. I wanna make them better and scale and yeah, just make it more efficient.

Katherine Breuss: So it sounds like another superpower might be that you’re a caretaker.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah, it could be. Could be, it could be. We don’t have any kids, but I always say my employees are my kids.

Katherine Breuss: Well, I’m guessing that just like hearing you speak since we’ve been talking, I think entrepreneurship is in your blood. And I think as well that, and all entrepreneurs or anybody who starts a business, is you have a belief in yourself to take a risk on yourself and bank on yourself, which I just, for me is like, hats off because that’s pretty cool in itself.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I’ll take it as a compliment.

Katherine Breuss: It is a compliment. And also we’re also a little crazy.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yes, yes.

Katherine Breuss: There is a little bit of insanity to us. But you know, the other thing is too, definitely a true entrepreneur in your blood because you shut down a business. And then what did you do? You went and you did another one.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. Yeah. You didn’t say, “Okay, I’m done. That’s it. I’m going to find a job.”

Katherine Breuss: No, it was just the wrong business at the wrong time.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. Yeah.

Katherine Breuss: And that’s what I actually will say. Okay. Even though I don’t believe America has great coffee, I do believe in my years overseas and travels and whatnot. What America has is this entrepreneurial spirit as a culture that I haven’t ever seen to that same degree in any other country I’ve been in.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Absolutely right. Yep. Yeah.

Katherine Breuss: There’s even people who are employees, there’s more of an entrepreneurial spirit to them, and that I love and I really respect, and I want that to continue to grow and expand. And you’re doing it day in and day out.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. I hope so. If you find a way to teach my employees how to be more entrepreneurial.

Katherine Breuss: I know. Well, if there was one piece of advice before we wrap up, Mitch, to other entrepreneurs or business owners, what would it be?

Mitch Prejbeanu: I think what we talked about before, don’t try to be everything to everybody. Just find your niche and do it better than everybody else. Faster, cheaper, better, mostly better. Do it better than everybody else, and do something that you love and you’ll succeed.

Katherine Breuss: Mmm, love it. Mitch, really wanna thank you for your time. It has been such a pleasure and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to, look forward to more and even having you again.

Mitch Prejbeanu: Yeah. Thank you so much. It was, it was painless. It was very, very nice talking to you.

Katherine Breuss: I love it. All right, Mitch. Take care.

Mitch Prejbeanu: All right, take care. Bye-bye.