Marcello Foran Interview With Jenny Woo
I had the chance to sit down with a man that I would like to learn a thing or two from (not to say I haven't already). I would rule the world if only I were the female version of Marcello Foran. If some of you aren't familiar with the name then you just might not be one of his VIPs with Ultimate VIP International (http://www.ultimatevipclub.com/).
Oh if only I could get my hands on that ever so priceless Rolodex, the priceless men I could find. Now, let's not get overboard. However independent I may be, Marcello has given away a bit of his secret on being a successful businessman or woman. We started from the beginning and worked our way to building the UWC (Ultimate Warrior Challenge) http://www.uwcmma.com/) to the big fight coming up on Feb. 21st 2009 and to seeing what to expect from him in the near future. This is Part 1 of my 3 part interview with Marcello Foran.
JENNY: What other past business ventures did you have and how did those experiences lead to UltimateVIP International?
MARCELLO: It's really interesting because I think this has been my life's calling. I didn't find it out until I started developing Ultimate VIP.
I grew up in a good family with lots of credibility in the Washington D.C area. We have lawyers, educators, athletes, and just about every other kind of professional you can imagine and I guess early on I felt I was supposed to take a different road.
After high school and in my first year of college I went to work for one of D.C.'s biggest and most powerful law firms. I was an intern and they had such accounts as TWA and Disney. They were recruiting graduates out of Harvard, Yale and the cream of the crop of the best of the best. Here I am 18 years old and being asked to take a package via limo and private jet to fly me to New Jersey to get a document signed because they didn't use a courier like FedEx; I would think to myself that this document is going to cost them about $20,000 to sign. When I'd get back they would tell me to just keep the limo for the rest of the night. I would pull up to the club as some of my friends were in the club business and I started getting the reputation in D.C as this person with these contacts. I was young, thought it was cool and my family wasn't well to do to the point where we were flying in private jets. Early on I started realizing this really interesting lifestyle.
The firm would have clients that would come in town and I would tell them that I know somebody at this or that restaurant and they would ask me to set something up. That's when I started doing these concierge type services for the lawyers at the firm. Then these young lawyers would come in and say, "I heard you know somebody over at this club." I would say, "Yeah, no problem." And that's when I started hanging out with these young Harvard and Yale lawyers. I then started meeting all these concierges at places like the Watergate, the Four Seasons and the Mayflower. At 19 or 20 years old, I was the person that they started to turn to.
I started a company called Main Event Promotions that was basically an earlier version of Ultimate VIP but without the internet and cell phones.
So here I am, young and meeting everybody in the D.C area and then I
started getting contacted from lawyers in our offices in New York, London and L.A. I began hooking these lawyers up with stuff and planning the entertainment from the extreme nightlife to the private jets.
At the time, I was also doing some modeling and acting. My mother had been a broadway dancer in Atlantic City and I was forced to take tap, jazz and play the piano when I was young. That led to the opportunity to be in a John Waters movie called "Hair Spray" as one of the dancers.
John Waters and Ricki Lake took a big liking to me. Ricki Lake and I became good friends and she was the first celebrity that I had come across. I started going to New York, we would hang out and attend some of the parties. I began meeting other celebrities, which expanded my contacts into the club business. Then when they did
"Cry Baby" with Johnny Depp, I got a chance to hang out with him. I became known as the guy to call in D.C. I use to think to myself at 20 years old, "Why do these people call me? They're these super celebrities and they should know everybody." Here they are calling me to get them hooked up in a club. I guess they could have had their publicist or P.R. person do it, but I think they didn't want it to be public knowledge. I was the person they could call where nobody would find out that they were coming into the club because I would sneak them through the back door. I would fulfill all of their needs and wishes and they knew that I would keep my mouth shut to where it wouldn't become public knowledge. And so it kind of grew from there over the years.
When the internet came out, I got into web development which gave me the ideas to create the websites for Ultimate VIP and UWC. Basically as time went on and the internet started coming around, I had such a big client base in the Washington D.C. area who really called me for just about everything. It was kind of a concierge service but we started getting more into the private jets and limos (as I had a limo company of my own later on which I named Ultimate VIP). I started dealing with sheiks and powerful people that came into D.C. And then the concierges from the hotels would call me and they say, "We've got Prince or so and so, and he wants to go out to dinner and he wants to go to a club and he wants a limo."
My whole thing and the reason I think I've been successful is because I have a certain level of customer service that I feel is an old school traditional type of high end customer service. If I say I'm going to do something then I do it and I keep my mouth shut. I've gained a huge client base from doing what I say I'm going to do and exceeding their expectations. It kind of evolved from there.
When the web started getting really big I decided to trademark Ultimate VIP. When I first started Ultimate VIP you could Google it and you would find nothing. Now you can Google it and there are pages and pages for Ultimate VIP. I could send cease and desist letters to most of those people violating our TM but I don't because I'm not really a litigious person. I'm not the type of person that's going to go out there and do that for no reason. Now if somebody's trying to gain or benefit from the name in the sense that relates in our business model then we have to do something legally.
