DA UNIVERSITARIO A IMPRENDITORE A 25 ANNI (COME HO FATTO) - Parte 1 di 2

Entrepreneur, are you born or do you become? And if the answer is the second one, how do you do it? Hi guys, welcome to this new video with a new framing, a new goal, a new everything. The director decided that it was time for a change and so here we are. Obviously for the director I mean myself. Not that he made big changes, I just moved the camera a few centimeters to the left. But it seems nice to me, doesn't it? It's not bad, I like it. In any case, today I'm here for a chat because I updated you on what happened after the graduation, that is, I entered Moncler for two months, then I left and opened the SRL to dedicate myself to my university orientation activities, but maybe I didn't focus specifically on what my path was to become an entrepreneur at the end of the fair. It sounds strange to me and I still struggle to say I'm an entrepreneur, because it seems to me a super high-pitched thing, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur, but I'm an entrepreneur what? The truth is that I actually undertook an entrepreneurship path, even though in my small, obviously I'm not a big company, I don't have offices, I do everything from home, everything in cloud, but in the end I was looking at what I had done in recent years and we can very well frame everything in the field of entrepreneurship. There are people who work with me, I have a service or more services that I not only sell but also give for free, so I organized a series of economic resources, people, knowledge, to offer on the market something that can be useful to people. What's the name of all this? Enterprise. I would like to go through the stages of my life to understand what led me to be the Marco Lecchi that I am now and leave you some clues at the end, because I think that sharing my experience, even if it is a unique path and it is peculiar and it is only mine, can somehow help someone who has only the far-fetched idea of ​​taking an alternative path to the traditional career and throwing himself into the world of entrepreneurship. In Italy it is a bit complex because there is not much education in entrepreneurship, the school does not talk about it, the university does not talk about it, so where do you learn? You have to learn it by yourself, at your own expense, throwing yourself, but obviously it is not like doing a career in a traditional company. Doing entrepreneurship involves much higher potential earnings, but also much higher potential losses, because you risk your own capital, you risk a lot of your time, because you really have to work hard to build something of your own, and so I decided to do this chat and then eventually dedicate other videos on my entrepreneurial path and to continue to document my life as I have always done, first in high school and then at university. This video will be divided into two parts, in the first there will be my story, in the second the points that I learned from my short entrepreneurial journey. If you have specific topics that you want me to deal with, let me know in the comments, so we can talk about it together and answer your questions. I want this to be a space dedicated to entrepreneurship, a chat, without too much writing. Let's start with my story. I sat a while to investigate my childhood, I must say that there has always been this desire to want to create something, to see something that was mine, to associate it with the times of symbols, which they did not want to say much, but then I will discover what it meant to create a brand, to create a logo, to create something distinctive. I remember, for example, in elementary school that I often organized these clubs, I called them clubs, in which I brought people together, I put myself a little at the head of these clubs and said, you do this, you do this, you do this. But in reality, I never had in mind to be a big entrepreneur, until a few months ago, maybe a year ago. I must say that I had a fairly decisive influence from my father, because my father has his own company, a small company here in our area, which, however, as small as it is, it is always a company, he never worked as an employee. And my mother works in my father's company, so let's say that I have never lived, on a family level, an outlook to make a career in the company. In the family, the person who had influenced me the most in going towards the economy and following his own steps is my uncle, who worked in the stock market and worked in the bank, and therefore it seemed cool to me as a child to enter the world of finance, so I saw that he had a good lifestyle and it would have been interesting to be part of it. In truth, then, my uncle also made an entrepreneurial path, because he quit the big bank he worked for to open his own SGR, that is, a savings management company. The first project that can be associated with an entrepreneurial activity, I think it was YouTube. I started the channel initially with a friend of mine, in which we talked about Minecraft. Hello everyone, let's install it so we can start crafting, yes, crafting, to make a small shelter for the night, I'm a romantic, let's sell roses. And on this YouTube channel I had a lot of fun, both for the creation of content, but above all for the activities that are behind the management of a channel, which are often not seen, but they are there and they are present, you have to do them well. It's about finding the right images, making every video a cover that has snaps, but that is also consistent with the channel, to find titles, to find a communicative style, the intros that must always be the same, the outros that must always be the same, the songs that must be consistent with each other, to understand a strategy of the content that will come out, so to understand content that takes the mass, some niche content. At the time I didn't have these things very clear, obviously, they are things that I slowly developed by doing a lot and publishing hundreds and hundreds of videos on YouTube. Remember that my old channel, which I kept for 3-4 years, uploaded 500 videos, which were obviously private, you can't see them. After that, there was my switch to the new channel, so from the Minecraft channel I opened a vlog channel, in which I initially made a little funny videos. Tag, what's in my backpack? So, yes, this is the... Marco. Yes, tell me. The camera is over here. Unlike the Minecraft channel, the whole channel no longer revolved around a video game and an avatar, but revolved around