What would you say about yourself and your business?
I’m Matteo Gasparello, an Italian digital marketing consultant. I help businesses to grow more online by publishing less content.
After working for a few years in London in the digital marketing space, I moved to Valencia (Spain) while working as a remote consultant for clients in Berlin, London and San Francisco.
At the same time, I’m building my Italian blog Contenuti Digitali where I share my expertise and strategies about content marketing and SEO.
How would you describe yourself with a few words?
I like change. Both in business and in life, I don’t like situations that are still and crystalized.
I thrive in an environment that changes, that I can shape as I want.
Probably that’s why I lived in France, UK, Italy and now Spain, and why I launched several businesses and projects in the course of my professional life.
How did your career growth begin?
It started when, from a small town in Italy, I moved to London. The city never sleeps and there’s a lot of competition, so to really thrive you need to step up your game.
The next turning point was when I burned all bridges and quit my 9to5 job to start a startup, an ecommerce company that was selling Spanish food online. Since we were bootstrapped, I had to learn clever ways to get clients without a budget. That’s when I started experimenting with SEO and content.
Fast forward to 2020, I can now get 20K page views in two weeks by publishing a single article, but this wasn’t an overnight success. It was a learning process that took me 5 years.
Is there something careerwise so far that you have not done?
Probably finishing writing my book and being able to mentor more people.
Would you change anything in your career path if you could go back?
Well, I think that failure helps us grow, so saying at this point in time “I shouldn’t have done that” is not useful because all the mistakes I made helped me understand what I was doing wrong and get better at my job.
Tell us about a hard decision you had to make in your career. How did you deal with it?
Closing my startup. We were selling Spanish products in the UK with a nice margin per product, but when the Brexit referendum passed, the British pound started losing compared to the euro, and we lost most of our margin.
But that was a blessing in disguise because I’m now a consultant for companies in Europe and the US, so that was probably for the better.
Were there moments when you wanted to give up and if not, what stopped you (or not)?
After a difficult call with a client, or losing a client – yes, I sometimes wanted to quit and go back to a 9 to 5 job.
But in the end, I like what I do and both flexibility of my job and the growth experience of working with lots of different brands are the two main things that keep me going.
Is there such thing as balance between personal and working time?
Of course there is, or you will burn out. I personally think that taking care of yourself and having some off time every week is actually helpful for your business: your brain is always working in the background and thinking about things you left off on Friday evening.
Lots of time I get back to work on a Monday morning and I immediately get the solution to a problem that seemed impossible just three days before.
What would you like to say to our readers?
Keep learning. Read a lot and take online courses created by somebody that knows more than you.
This is what will make you thrive in business and as a person. It will open your mind and make you think about a problem from different angles, making it easier to solve it.