Anyway, I got the trademarks for Ultimate VIP and then I set out to build one of the world's leading luxury lifestyle networks. Through building of Ultimate VIP and through the private jets and limos, I was meeting a lot of businessmen, business owners and people in big companies like "Fortune 500" companies. They'd say, "We want to hire you to market for us or to work for our company." And I'd say, "Well
I'm just not into the whole working for other companies and the corporate lifestyle. I'm happy with my life and I don't want to do that." I ended up getting contracts to do direct marketing for special industries and writing marketing plans for companies. The whole thing kind of turned into me doing corporate work but as a consultant, which is much better. I was taking some of my contacts and developing sponsorships and developing marketing. I had contracts with MCI when they first were getting big and trying to challenge AT&T. I was more of a consultant for marketing, building marketing strategies and carrying out promotions.
I had done some work with a guy for the American Power Boat Association; he owned a transportation logistics company and he offered me a lot of money to come and consult for him. This is where I really made some big money but it wasn't as much through Ultimate VIP yet or through what I had created. I applied my skills to his logistics company and we ended up creating a product that changed transportation. It was a company called TRT and we utilized a railroad to move freight the way you would with a truck. I'm actually working on a deal right now with T. Boone Pickens Clean Energy Fuels Company to implement natural gas trucks into the transportation industry. So I got into the transportation industry as a consultant and I just applied my marketing skills and my contacts. In the transportation industry, I helped innovate a product that now does five hundred million dollars a year in total revenue for the railroad. We had a contract for four years and I knew when that contract ended the railroad would probably not renew it because as a consultant a lot of times they hire you to come in and do something; once you've done it they're not going to continue to pay an absorption amount of money when you have already created the product.
I had gotten away from the whole concierge and Ultimate VIP service for a while because it takes a lot of concentration. I mean I still had people calling me saying, "Can you get me front row tickets for this?" or "Can you hook me up at a club in Vegas or New York." I would say, "Sure." However, I wasn't charging people for it. If I sent business to a private jet company then I would get a percentage of the commissions. I kept it going in that respect but it wasn't called Ultimate VIP yet. At this point we hadn't created Ultimate VIP per say, it was still Main Event.
I had some money to play with after doing well in the transportation industry and I was no longer under contract. I needed to figure out something else to do and people where still calling and asking me to hook them up with VIP services. I started saying, "Well I'm creating a company called Ultimate VIP and I'm going to have to start charging you because my whole life has been about building this network and this is a compilation of everything I've done." So I went on to tell them that I was going to create this company, Ultimate VIP
International and I'm going to use "the world is yours", the old Tony Montana saying.
JENNY: Well that was going to lead into my next questions - Ultimate VIP International's motto is "the world is yours" which leads me to think of everything and anything could be mine as one of your members. Correct?
MARCELLO: Right. I'm a philosophical and psychological type person. When I thought of "the world is yours" there's two things that came to mind. If you drop the "y" in "yours" it means the world is "ours" and then there's the relation to the "Scarface" movie. Ultimate VIP is also somewhat of a research project too because I'm the type of person that likes to accumulate data and information. It's kind of a science project. Anyone that knows me knows that I've been very careful with Ultimate VIP because it's my entrepreneurial challenge. I am involved with five companies; UltimateVIP, an internet marketing company on the west coast, the web design company, the logistics company and then I have the UWC.
A lot of people don't understand - I've been offered considerable amounts of money by companies to have their advertisements on the website but I won't do it if it jeopardizes my vision. I'm not going to take the thing that I want to be remembered for as an entrepreneur, junk it up and blow this opportunity. I've turned down a couple of people that have wanted to do a T.V. show. We have met with several production companies. They wanted to do a show about Ultimate VIP but it was completely different. They wanted to do it as "The Ultimate VIP" but who could be the biggest "baller". The way the show would go is - we would find the guys that already think that they're "ballers" and they would ride around in limos, have high end exotic cars and go to the clubs. In each city we would do a casting call and end up with two guys from Miami, two guys from Vegas, two guys from New York, two guys from L.A., etc. The whole idea would be that we would have these series of challenges and one week the episode would be in this city where these two guys would have the advantage; another week it would be in a different city with another Ultimate VIP set of challenges; they would have to out do each other as the biggest "baller" but it would really be the biggest Ultimate VIP.
I looked at my motto along with looking at what we were growing for my clientele and I said, "This doesn't really fit the bill." I wanted to do a show that showcased behind the scenes on how we put together these ultimate itineraries, how we manage these lifestyles of these multimillionaires and then the other half of the show would actually show them out there doing the actual stuff and living the life.
Anyway, getting back to the subject - I started creating Ultimate VIP with the money that I made and the relationships and contacts that I had; I was getting tired of hooking everybody up for free. What I had learned from transportation logistics and from a brokerage stand point is that I could go out there and could create a network of things that already existed - private jet companies, tanks excursions, be James
Bond for a week, super model for a day, sub orbital space flights, you name it, the world is yours, right.
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