Christos Pittis - Udemy Premium Educator, Entrepreneur, Business & Tech

- How did you get your start as an investor and business consultant?

Carlos Flores - Investor, Consultant, Entrepreneur

- Well, I started as a business consultant first after I got an MBA, and joined a management consulting firm shortly thereafter. I spent around 12 years there doing management in telecom and media. I was a principle when I left to join another large consulting firm in Europe called Roland Berger strategy consultants – they are based in Munich, and I was doing Telecom and media for Latin America there.

At that point, I decided to start my own company, so I started one in Brazil. It was an e-commerce company, our products were related to health and beauty imported from the U.S. into Brazil. That was my first try at entrepreneurship. I did that for about 5 years, sold the company, came back to the U.S., and decided to become an angel investor and I joined Golden Seeds. It’s a very large angel group here in New York City and also has offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Dallas. We have 300 members, and a fund of 150 million dollars that we use to invest in every state’s startups in technology, life sciences, and consumer products.

Dave Kaster - Business writing consultant

- I owned my own financial planning business for about 15 years and ran it. I had about 30 people who were working for me. I sold that and started to work with some business clients because they were struggling financially. I started to try to help them to find different ways to be successful to make more sales and get more profits, that’s how I started.

Michael Virardi - Business consultant, author, public speaker

- Thank you Christos for this question. I started back in 2001 when I was working for the family business, which deals with catering equipment and tabletop supplies. We won a European award – it was an American company, but we won a European award in terms of Cyprus, our country. At that time, I came from my studies, and my dad said “Michalis, we have a new company, it deals with plastic articles. You are going to be in charge for the sales of this company”. We imported the products, and our goal from the United States company was to sell one 40 foot container. We sold 7 of those containers, and we won the first European award for that. The Americans honored us as a family and as a company, and I was lucky enough to be there with my brother.

That day, they brought one of the best sales consultants, Jeffrey Gitomer – gitomer.com is his website – he spoke to us, and I was mesmerized with what I heard. I turned to my brother and I told him that I was going to do what this guy is asking. My brother asked me what I meant, and I told him I was going to try to become like him, a business consultant. As soon as he had a break, I went up to him and asked him how I could become like him. He said there are 2 ways to do this: the first way is easy and the second way is a difficult. The easy way was to study 2 hours every day on a chosen topic for 10 years excluding weekends. In 5 years, you will be recognized in your country, in 10 years worldwide. I told him that I would start that day. I then asked what the difficult option was. He told me I had to have consistency, so I would have to not skip a day of study for the next 10 years. That’s how I started becoming a business consultant, and I began reading my second, third, fourth, 800th book. To cut a long story short, I am here as I am now - being a speaker and a trainer both in my country and in 7 European countries as well as in the U.S.