my person, so that's where the need and the awareness of having to take care of the personal brand. The personal brand is a very broad and important topic today that does not only concern YouTube channels, but concerns all of us, because we are all present on digital platforms, with our social media, with LinkedIn, with our CV, even when we go to present ourselves in the world of work. So that's a personal branding theme that must be studied by everyone, not just influencers or content creators. In the meantime, while I was taking care of my personal branding and my YouTube channel, I was also passionate about many other things. I followed a lot of things, the representation, the music, you see behind, I don't know if you can see it, but here there is a digital keyboard because I played the piano. There was the technology, there was the spinning wheel, I started collecting coins, and among all these myriads of passions, there was also that for branding. How did I pursue my passion? Simply by informing myself, simply by reading something I found on the internet, on social media, articles, observing how big brands acted, so Apple, McDonald's, Burger King, etc. So I understand that perhaps my direction was more towards something qualitative, which concerned branding, the management of the company, rather than the financial field. And this, my passion for marketing, ultimately materializes in my thesis of maturity, in which I bring the theme of the construction of an identity brand. So I analyze all the steps that were needed to build a brand, what distinguished it, what marketing elements were needed to be able to bring a brand to success. I realized that when I talked about these things, I did it with a sense of cause, because all the information I had absorbed for this passion allowed me to link to my personal experiences all the theories of branding. And so I decide that at Bocconi University I would not have studied finance, but I would have studied management. During my first year of university, a world opened up in front of my eyes, because Bocconi University was and is a competitive environment, in a positive sense, I have always said, so positive competition that allows you to face others in a healthy way, so to understand your own limits a little, try to improve them, and therefore also to find a little motivation, seeing what others are doing, being inspired. And in short, I know a few guys who are really very awake, not only have excellent degrees at the university, but also have their own projects, they want to get involved, they want to build a lot. In particular, I know Bilab, a representation association that still exists, which in fact does student representation, in a political, political and professional way. Their main activities, however, were not limited only to representation, so simply participating in the meetings of the Ateneo, taking decisions on behalf of other students, but there were a lot of other activities, such as the organization of events, the creation of dispensaries, the university orientation for high school students, there are many things. So I join Bilab. In particular, I was totally amazed by an event they had organized, in which I participated, which is called Ski Lab, that is, a three-day ski weekend, where there is an open bar, DJ set, everything, ski passes included, there is a party among all the students, I had a lot of fun. I said, damn it, but if I can create something like that, where I have a lot of fun, and I learn more, because surely by organizing something like that you will learn a lot of things, and then you can spend everything you have learned in the world of work, then I simply won. And so I set myself the goal of organizing Ski Lab. In the meantime, I enter the area of ​​communication and media of Bilab, so I continued to pursue what was in the end my path, that of marketing, communication, branding, etc. I remember that the first activity I did when I joined Bilab was to remake the logo. So this association had an old logo that had been going on for a long time, for almost a decade. I arrived, I said, in my opinion you can do better. Boom! Proposals, proposals, proposals, and still the association is using the logo that I had created as soon as I returned to Bilab. In the association I commit myself, they see that they can entrust me with some responsibilities and start organizing something, and in the meantime I become responsible for the communication and marketing of the Christmas gala, which now unfortunately is no longer done, but at the time it was a very popular event at the university. We do a launch, in collaboration, obviously with the very strong work of the representatives who took care of the organization. That year the sale was online, and we sold out in like 30 seconds, I don't know, something like that. Great success, super fun, the fact of finding also what communication you need to do, the logo, the images, posts on social networks, all these things here fascinated me a lot. And guess what? The following year I organized Ski Lab. So my big goal that I had set for myself at the beginning of the university, I finally achieved it. Organizing events, in the end, is a bit like doing a mini-business, a business project in a short time. It gave me the opportunity to understand what it meant to take a risk, then also take a budget and have to spend it, to understand how to do the communication, to understand the participants, what they really wanted, so, I don't know, basically what drink to buy, what kind of ski pass was the most suitable, where did we store the resources, did we buy the beautiful jackets or did we buy more posters to hang during the evening open bar that we inserted in the first day of skiing. All these things, right? That, however, put you to the test and make you understand what it means to do. And so this was certainly one of the most formative activities, so Bi Lab and all the events organization activities. And here there was another activity that made me grow a lot, that is, the activity of representation itself, but even before the activity of representation, applying for elections and carrying out an electoral campaign. So another time I found myself taking care of my personal branding. This meant that I had to be present in the communication channels, I was present on my channels, I was present on the page channels that made memes because in the meantime I had become the face of Studenti Bocconi, I was the face of Top Squad, which I haven't talked about yet, but I