Things are moving very fast these days and they have taken a much faster pace as compared to the already dizzy speed they had in the last months. Many changes have occurred in my personal and professional life since the arrival of Daniele in the United States and the joint decision to share everything we will do in the future.
It changes the working and living perspective completely: now everything I do will have some kind of effect on Daniele’s business and life and vice-versa. It means a whole lot responsibility and potential at the same time. Running a business relationship across an ocean is a bit challenging already, but when we look at the newness of all the things we are planning to do together, there is also a huge potential. Life changes when you shift from the perspective of being by yourself, an independent entrepreneur that is building his own business and is living his own private life, and having a long term partner that is connecting his life to yours.
For one thing, as of Friday I already have a brand new business to add to my daily planning. During the week end, Terry called me to plan the first activities to be done with his agents as of Monday and I had to wear again my manager hat. I hadn’t been wearing it since I left the management of the magazine I was running in Italy in 2007 and it feels comfortable as usual, but it is quite another thing to now have to direct a US organization as compared to an Italian one.
Sunday morning with a view of an auction sign and the beautiful Florida sky
Online marketing has really become a necessity and an obsession for many American entrepreneurs. Everywhere I go, to every meeting I participate, there is some slant toward promoting your business on the web, with a lot of tools and a lot of cool tricks. Yet one needs to adapt it to the classic activities that are performed offline that remain very important for many segments.
A short video section of the presentation given by me and Daniele to the agents of Century 21 Grant Realty. Read the rest of this entry »
I have met many exceptional guys in my life, but I have met very few outstanding teams. In our world it seems like everybody is trying to become a superstar or a prima donna. This is true also of corporations. All those I have in contact with had all kinds of complex procedures and rituals that were only aimed at making people working together or at restraining the individual power so to avoid internal fights. Sometimes the “glue” that holds the team together is some form of social habit or more that is applied with no judgment.
Daniele Bogiatto, Terry Ogburn and Karen Selby
I have a little story to tell about this that comes from my past. In 2001, at the beginning of the new millennium, the .com bubble was in full swing and I sent to work for the major Swedish telco company that had created a special team to build one of the first UMTS portals. In a nutshell it was the first project aimed at bringing the Web on mobile phones. Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular are very strong on mobile phone network since, due to the wide expanses of the land and the fact that very little of it is actually inhabited, it is not quite economic to build a regular phone network, based on wires or fiber optic. So out of necessity Sweden and Finland have become some of the world leaders in mobile phone technology.
The project was big and was spanning several European nations. I had been chosen as the chief of content development for the Italian portal. The project was exciting both because it was quite innovative (too much for that time as we soon found out) but also because it gave me the chance of flying to Stockholm every so often and meet people from all over Europe and be exposed to very different cultures.
Tomorrow I will have an important meeting with three people that will have a fundamental role in my future professional life. One of them is of course my business partner and friend Daniele, with whom I will be sharing all of my future endeavors in the US and in Europe; the second is Terry Ogburn, a very interesting businessman and chief of business development at Century 21 Grant Realty of Florida, in Seminole. The third is a lady, Karen Selby, the broker.
Terry, Karen & me in one of the best Chinese restaurants in Pinellas
Our story begins about four months ago. My investing career was moving slower than I wanted and, after talking with my wife Maria who is also my personal business coach, I decided to immerse myself in the local market and see how people worked around me. I opened up Craigslist, the most important free announcement network in the US, and I found a posting about two real estate brokerage firms that were looking for new agents. I contacted both of them, and only person who actually returned my call was Terry.
I explained him that I had done my real estate training at a formal Florida school and was considering activating my license as I wanted to see how the market really worked in the field. We arranged a meeting (intended to be a formal presentation) and a couple of days later I was entering for the first time the office of Century 21 in Seminole.
As I stepped into the door, I noticed a message board displaying “Welcome Roberto Mazzone”. Despite the misspelling of my last name, I was impressed by the attention to detail and the positive effort to make me feel like at home. The following presentation was more like a two way discussion and lasted twice as long as expected. At the end I knew very well three things: Read the rest of this entry »
I am almost 50 years old and I know very well how it feels when you have built a career leveraging a whole lifetime of work and connections: it feels comfortable and it feels like that’s he only way it cam be. I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have built my whole previous career on the computer industry and I have seen a whole market be born, grow exponentially and then fade away in little more than a decade. Some of you might know PC Magazine: it has been the reference reading for all computer professionals in the 90ties and I have launched its Italian edition back in 1991 bringing it to 110,000 paid readers and to 700 pages: the most successful international edition of PC Magazine the world over.
So I have had my heydays in publishing, but since the arrival of the Web I knew it was over and that the people were going to drop specialized magazines and go online: and so happened. Two years ago I was directing my last magazine. I had a biog office, a staff working with me and a nice paycheck paid by one of the top publishers in Italy.
Yet I knew it wasn’t going to be long before my comfortable position was going to be challenged by the death of the computer advertising market, that had been decreasing world wide. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else than directing computer magazines, but it looked like there weren’t going to be too many in the future and I was also a bit tired of it. My wife Maria started therefore a “campaign” to convince me that I was really an entrepreneur and that I was simply wasting my time. She did her best to convince me that I would have been at whatever I was going to do and I could trust her judgment: she has reached the highest levels in network marketing in Europe, developing a downline of over 10,000 people. So she knows people and how to motivate them.
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