Duccio Zambrini doesn’t like to stand still.
During his time at corporate news giant Bloomberg, he conducted business meetings, demos and seminars in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian and Russian. In all, he speaks 13 languages at various levels of fluency.
He left the corporate world in 2011 and today runs a number of businesses, including: Life Coaching, Career Development Coaching, Executive Coaching and Leadership Development. But in this interview, we’re looking at another part of his portfolio of businesses: his networking groups. Duccio runs the UK Confederation, London Connector, Italian Connector and Property Connector. He also has a property management concern, and a new business, which we will discover in a minute. (UK Confederation is the British branch of Confassociazioni, the Italian networking mega-organisation, with 1.3 million+ members).
What links all of his work together is the fundamental belief that each business is Human to Human.
We should mention that he spends 6 months of each year in Spain and is an avid cyclist – he is in fact, also a cycling coach.
We told you he doesn’t like to stand still!
Human to Human
Duccio explains that he has never sat down and planned any of his business ventures in the conventional sense.
All the businesses I’ve done, all of them, they never came because I, somehow, sat down and said OK, I want to do this or that. It was always something that happened in my life, that was either through an introduction or the events, I was just doing the event for fun… And they all came through networking.
All his businesses are related or follow on naturally from one to the other. Italian Connector networking group links fellow Italian professionals in London. This leads to London Connector, which encompasses entrepreneurs and corporate managers from across London. Developing that theme, the UK Confederation brings together members from a number of business associations in the UK, including the British Argentine Chamber of Commerce, the Lithuanian Chamber of Commerce in the U.K, London Connector, and Polish Business Link.
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Duccio owns and manages a couple of properties in London, and manages properties for some landlords. Some of the delegates at his events are in the property business, so, when they enquired about a dedicated group it made good sense to start up Property Connector, to bring them all together and attract more in the same industry.
What about Duccio’s latest business, mentioned at the top of the interview? He had been working with the same woman for four years, who has been servicing his properties in London. She came to Duccio with an opportunity to branch out, by laundering the linen for a number of London hotels and now a new partnership has been born, the latest in a logical chain, all linked to the one before, all started as a result of suggestions from others.
What Makes You Feel Good
And then Duccio revealed a surprise: during lockdown, he didn’t simply switch all his business networking events to Zoom or Teams – he simply stopped doing them all!
Again, the human-to-human ethos overruled the option of following the crowd, as he felt that without that in-person element, meetings and introductions would just not flow the same and would not mean as much to people participating.
And, ultimately, Duccio enjoys meeting people in the flesh. He values the real-life handshake upon greeting or sealing the deal. And what matters most to him, one of his rules to live by, is to do what makes you feel good and avoid what you dislike. Alongside that, he has cultivated a strategy that whatever he does, if it goes wrong it will not negatively impact on his life.
What makes that possible is both a diverse set of income streams, as we’ve seen above, and capital accrued from lucrative jobs when he was employed in the corporate world. Duccio does recognise that he is fortunate in this regard, as this is not the situation for many people in business, especially those starting out.
Duccio is keen also to consider those people he works with and he has noticed the positive impact of good conditions and wages on the staff at Confassociazioni. It is particularly satisfying that doing what makes him feel good also makes others feel good, too!
Duccio Zambrini was interviewed by Bill Mair, of PrecisionPresentation.com
