Czech entrepreneur Černíková on surviving severe burnout

Czech entrepreneur Tereza Černíková was running her own marketing agency with almost ten employees at the age of 24, but an inflated ego and an inability to delegate tasks nearly drove her to burnout. Today she has turned that crisis into a new business — coaching and mentoring, where she teaches clients to find balance between work and personal life.

Černíková began her career working in radio, writing articles for a network of online publications and taking side jobs as a costume assistant on film shoots, including Netflix projects where she worked alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi. At the same time she picked up social media marketing, graphic design and web development — and soon had so many marketing clients that she decided to found her own agency, Movements Media.

The agency grew quickly: within a few years the team had around ten people, and clients included companies from development, software, real estate and law. But, in her own words, she didn't know how to delegate and kept controlling every little detail, convinced that no one could do the job better than her.

The situation was made worse by her father's illness — doctors diagnosed him with an aggressive form of cancer, and Černíková combined running the business with caring for him and accompanying him to chemotherapy. “It felt like if things were going well for my dad, the company was slipping, and vice versa,” she recalls.

In 2024 this led to the first panic attack of her life. After therapy she realized that if she kept ignoring sleep, nutrition and rest, burnout was inevitable. She decided to close the agency, ended ninety percent of her collaborations and flew to Edinburgh to recover.

It was there that, for the first time in a long while, she thought about when she had truly been happy — and realized it was in front of a microphone, helping people find their own path. Around the same time she started recording a podcast as a form of self-therapy — and got an unexpected response: people began writing to her asking to be mentored.

After returning to Czechia, Černíková went through therapy and decided not to abandon marketing but to relaunch the agency — this time with clear roles and a deputy structure, instead of everything depending on her alone. At the same time she began combining business development with her employees' personal growth, using, among other things, the Gallup method to identify clients' strengths and talents.

This autumn Černíková is preparing her second self-development conference, at which she plans to have her father speak.