Robbie Verrecchia - Jamma de Samba

Many people dream of making their living doing something they love, but how many manage it?  At age 19 Robbie Verrecchia decided to give it a shot and four years later he’s living his dream - self-employed, drumming, being round lots of people, working with teenagers and teaching.” He’s the leader and beating heart of Jamma de Samba, a collection of samba drums and enthusiasts based in the old Roman city of Bath, England.  

Brandishing his trademark whistle and repinique drum, he leads three weekly drop-in samba groups with a loyal core of 30-40 people each, a small group for club performances plus workshops in 240 schools in the area and corporate events.  It’s a solid living and it’s growing. 

Robbie has been drumming samba for 15 years since his mum Trish was inspired to start up a group.  They made do with bins, tins and pans until 2000 when they were able to buy an impressive van-full of real samba drums, thanks to the Arts Council Millennium Fund supporting community projects.  The group operated as a collective but gradually dwindled to fewer than a dozen regulars by 2006. Disheartened, he had resolved to leave it and go travelling but a three-month stay in Brazil rekindled his  enthusiasm and he decided on a bold move.

“I called a meeting of everybody and told them I wanted to dissolve the collective, take over and run the group as a proper business.   I set out my vision to make something massive and set up lots of samba bands.”  Despite some opposition, the change was voted through.  Then came the hard bit – turning it into a business.

It was all trial and error until he attended an entrepreneur workshop day and was fired up by speaker Eric Edmeades and his five principles.  Support from the Prince’s Trust and two business mentors kept him going through hundreds of cold calls and endless driving to meetings.  “At the time I was developing it I was getting up at seven and going for a run every morning up to the top of Solsbury Hill and back again … it’s a big hill and I thought, if I can conquer that and be back and shower and have breakfast before nine o’clock, then everything else in the day would be easy.”

Four years on, the results are impressive.  Thanks to his skill as a drummer, teacher and leader, he’s able to keep motley groups of enthusiasts tight and on track through complex rhythms and breaks.    It’s not just fun and exhilarating, it also has significant health and neurological benefits that are increasingly being discovered in the lab and in practice.

“Sometimes people tell me stories of how the drumming has helped them through difficult times.  It’s inspiring.”

Mark Sinclair - yBC

 

Mark Sinclair co-founded yourBusinessChannel in 2005 and is now its business development dynamo and key editorial executive.   Talking with him it becomes clear that some of his outstanding qualities come in complementary pairs:  pragmatic business sense and philosophical curiosity: an ability to observe from the side and a capacity to get stuck in: open-mindedness and decisiveness: seriousness and humour: appreciation of what is and appetite for what’s next.

Mark comes from New Zealand, where he studied law, German literature and philosophy before starting his career with a big law firm.  His love of communication and advocacy took him into some of the country’s hottest PR firms with high-profile clients, but he soon felt the urge to strike out on his own.  

He quickly built up a thriving marketing and PR consultancy, doing things in a non-traditional way and helping clients to achieve greater profile.   In a few years he had married his teenage sweetheart Rachel and was living the dream with great friends, great family relationships, a thriving business and a great first house, when everything changed.

We went to Aitutaki which is in the Cook Islands – idyllic.  Beautiful, white sands, shallow waters lapping away.  We were lying on the beach reading mountaineering books …. I was mid-paragraph and I hate being disturbed mid-paragraph … and Rachel rolled over to me on the beach and said “Let’s sell the house and move to the UK.”  We had talked about it in the past.  And I went “Alright” and carried on reading and that was it.  And I meant it.

The decision had nothing to do with sunstroke or cocktails.  They had both travelled a lot and longed for the sense of connectedness that they felt in Europe.  So with fateful timing they sold up everything, travelled for 9 months, and moved to a flat in Highgate, north London, moving into their new flat just a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Despite arriving in the UK at a time of high anxiety, with no job to come to, he’s been flat-out busy ever since. 

The idea behind yBC is to make expertise available to the people who need it, in video form, with great production values.  We involve experts who can help solve business problems, and we get them together and create a micro-TV channel …. it’s truly socially-networked business television.

At the heart of Mark’s work at yBC is interviewing many of the experts who are featured.  This gives him plenty of opportunities to meet a lot of different people and have great conversations. 

I often privately lament that I’ll never be able to know everything or read every book …. I see conversations as a very convenient and interesting and engaging way of being able to find out stuff that I would never find out.

In keeping with his “both sides now” personality, future plans embrace here and there.  The future I see is one where we’re living in two places interchangeably … I’d be quite interested in living back in New Zealand for a period of time but I’d miss Radio 4 so we’d need to be here.

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Extracted from a conversation we had in Bristol, UK on September 13th 2010, recorded and photographed with Mark’s consent for the purposes of this piece.

Chris Bose - In Press

Chris Bose is the head of Internet practice at In Press.  For me his outstanding qualities are a razor-sharp mind, huge curiosity, a sense of fun and willingness to take himself and others out of their comfort zone.  The following comes from a conversation we had in Bristol, UK on May 26th 2010, recorded with his consent for the purpose of this piece.

"Everyone plays to their own rules within the constraints of the system ... constraints are really important.  In a prospect situation, people ask 'what would you do if you had infinite budget?' but that's a ridiculous question because there are always constraints and the best ideas come from constraints and discipline."

"I was challenged by one of my teachers when I was 17.  He said 'you've just given a very precise answer' and I said 'actually I think I've given a very accurate answer, precision is something else' ... so I explained the difference and he said 'yes, you have a very precise mind.' "

SH - You have everything it takes to be a total pain in the arse, but you're not.  How do you manage it?

"Because I make no attempt to be pedantic and I love to explore where the ideas go.  So I hope that I give people the scope to explore their ideas. But  I don't have this conversation with anyone else except you." SH - So you can be a pain in the arse with other people?  "I can come across like that, yes.  But I've now chosen to use it as one of my filtering rules ... people who still think I'm a pain the arse, I will filter out from future contact."

"I would always be the one to put his hand up and ask awkward questions ... it takes practice, believe me ... I assume very little.  I test everything.  I set up experimental solutions ... I use conversation to test people out."

"My bigger purpose is that I was trained as a scientist, a research chemist.  I want to continue being a scientist ... so I want to organise my business arond the principle of research ... on the Internet the numbers give me the ability to do that."

"You have to have an edge in life ... I believe it's important to hone my defensive skills all the time, even though they may never be called into action.  But that's not the point .. I think it's right to have an edge all the time, but it's not an edge where the intent is to wound someone, verbally or whatever.  That's quite a fine line sometimes - that's why it's called an edge (laughs)."