I met Andrea Iervolino at Cassino University while he gave his inaugural lecture at the Advanced Training Course in Artistic Production and Entertainment Languages and I was speechless for his story.
It is as if the best of Italy and Canada had come together to give life to a boy capable of facing every problem in life by creating new business models and becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the show business.
A recognition that is attributed to him by the press such as Forbes, Variety, Financial Times but also by the quotations on the stock exchange of his companies and by the acknowledgments of merit by the President of the Italian Republic and Canada.
He is a born entrepreneur - and also a great salesman - and he started selling snacks at school at the age of five. And his resourcefulness still continues:
“Doing a business for a few euros or many millions takes the same amount of time, so it is better to think big. If I look back, I think I spent more energy convincing the pastry chef from Cassino to finance my first movie than to ask an investor for millions today”.
His story is a textbook, and perhaps sooner or later he should tell it in a film: Andrea has a trauma at the age of five that makes him stutterer and since then he has to strive to achieve his dreams in an original and different way from that of others.
Her maternal grandparents went to Canada after the war where they made a fortune and adopted her mother who then grew up with a new mindset. Canada was an expanding country that offered opportunities to those who were enterprising, and this spirit is transmitted to Andrea.
The grandparents returned to Italy and his mother gets married and started a family in Cassino. So, Andrea grows up with a unique entrepreneurial freshness, which comes from overseas, and an equally unique sensitivity given by our country.
As in all families, economic problems come at a certain point, with their tragic emotional contours, but Andrea has a dream that guides him and makes him invincible: he has the dream of working in art, in cinema with Hollywood actors.
He learns the creative processes in a theater company and at 17 he decides to shoot his first film as a producer in Cassino. The Montecassino abbey is perfect as a location for a film about the Middle Ages and Andrea manages to convince everyone to finance and shoot the film. Today it would be called crowdfunding, yesterday it was a micro-financing operation.
To shoot the film he asks for help from a wedding photographer who was an expert in digital technologies and, in a natural way, Andrea introduces digital to the world of cinema that was still entrusted to films. A technological revolution that immediately projects him as one of the few expert producers in digital innovation and which will then pave the way for success.
Once the film is shot and edited, the real problems arise and the way to deal with them will be what characterizes Andrea's entire entrepreneurial life.
At that time, distribution took place only in cinemas, a monopoly organized by large companies that left no space for independents. A new way of distributing films had to be invented and Andrea changed times and audiences.
He decides to have screenings in the morning reserved for schools and followed by a debate. The cost is minimal, and the attention is great. The success is such that he makes other films and becomes a national example and a reference for our ministry.
The lecture at the university continued with the story of other episodes, but we can summarize his life of success in 2 key lessons: technological innovation and new business models to arrive on the market.
They seem trivial concepts, all the business management manuals tell them, but hearing them told from who have applied them successfully is exciting. Again, I felt that reality surpasses any manual and I was thrilling to have the opportunity to speak and ask questions to someone who have innovated the world of entertainment. I hope that students of the University of Cassino have deeply appreciated this.
To close this first story and leave the desire to follow Andrea Iervolino in his business adventure and watch his productions, let's say that the innovations in distribution have continued with the creation of the TaTaTu platform - where viewers are 'paid' to have fun -and in the recent agreement with Elon Musk for the production of sports matches in space - where the need to manage the variations (negative and positive) of the weight due to the variation of gravity is added to the sporting emotion.
When we finished listening to Andrea, all of us were filled with a spirit of optimism and came out with the idea of innovating our lives.
But personally, I was also struck by another aspect concerning the wealth we have when there is contamination between different cultures, in this case the Italian and Canadian ones.
Andrea has made films about Lamborghini, Andrea Bocelli, Enzo Ferrari and has a very strong visceral bond with Italy, yet to make the leap he went to Toronto in Canada and today he lives mainly in London. But his way of thinking is different from those of us who are totally Italian.
It is this having more spirits in one's heart that leads enterprising people to be able to take the best of what the world has to offer. It is this emotional richness that allows you to have deep roots but also wings with which to fly high.
And then there are no obstacles, and every obstacle is a challenge to innovate and grow.
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