Me and my wife Maria just had an unexpected encounter. We were out doing some shopping in a produce store and we had just bought some broad been, a type of vegetable that is typically Italian and very much liked in Rome, the city where my wife was born. We were approached by a lady who wanted to know how my wife was going to cook them and explained she had Italian origins: her father was from the area of Messina, in Sicily.
After a short conversation on recipes, she insisted in inviting us to a community that apparently is over 170 members strong in the area where we live here in Florida and that is composed of American ladies who have Italian origins. The also have a site, named liado.net, where LIADO stands for “Le Italo Americane Di Oggi” – The Italian-American Women of Today.
Le Italo Americane Di Oggi, associazione fondata nel 1993
They have weekly meeting not too far from where we live and this lady, Mary Jane, said she would love my wife to come over so that they could learn again some Italian as they are loosing it.
I will be able to also go in some special occasion: this is strictly a women-only association. It felt like we had found a little piece of home in America. It sounds kind of strange and one would imagine this kind of feelings not be exiting in a modern age, but indeed it is pleasant to find people who have taken the time to network together and build a stable association on some solid roots, their original family roots.
You can tell when you are on the right path by things getting simpler and the right people coming to you spontaneously. Life is all about people and business is part of life. No system will do the work for you, and the right people can always figure out a right system.
So since I have been in the US I have always been searching for the right people to team with. And I am happy to have finally found the first key resource for our American operations. His name is Terry Ogburn and he is an all American business man who has a long term experience in running and establishing several type of companies and who has a special knack at teaching and coaching people. His current title is business developer for Century 21 Grant Realty of Florida and he is helping us putting together a very advanced training project that will empower the agents of this brokerage firm with all the Web 2.0 tools they will ever need to be much more effective in their real estate selling career.
Introduction of the presentation I did at Century 21 Grant Realty with Daniele Bogiatto, with the support of Terry Ogburn and Karen Selby.
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 »
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