Best Buys Into Abu Dhabi Through Reality TV

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Culver City architect Richard Best always wanted to work in the Middle East. Now, he’ll do so, but it won’t be in architecture.

His adventure began when he saw a UCLA alumni e-mail for an audition to an “Apprentice”-style reality show in the United Arab Emirates. The challenge: to draw up a business plan for show host and Abu Dhabi real estate mogul Sulaiman Fahim.

Best, 52, went to the local audition in early 2008, and, much to his surprise, won a place on the eight-member U.S. team, which went on to compete in Abu Dhabi. Thanks to his plan, under which Fahim would consolidate much of his operations, Best emerged in April as the last person standing and got a $1 million prize. He also won the right to join Fahim as a partner in his business.

“I jumped for joy when I learned that I won,” he said.

Best’s first move: to donate $100,000 to a United Nations agency dedicated to fighting malnutrition.

Now, Best is getting ready to return to Abu Dhabi as a minority (49 percent) partner with Fahim in a new company that will implement his business plan.

“I never envisioned myself doing anything like this,” he said.


Uniform Work

As president of Aramark Corp.’s Uniform and Career Apparel division in Burbank, Thomas J. Vozzo is boss to 30,000 employees nationwide. But as one of 160 volunteers in a recent company project to enhance the Salvation Army’s Whittier transitional living center, he was taking orders from people half his age.

“They were our supervisors for the day,” said Vozzo, 47. “It was interesting. I built picnic benches and benches with flower pots.”

Jeremy Bleier, 25, who oversaw Vozzo’s handiwork for City Year Los Angeles, a non-profit sponsoring the project, said the Aramark exec did a good job.

“He’s one of the easiest types to manage,” Bleier said. “He basically manages himself.”

The biggest challenge, the supervisor said, was getting Vozzo who was working in 95-degree weather to “take a break every now and then” to cool down.

Vozzo, for his part, had only one complaint: “I had sore hands and sore shoulders. So afterwards I took some aspirin.”


Empirical Studies

Sasha Strauss is used to teaching brand strategy, whether to clients of consulting firm Innovation Protocol in downtown Los Angeles, where he’s managing director, or students at USC, where he’s an adjunct professor.

But last month, Strauss found himself trying to market not a company or a product, but a country.

Strauss, 33, was summoned to Universitatea Agora Oradea in Romania to help create a strategy for a coalition that is trying to cultivate a brand for the southeastern European country that lies on the Black Sea. He spent two weeks traveling the country as well as getting a crash course in its history.

“A lot of people may know Romania exists but don’t know much about what distinguishes it,” Strauss said. “But just about every empire that existed in European history crossed through Romania and claimed part of it as theirs.”

So at the end, what did he think of

Romania?

His answer hits at the new brand: “It has been at the crossroads of the empires, and is a stable place today that anyone would enjoy

visiting.”


Staff reporters Howard Fine, David Haldane and Francisco Vara-Orta contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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