Interview With Serial Entrepreneur and Renowned Public Speaker Andrea d’Agostini

Andrea d’Agostini is a serial entrepreneur, renowned public speaker, and successful mentor. He has helped thousands of people around the world scale their businesses and learn the advanced fundamentals of marketing, and has been featured in Forbes, Vanity Fair, and Glamour. 

Interview With Serial Entrepreneur and Renowned Public Speaker Andrea d’Agostini

d’Agostini moved to the U.S. in 2013 and became the VP of PR & Marketing for a young energy company (American Power & Gas) and in 2015 started touring the world with speaking engagements as a way to give back. By 2018, he formalized his creative ideas by establishing SalesJet, and since then has been a major part of many other business endeavors.

Andrea would love to share his backstory, why and how he started his many companies and upcoming projects he has in the works.

Can you share with us your background and your career?

Well, I started my career in acting, no wait, my first job actually was to be an Entertainer, you know the guys that entertain guests in resorts and big vacation complexes? Ya, that.  I absolutely loved being that and, to be honest, I think I never stopped being that same entertainer at heart.

After a few summers entertaining guests in different locations across Italy, I had the opportunity to land a role in a major TV series, and with that I had the opportunity to start acting professionally.

After a bit of acting and dancing, I entered into another sphere of show business when I became a host. I absolutely loved working as a host, the team, the preparation, the drama… It was all part of it.

After about two years in television, I got more and more interested in communication and the possibilities that the digital world was presented in 2007. I decided to start content production, a creative content production generating tailor-made content and creative campaigns for brands in need to understand and penetrate the growing social media space. It was a great time and an intense learning curve from being an entertainer to becoming an entrepreneur.

The creative nature of our firm helped us greatly in landing clients such as Sephora, Pandora, Sweet Years, Sperry and many others. During that period of time I made many mistakes and wrong decisions, mainly it was hard for me to understand the real value of what we were doing and how scalable our business model actually was. I was, after all, still an artist in my mind, and the fundamental reason why I started building a marketing agency was to learn how to create a machine able to create, produce and promote shows, music and events.

I continued it in Italy until 2013 when I moved to the United States permanently. In 2014 I accepted the role as vice president of PR and Marketing for a then-emerging Energy company called American Power & Gas. We worked together and built an amazing team that grew the business from $23 to $387 million in just 3 and a half years.

In 2015, I started to share my knowledge and experience in seminars and talks across the United States in the beginning and then near following all over the world. I delivered over 1000 talks trying to help entrepreneurs and people in general find Marketing Solutions Strategic Partnerships and in general accelerate their growth.

In 2018 I launched my alpha business program, to apply my skills to help other businesses that wanted to grow and accelerate, fast.

2021, I completed my path as vice-president and decided to continue with my own holding and the different businesses that, at that point in time, became part of my network. Our group is scaling faster than anything I’ve ever seen, and every week we have a new request from CEOs and business owners to accelerate their growth. I love businesses that have a very ethical approach and a great exchange with their customers or community, and burning passion for their product/services.

Can you share with our readers how you started your company and the mission behind it? 

My business was born with the purpose of accelerating the growth and expansion of entrepreneurs through business coaching, marketing and sales support and strategy sessions. Our goal is to add $1mln to the business in 12 months or less and scale from there.

We have built a whole program and tools to systematically expand brands and grow operations. We currently have clients in Italy, the US, Russia and soon in LATAM.

Our businesses thrive and we often end up partnering with them and scale even faster and further. My team and I believe that entrepreneurs are artists because an entrepreneur has to constantly create his/her company every day, out of nothing. If this is not art, tell me what it is.

The business Renaissance that this world so desperately needs will be brought into society thanks to the work of the entrepreneurs and leaders that will bring innovation and prosperity in spite of the barriers constantly thrown at them.

My wife and I are building everything together.

How is diversity in the workplace evolving, how does it play into your company and its mission?

In the world of creativity and innovation, it has never been a matter of diversity (at least in my opinion and in my view). The only rule is “best idea wins” and the best idea is tested in the field.

I do agree that the exec structure needs to have a positive and supportive approach toward the team, offering good opportunities for those that want to present their ideas, but ultimately the best idea wins.

I have seen how ideas, creativity, and the joy of working can be squashed by bad management, office politics and in general a suppressive approach on the part of management. I pay a lot of attention to this aspect.

I believe the world is way more integrated and “together” than what social media shows, you know?

My staff are quite amazing. We happen to have more women in executive positions than men and our group is quite a mixed group in terms of ethnicity and nationality.

