I started this blog a while ago but didn't have the courage to make it live and breathe until this week when I decided that the path that I am on with my business partners Klementina and Ed (in Northern Italy and New York respectively) was worth documenting.
What helps is knowing that we do not have to be perfect to share thoughts and ideas about work. Our experiences, good and bad, can serve as a lesson for others as well as ourselves.
Here is how I first revealed the news on my previous blog turnthatshipintolemenade.blogspot.com
Klementina and I were already working separately and sometimes together a year ago when we had the idea to create a company together. I wrote up a business plan that had us helping small and medium Italian companies communicate better outside of Italy. It's what we had been doing for some time already, and we were good at it. As I wrote it I decided that the best way to help companies go international would be to go international ourselves. But it was still far away and scarey, sometimes exciting, but then we just left the idea there. The plan became one of those "some day" stories that never seems to go anywhere. We had work, though, so we didn't worry too much about it.
It was always there in the back of my mind gnawing away at me though. I wanted to be able to do the same thing for companies in other countries that we were doing for Italian companies. I wanted to have a closer relationship with my home country. That, and I think we both felt we could do more.
This is the story of how we decided that some day could also be now. At that point, our third partner, Ed, came into the picture as the most obvious complement to what we could offer our clients. We became a team on two continents because all three of us had the courage at the same time. That is when things started to get interesting. But we will talk about that later.
This week the three of us are on different projects that mean something special to us individually. Ed is in Afghanistan with a group of cartoonists, sponsored by the USO, drawing caricatures of American soldiers, Klementina is helping a new all-female company get through a charity fashion show, volunteering her time and lending her expertise to help a company she believes in, and I am planning the re-launch at the end of the month of a 53 year old non-profit private library that I volunteer for in Trieste.
All three of us are doing what we love and giving our time and energy to projects we believe in. This is what real fulfillment at work feels like. Because what we give adds to our experience and bag of tricks that we use with our paid work, we don't even have to feel guilty about it!
So here is our new blog, let's fill it with ideas that other people can use to do their job better and give back when the time is right.
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