The entrepreneurial adventure begins
I am Morgan Pasqual, I am, with my wife and partner Luciana Silvestri, the owner of Cinque Sensi Srl, which is the company that owns the brand “La Giardiniera di Morgan”, which is the main activity that arose from a catering business that me and my wife had up to five years ago and where we already produced our artisanal mixed pickled vegetables in sweet and sour sauce to offer them to our customers. From there we received a whole series of ideas and stimuli, because we had customers who traveled long distances to come buy our pickled vegetables and so we decided to put them on the market, not knowing that we were filling in a gap because our customers, the specialized retail could not find quality artisan pickled vegetables, made like in the old days.
Running a business as a couple is not easy, it’s not easy to be with a person, doing business together is a way to make sure that all the rules that are in a family: the positive rules of sharing, dialogue and discussion are also brought inside the workplace and this is, I think, a great value. Luciana is an example of an entrepreneur mum, where some family management rules have been brought inside, in order to stimulate our people, our collaborators so that they can be decisive and bring value within the activity.
We have built a family business, we have also launched and given personality to our products, because we are the family of the “pickled vegetables”, because every product represents a member of our family and the recipes are inspired by the physical features and the personality of the individual members. So we turned our family in an entrepreneurial project.
I remember the pickled vegetables I used to eat with my grandmother Regina, an incredible cook and that I couldn’t find anywhere. So with my wife, who was the kindle, the inspiration of all this bittersweet story, we started experimenting with recipes that created an emotional experience and this was the key to our little success, something that our customers immediately appreciated and has become a bit ‘our signature’. So tailor-made products, extremely cared for where the detail and the continuous strive for improvement, to get the best possible experience, because for us every jar of pickled vegetables is a table, is sharing, is a special moment. So we want to build the best possible experience for our customers.
The money to start
Our business was born thanks to the trust and intuition of Luciana’s father, Giovanni Silvestri, of his wife Anna, two entrepreneurs who believed in the first phase of our professional entrepreneurial life supporting the beginning of the restaurant business.
From there on we made important progress, and overcame some difficulties, because doing business in Italy is not easy, access to credit is increasingly difficult. Now that our business is a virtuous company, obviously there are different rules and procedures, but when we started accessing credit wasn’t easy and so we were greatly helped by my in-laws.
A negative and a positive event
A significant event in our entrepreneurial path was an activity that we built alongside our current business with some other business partners, in a product sector similar to ours, in the world of bakery products where we created an extremely ambitious project. Probably too modern, too innovative in a territorial and economic context not perfectly aligned with our ideas and therefore not successful. However, we learned a lot, in terms of organization, speed in making decisions and problem solving that are skills and procedures that today an entrepreneur, regardless of the size of the company, must have as skills in his job description.
A very positive event at the beginning of our journey, so almost six years ago, was a meeting with a very good producer of Castelmagno, the best in Italy, Mr. Giorgio, who asked me a jar of pickled vegetables to bring to a friend and this friend was Davide Paolini, who is also known as “Il Gastronauta” which is the name of a show on radio 24 and coincidentally that morning, when he spoke about it in his radio show, we were listening to it in the laboratory and knew nothing about it. And that was the starting point, because only that day we received about fifteen phone calls from all over Italy, from curious people, enthusiasts and even retailers, who wanted information on our pickled vegetables and this was our first, let’s say, important public appearance.
Doing business in Italy
Doing business in Italy is an act of courage, because it’s known that the bureaucracy and the apparatus that governs us is very cumbersome, very elaborate.
But creativity, the ability to do, invent and the culture and talking about gastronomy, the culture of regional cuisine that we have in Italy is incomparable, plus we live in a territory, this one of Vicenza, where the work ethic it is still very strong.
Although it is believed that the new generation, how to say, is not ready to work, Luciana and I can debunk it, because we have a group of young men and young women that are extremely devoted, involved, responsible, and are an extremely positive and virtuous example of work, of what sacrifice and participating in a corporate life means.
The key traits of an entrepreneur
I believe that an entrepreneur must have a whole series of ingredients, remaining on this theme, must be extremely curious, must be, must obviously be a little brave and carry out with clear determination his mission, his will, his work, without necessarily having to compromise and mediate what is an idea, a clear vision, which he must have in order to achieve a goal.
The future for the new generations
This is what I would like to tell our young people: I strongly believe in curiosity, in traveling, in learning; get out of your field, of your comfort zone to acquire information, culture, languages. So, I recommend to young people to be brave and leave: even it is a small journey, a small distance, even in Italy, but change the pattern, gain experience, do not stay too close to your family, especially when you are young and not bound by commitments, by family and therefore have the courage to experiment. This is what I recommend. Because the baggage that a young person can create by traveling, questioning, acquiring information and culture will become his capital that he can spend and invest when he then decides to stop and find his path in life.
IP Crew