Our Lead Designer Bari is from the Philippines, our COO Micaela is from Italy, our CTO Mattia is from Italy as well, Our CEO Nicole is Persian, our media director (Jenna) is from the US, one of our copywriters is from Kenya (May) and we could go on with the list.

We will be reaching around 300 staff by mid 2022 and we see a “global” approach toward hiring. No boundaries.

Of course, in our different businesses, we have a concentration of staff in the vicinity of the HQs, for example, our weight-loss firm has offices in LA, Atlanta and Tampa, our Accounting Firm in Italy (Turin), our Winery is Italy (Puglia) etc.

I strongly advise businesses to look at innovation and ideas as the primary driver in the selection of their employees. Diversity will follow as a consequence.

Great ideas can come from anywhere and a business should have processes in place to recognize and capture those inputs identifying a great mind.

During the pandemic many people lost their jobs and livelihood, how did your company adapt and pivot during this time to be what it is today?

During the pandemic, we 10Xed the business and created a new approach toward the growth of our companies. We quickly scaled from a small 6 figure company to now an almost 8 figure business. And we are just getting started. It requires extremely hard work, dedication and investments on our part.

We had tough moments when some of our then customers had to cut down their budget and expenses during the lockdown. The solution for us was to evolve our approach from a marketing agency to the business accelerator, partnering with the businesses we choose to with and participating in their growth. We just started the acceleration of our businesses, and our process is truly giving us amazing results.

If you could go back and talk to your younger self what would you tell him and why? 

I would tell him:

  1. Write down your goals and focus on them.
  2. Stick with your intuitions. Stop living life like a general rehearsal, just go for it.
  3. Look carefully at those around you. Irrespective of their social status, are they contributing to your life? What are their intentions? Be willing to cut off people.
  4. Find someone that already reached goals similar to yours and learn from him/her.
  5. Understand finances and that the best investment you can do is to invest in yourself, your competence, your health and your spirituality.
  6. Discipline yourself to workout everyday
  7. Never stop learning, being talented is not an excuse to slack.
  8. Be your best supporter.
  9. Work like crazy and work like crazy at something you love, because it will get tough, no matter what.
  10. Think like an entrepreneur, be creative for sure, but think like an entrepreneur.
  11. Be willing to experience the haters. Their mission in life is to spread negativity and be “victims”. These people might be rich, poor, tall, short, it doesn’t matter. They are the biggest danger for an entrepreneur. You need to grow tough skin.
  12. Be willing to experience failures. They are part of being an entrepreneur.
  13. Be willing to experience comments, insults and all the bad there is in the world, especially if you are preparing to make a “dent” in it.
  14. Never, ever, ever quit.

I was very much concerned for the better part of my life about not upsetting people, not being too self-confident, too certain. I was listening to everybody and particularly to those that criticized me, my art, my life, my way of walking and so on.

That nearly destroyed me.

If I could talk to my old self, I would tell him to grow tough skin and go for it. Ultimately, you are the one you meet every day in front of the mirror. You are the one paying the bill of your own life and, in life, the rent is due every day.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? 

MANY!

Oh, every day is really really exciting, I have to say!

  • Our TV show Women Of The Movement produced by our Film Production firm Serendipity Group will be airing on ABC in January.
  • We are finalizing the launch of our franchising BodyContourz as a Business in a box in the US and Italy in 2021.
  • Our acceleration program is growing every day
  • We have grown our participation to 9 companies in our holding
  • Launching an advisory from Switzerland to help companies bring their products to market in the Italian and Swiss markets.
  • Our Marketing firm is becoming truly world class and we are aiming to have a couple of exits in 2022 with the businesses we are scaling.

There is really a lot more, we are going 100 miles a minute, and the past 90 days have been the best of our life so far. The potential became unlimited.

My wife is the other half of my sky and is an incredible partner in life and business. We enjoy every minute we are together and support the effort shoulder to shoulder.

This is truly the most exciting thing of all. To build all this with her.

Where do you see yourself and your career going in this new year and in the future? 

In this new year we aim to expand our holding, continuing to acquire businesses that are bringing incredible value to the market.

We want to start producing the next season of our show and start to develop other subjects.

We will always keep cultivating our relationship with our CEOs and we’ll initiate more group activities for the whole holding.

Our team is really incredible.

How can our readers connect with you on social media? 

You can connect with me on Instagram:

@mrdagostini

Or on my site

Andreadagostini.com or Monarchy.io

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