Interviewee Name: Andrina Lever
Company Name: Lever Enterprises, Balloon Express
Website: http://www.balloonexpress.it
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Andrina Lever: I was born in England but grew up in Canada and in various other countries. I started traveling when I was nine months old. I went to 17 different schools growing up in three countries. I graduated from law school in England and started out in human rights law and sold my soul to the corporate world. I went into banking and was in advertising for awhile. I got married and my husband and I lived in various places – England, New York, Australia – then we moved back to Canada. In 1988 I started my own business Lever Enterprises.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Andrina Lever: Now I live overseas again in Firenze, Italy. I’m not working so much in my own consulting business anymore although it is still active and I take on special projects, my husband retired so we moved to Firenze. So a typical day for me now is I get up and go into the office and work with our son who has a company that’s in import, distribution, and manufacturing of balloons and arty products. He is looking at expanding so a typical day is working in the office for 10 hours, having a nice long leisurely lunch, which is very Italian. It’s pretty intense, I do a lot of work with foreign suppliers and partners of the company. I come home, my mom is living with us, I read, sleep and start all over again.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Andrina Lever: I was just born motivated. I am an optimistic and positive person and I enjoy my life and I enjoy what I do so I look forward to getting up in the morning and going to work every day and that’s what motivates me.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Andrina Lever: I honestly do not know if I would do anything differently. Maybe I would have been more disciplined with certain things that I did. Sometimes I resisted because it seemed like it was something to do, but everything seemed to work out. I think that’s a difficult question to answer, it’s hard to undo what you already know or what you have already done.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Andrina Lever: I don’t know if it’s a discovery as much as a confirmation, which is that I’m pretty adaptable. Our family has faced a lot of challenges in the last 20 months and I guess that has confirmed for me that I’m pretty strong and I have the ability to do what needs to be done.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Andrina Lever:
- Our company Balloon Express has always been the leader in its field. It’s a vey unique company, and the way we do things here is unique. We are the leader and trendsetter and what’s beginning to happen is that we have more and more competition and more and more companies copying us. So we continually have to stay ahead at the leading edge.
- Another challenge for us, and I can only speak for the Italian market, is that it’s very difficult to find the right employees that have the right skills that we need to work in the company. There is little unemployment in Florence but there is a lot of competition so finding the right people is a second big challenge for us.
- The third challenge which again is unique or a mix. Moving from Canada and coming to work full-time here, with the openness of the European Union the challenge we have is competitors from other countries in the EU can come into our market, and it happens. That’s very tough and again we are constantly finding new competitors and challenges.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Andrina Lever: We provide an integrated approach. The company was started by my daughter-in-law 19 years ago. It started out as purely importing and distributing balloons and party goods in a way that had never been done like this in Italy. The company goes out, we have 45 of our own shops, we have 1500 clients, 30 agents and we train everybody and we spend a lot of money training people in our shops in balloon décor. There is a lot of creativity, we design our own products, take products from all different suppliers and integrate them together.
Every year we host the largest Balloon Arts Convention outside of the US called the Balloon Arts Convention International. We continually enter competitions to draw attention to the company, and we hold the world champion title for the largest balloon sculpture that was seven meters tall. The company has held the Guinness Book of World Records since December 2001 and we continually advertise in very high end publications like Italian Vogue and Weddings Today. We spend a lot of money on promotions, it’s impressive.
Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?
Andrina Lever: Customer service. We spend a long time working with our customers and our customers’ customers and we train people. Sadly most of our suppliers, which are major multinational companies, do not put such a high premium on customer service despite what they say.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Andrina Lever: My daughter-in-law started this company 19 years ago, and she was the driving force. We helped her. I did a lot of research for her when she started the company. But two years ago very suddenly and tragically she died while on holidays, which is the biggest challenge that anyone can face in business. She was the driving force, the visionary. She had a gift in terms of choosing products, so we had to deal with a huge emotional loss and pull together to ensure that the company continued and that the predator competitors out there – and they were out there – did not try to take advantage of the situation. I’m proud to say that every single person in the company pulled together as a team through a very difficult time.
