Do you know anyone who successfully runs four very distinct businesses? Probably not. This is the story of Sicilian Mirko La Rosa, who helps people grow their brand via Instagram, owns a community of over two thousand professional influencers who connect and support each other, a top luxury hotel influencer business, and a real estate business.
Mirko studied Business Management at Bocconi University in Milan, and soon after graduation he started working a typical 9 to 5 job in companies such as PWC and Ernst & Young. Even though getting those jobs was tough and something to be proud of, Mirko was miserable. He was working more than 12 hours a day and barely making $2K per month.
To keep his head up through corporate life, he read constantly. In one of the books he read, he found the quote “start building your dreams, otherwise someone will hire you to help them build theirs,” by Tony Gaskins.
“This sentence was a total breakthrough in my life. In the exact moment that I read this sentence something clicked in me. I had to do something to change my life.” Mirko recalls.
Mirko then started to find out about unconventional types of jobs, such as influencers and media promotion. After three months of learning about Instagram marketing, he got his first client: a restaurant in Milan that continues to be his client to this day. Very quickly, he earned the restaurant over 100K followers.
After this successful media growth experiment, Mirko engaged in monetization techniques and was able to get the most out of Instagram. He then quit his 9 to 5 job and has lived a completely different life ever since.
Mirko worked on becoming an influencer himself, and soon after started to be contacted by top luxury hotels around the world to ask him to stay in multiple sites and promote his visits. In the past 36 months, he has visited the best hotels in the world, in Bali, Dubai, Maldives, Phuket, Mykonos, Ibiza, Kiev, Barcelona, and the list goes on. Mirko shares all of these experiences through his company Luxintravels and his travel page.
“While traveling the world, I have created the first Instagram community of professional influencers (about two thousand people) with mailing lists of over 10K people and with over 50K followers. These people exchange daily advice and add value to each other in order to grow on Instagram.” Mirko recounts.
Having nailed the brand building business, becoming a top luxury hotel influencer, and creating a massive Instagram community, Mirko decided to create with some of his friends a Real Estate business that is growing at a 40% rate every year.
Through it all, Mirko emphasizes that bad things happen to everyone, but what matters is what people do as a result of this.
“It’s not about what happens to you. The key is how you react to bad things that happen. Life doesn’t happen to you, life happens for you. Only by taking full responsibility for everything you can amplify what you have direct control over.” Mirko reflects.
Mirko has found success at age 37, and he only started four years ago. For him it is remarkable how no family member of his ever lived with the comfort that Mirko now has, and he stresses how important his parents’ unconditional support through his journey has been. Even when he was 33, his parents helped him with rent and other expenses. But that year, they had a major business crash and they, along with Mirko, went broke. It was during this time that Mirko stood up and got involved in the brand building business.
“There was a moment in which I couldn’t even go to a Supermarket to buy mineral water. And that was the exact moment when I said to myself: No more. I will never be in this situation again.” Mirko says.
Now that winter has passed for Mirko, he can look back and analyze his journey. On the one hand, Mirko thinks that the biggest challenge for people who have never created a business is to compete against yourself and negativity. On the other hand, the biggest challenge for those who have already created a business is to find money to finance the project, to which Mirko advises to be resourceful and creative.
Mindset is essential for any business too, which is why Mirko still invests in learning as much about mindset as he can. For him, business is a spiritual game. He asks, “what is the difference from the small pizzeria under your home and Pizzahut? Is it how they make pizzas? The difference is the mindset of the owners.” It is mindset what can differentiate your project from someone else’s.
Mirko will continue building brands on Instagram and traveling the world visiting top luxury hotels. You can follow his journey here.