guess you already know. And so here again, to work on myself, to work on the image that communicated outside and to do branding again. The elections went well, so I was elected to the College of Teachers and Academic Council, so two bodies, during my second year. After that, when I entered the high school, I became a class representative and a course representative in Marketing Management. I was re-elected to the College of Teachers and Academic Council and I won the region, so I became a representative of the Regional Coordination Committee of the University of Lombardy. So I had a total of five seats. All the communication activity, personal branding, the work I had done to spend myself as a representative and try to meet the needs of the students, they had repaid me, that is, I was able to get what I wanted to get, become a representative in an important body, that is, the regional one. In all this, however, the university journey, you know, was accompanied by Top Squad. So let's take a step back to the first year. When I arrived at the first year, I was the only one in my little town, where I grew up, here on the outskirts of Milan, to do the Bocconi. I didn't know anyone else. And I remember well the first moments when I arrived at the university, that I didn't know anyone, I didn't know who to talk to, I didn't have information, if it made sense to buy certain books, where to go to eat, all these things here. Talking a little with the older ones, when I had started to meet people, especially thanks to B-Lab, I realized that there were a lot of unwritten rules that were handed down from the older ones to the younger ones. I said, how can I solve these problems that I have experienced on my skin, that is, the fact of not having people to trust during the first few days, thanks to what I have already created, therefore my YouTube channel. And so from the YouTube channel I announce that there would have been a Facebook group in which I would have answered all the questions for those who wanted to enter Bocconi. This Facebook group works well, at the beginning there were a few hundred people, the people were very interesting, they asked me a lot of questions, I answered, also together with a friend of mine who had founded Top Squad with me. And after a year had passed, when the test was over, I realized that all the guys I had helped were automatically answering the questions of the guys who entered the year after. So all the new guys solved their doubts thanks to the guys I had helped before answering their questions. So I said, well, let's contact these guys who are so available and ask them if they want to help me manage this Facebook group. Their answer was obviously affirmative and they were a great help to start the whole Top Squad group as it is now. I said, the best way to solve a problem when we have it in general in everyday life is to write to our friends on WhatsApp who know the answer. If I want to be that friend that I missed when I entered Bocconi, why don't I make a WhatsApp group where we all answer the questions of these guys? The group starts, I make it short, today we are 1,500-2,000 people every year who try to enter Bocconi. This is how the Advisor program was born, that is, these guys who are actively part of Top Squad and manage the community, who respond to messages, manage groups, but as well as many other activities such as managing Instagram, LinkedIn, collecting material, doing simulations, giving repetitions, etc. In my third year I realized that having such a large audience in which we responded to all the needs of where we are at home, where I go to Milan, how much it costs to live in Milan, how to register at the university, I mean, they were already doing this well, but it was also necessary to respond to another requirement, that is, the preparation of the entrance test. None of us, being students, could give a super punctual training on the Bocconi test, because even the best of us were not teachers. And so I decided to take a step further, I would invest the budget I had made with YouTube to create a platform in which there was a complete video course for the Bocconi test, simulations, exercises, statistics and commented exercises. And I decided to call it Top Test. At first it was a bit of a mess, I didn't know what to do, I called some Bocconi teachers, first they say yes, then they say no, then I look for someone at the Polytechnic, I had a very long list of teachers, I finally find this teacher, I contact him and he tells me, nice idea, let's try to develop it together. Gradually, even then, he knew about this thing and a friend of mine who had done a presentation with me in B-Lab tells me, look, I have childhood friends in Abruzzo who are developers and could help you with the platform. I hear them and they tell me, why not, we are on board, I think it's a good idea, I think it's a good project, let's try to commit together. So I put together all the tests, a bit of the networking I had done during college and boom, something bigger, more professional, with a budget, with people who work on this thing, and my little first real business was born. Today, of course, I still have a lot to learn, there are a lot of things that I am still understanding at the moment, every day is like going back to college, that is, taking a lesson every day in real life. Between tax, business, new forms of marketing, social media that are growing, artificial intelligence, there is really still a lot to do. But what I'm doing excites me a lot, it amuses me and gives me the opportunity to work when I want to do what I want. And I believe that having undertaken this entrepreneurial path was the best choice I could make based on the resources I had and that I had built over time. These, I think, were the most important points of my life. Obviously, it is difficult to summarize in a video on YouTube all your life and everything that has formed you. There have been so many things, I can't go back to my entrepreneurial path just for a few factors, there have been a lot of things, but also really starting from the education of my parents, from the people I met along the way, from some teacher who changed my mind, from an advice that a friend gave me, there are so many things that came together so that this path could be accomplished. Now, there are some fundamental points that I have learned from this entrepreneurial experience of mine, which concern the target, the value, the time and the entrepreneurial idea, but we'll talk about it in the next video.