Ask Aldo Grech’s mentees what it is he leaves them with, and most will say inner peace, or calmness. Meeting the man, you can understand that sense immediately.
Identifying a starting point in identifying Aldo’s success is a challenge, because it isn’t immediately obvious with one specific turning point.
It could have been the time when, as a young boy living in Malta, he was given a broken radio by a family friend who knew he could fix it. “I was twelve years old and I was able to fix things and it took me just half an hour to make that radio work again.”
Or, two years later when he paid seven pounds for a car a mechanic couldn’t repair. “I was fourteen and I spent two months working on it, got it running and was driving it, illegally.”
Or, when he migrated to Australia in his late twenties, just as the personal computer industry was about to explode. “It was pure coincidence that I landed a job with a PC organisation as their main technical guy, and because I wanted to make more money I quickly transitioned into sales, then into marketing.”
Or, when he moved to New Zealand to be the country manager for Acer. “I decided to do something different in a bid to grow that business and the people who worked in it. Instead of having business cards which said Sales Manager or whatever their title was, I gave them titles that respected what they did: for example the receptionist became the director of customer satisfaction.”
Or, when he got cancer which led to a ten year spiral in which he lost everything. “That was twenty years ago – I had colon cancer. While I recovered from it, in the work environment I went straight back into everything I did before I had cancer. I got to a stage where everything I had built was gone, everything.”