The asset that the company has is really the people, the team we created. Everybody in the company has worked for us for quite some time and they are very loyal so we pulled together. One of the big lessons is the better you treat people the better they treat you, and never underestimate the value of the staff because you can never be prepared for something like this. It’s a small company so when you lose a key person it puts a burden on everybody else.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Andrina Lever: I’m not sure if I ever had a big break. I had some lousy jobs before I started to work for myself but I always tried to make them fun and learned as much as I could from them. When I came back to Canada after living away for a long time, it was really very difficult to get a job. I met a head hunter and they sent me for a job that I really didn’t want, and it really wasn’t in my field, and I suppose that was considered a break because when I was being interviewed the guy told me there was a consulting side of the business which would be a better fit for me, and he offered to hire me on a contractual basis and after a year I was placed full-time. I think that was more of an opportunity than a break because someone read between the lines on my CV and saw something else there.
After about five years with this consulting firm, I was beginning to feel frustrated and some of our clients could see that. One client, in particular, encouraged me to leave and start my own business and promised he would be my first client. He did not like the man I worked for so I never felt like I ‘stole’ a client or business from my employer, but that client helped put my own company on a secure financial basis when I started out so I immediately had a positive cash flow which was great! He also saw ability in me which I did not see in myself.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Andrina Lever: I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a big failure. I think we all make mistakes and we learn from those mistakes. Some of them are the way you handle situations or relationships, but I can’t say that I’ve had a really big failure. Sometimes I think I’ve been very lucky, I think I’ve always had a good attitude and I’ve had a lot of positive people around me who support me and I support them.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Andrina Lever: I think it was a very tough decision to leave a well paying job and strike out on my own. I was no longer happy with the company that I was working for and several clients were encouraging me to leave. They told me that they would continue to use me as an advisor, and they did. I think the decision was tough because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I never looked back and I set goals for myself including how much money I wanted to make, and I figured if I equalled my salary (If I stayed employed) the first year then I was doing okay. But that was a very tough decision to make to leave the security of a well-paying job to strike out on my own, that was a gutsy move to make.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Andrina Lever:
- The way that I grew up. We traveled a lot and I went to a lot of different schools. If I used that as a collective experience, that had a huge impact on my life, how I view the world and my ability to be adaptable, outgoing and comfortable in many different circumstances and my treatment of all people as my equals.
- My father left us when I was in my early thirties and he went to live on a tropical island on the Pacific and that had a huge impact on me and the way I looked at life because I never thought that would happen to me or our family, and it did. That had a dramatic effect on me and taught me that you never take anything for granted. Anything can happen to anybody at any time.
- Facing the death of someone close to you has a dramatic effect on you in terms of facing your own mortality. You really need to appreciate what you have and the people around you. And the one thing about that, that I really have to say about my daughter-in-law’s death was the last time I saw her we were all leaving to go on holidays and I told her how incredibly proud I was of her and of everything she created. To this day, I’m glad that I said that to her because I never saw her again, she died after that. Sometimes you don’t tell people something that’s important and good because you just don’t get around to it, so I’m eternally grateful that I said what I did to her.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Andrina Lever: Staying in business for all those years – 25 years. Being successful and keeping my reputation. That was a big accomplishment.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Andrina Lever: I didn’t realize that they were mentors at the time. There were three men in addition to my father. When I was growing up my father always told me, “You’re going to be somebody. You’re not going to work for other people, you’re going to get your education and you’re going to do something.” My husband always supported anything that I wanted to do. During the frustrating times when I said, “I cannot do this anymore,” he’d say, “Of course you can, or if you don’t want to do it, give up,” and of course he knew that I wasn’t going to give up.
When I was working at my last job, three men approached me separately and told me that it was obvious that I wasn’t happy anymore, and told me if I decided to leave then he’d support me. At the time one was a banker. One of the men owned a consulting company in New York and one was a client The three men independently and without knowing each other saw something in me and encouraged me to start my own company and helped me and taught me things I didn’t know. They also helped my self-confidence when it would go down.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Andrina Lever: That I was better than I thought I was. I think a lot of women particularly from my generation suffered from self-confidence issues even though we knew we were smart and we had the paper to prove it. They told me I was smarter and I could do better and that was a big help to me.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Andrina Lever: I hate this quote from Nike, but sometimes you just have to do it. We look at other people and think they had it easy or they did it the easy way. I have had several young women say to me, “You always had great jobs and everything you did was fun,” and I’d say, “You know that’s not true. I had some crappy jobs and no it wasn’t always fun.” But something my father always said to me was, “Keep your sense of humour, you’re going to need it,” and I did. I think it’s important to keep your sense of humour and have a good outlook on life and sometimes don’t take things so seriously. Yes business is serious, but step back, be objective and don’t try to second guess yourself too much, just do it.
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