Valerio Soldani, director at the Italian Trade Agency: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Valerio Soldani (LinkedIn), the director at the Italian Trade Agency. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

I’m the director of the Italian Trade Agency office in Dubai, so I’m the Italian trade commissioner to the UAE. We cover the UAE and the Omani market as well. I have previous experience in the US because I was deputy director in New York and several other postings in Italy. Before that I was working in a startup in the rally industry and the design industry.

We’re part of a network of 69 offices all around the world and our main purpose is to promote Italian exports to the area, help companies who want to do business in the UAE and Oman and also attract investments and being a one-stop shop for foreign investors looking at Europe and Italy as a good option to invest into.

We are an agency with boots on the ground. We do three kinds of activities. The first are trade shows. We do more than 20 trade shows with 600 companies that come here to showcase their products and meet distributors, buyers, industry professionals, and media. The second line of activities is incoming activities, where we sponsor trips and we invite buyers and distributors on scheduled business trips to Italy so they can visit our industrial district, the companies, the trade shows, and have a feel of what Italy is all about.

Our third line of activity — which is a brand new one — is the retailer partnership program. We are teaming up with one of the major grocery stores in the UAE that’ll be disclosed in the third week of November. We’ll be having a 12-month program designed to promote Italian products and get new ones into the Emirates. Some brands that were not here before will be featured in many sales points and grocery stores of this major chain all across the country.

The first thing I did when I came here was knock on doors and visit in person the top distributors, importers, and retailers, because I wanted to learn from the people that are interested in buying our product, and understand why they’re buying things and what they need. Just putting people on a list and inviting them on trips doesn’t work. My responsibility is also to listen and to grow those kinds of relationships.

We’ve been here since 1988, but the last five to 10 years have been great. We are close to seeing record high exports at the end of 2024 from Italy to the UAE. The latest data is seven months into 2024, and we’re growing 22% y-o-y, which is twice the pace of growth that we had in 2023. Since we ended last year at USD 7 bn, we’re pretty confident that we can go beyond the USD 8 bn mark at the end of 2024. There’s a huge demand, and companies are responsive.

Out of 69 offices all around the world that we have — 80 if we’re counting the antennas that we have in other secondary markets — we have the sixth biggest budget in terms of investment promotion, so we’re investing big time into the UAE market.

The first important thing we encourage companies that want to set up shop here to do is dialogue. There’s huge competition; it’s not an easy market. Everyone wants to be here. The difference is made when you have a good dialogue and develop a relationship with your distributors and clients. You cannot have a top-down approach whether in terms of customer experience or even the way you make things.

There are two [Italian] industries that are really big here. The first is the lifestyle-related industries, so sectors like jewelry — that’s a huge chunk of our exports — and fashion. These are big because demographics are evolving and the population is growing, m’naires and b’naires are coming and they have an appetite for a different kind of luxury — so not only the big brands that are everywhere, but a more customized experience. The second industry would be technology. I’ve seen a lot of companies from Italy doing business in energy and water treatment, because sustainability is a big thing, and they have ready solutions for the market.

Everybody assumes that Italians have the three F’s — food, fashion, and furniture — but they forget the fourth F, which is factories. It’s a growing market, and we sell more than USD 1 bn in aggregate of machinery and technology just in the Emirates, but there’s much more exported to the region.

I’m a morning person. I start very early with sports. I am a former kickboxing professional, so I do my workout in the morning, and I like to change it up every day because I need something new, so sometimes I run as well. Then I get a big breakfast, and I go to the office. I like to chat to people on the team and know what’s on their mind.

I have a great team. They are a little bit more junior, compared to other offices, but it’s diverse — we have six nationalities in the office, so not only Italian. It’s very ‘Dubai,’ because it’s a team of locals, only the director and deputy director are from Italy. We change every four or five years, — our mandate is temporary — but our true asset is our teammates that have been here for a long time. They know the market, and they have their specialties.

My first tip for staying organized is to try to exchange straightforward feedback with the people you work with and to ask questions. The second is to cut yourself some slack. Sometimes you need some time with yourself — in Italy we say “fare il punto,” which comes from sailing, and it means that you stop for a second to look at the sailing route, and look at what’s happening on the boat, and at the map, just to see where are you going, what you need to do, how long it’s going to take and put things in perspective.

I really like a good conversation or a walk in Dubai Marina or Kite Beach — it really helps me unwind.

I like to read a lot. Sometimes it’s boring stuff about marketing or the economy, but I also read a really interesting one called Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. It’s about what men and boys can do to improve the way we interact with people and interact with business, especially since the figure of masculinity has changed a lot.

On a professional level, my goal is to be successful in helping the Italian companies here, and finishing my mandate in Dubai and then heading to a new destination with the same spirit. On a personal level, what I try to do is to rely on the key relationships that add value to my life, like other people like my wife and family and friends, and pick the right people and take the time to overcome this digital world we are in where everything is commoditized by building true relationships. I also try to learn something new everyday. I think you don’t get old if you’ve got something to learn.

The best advice that I ever received is from a former colleague of mine, when I was working at a startup and was struggling a little bit with a client. He told me to try to be better, not at the things that I am always good at, but at the ones that I don’t like — so if there’s something that you feel is not for you, work hard to overcome it. Everybody can do what they like and what they’re good at, but if you focus on something that you think is not for you, you can develop, not a skillset, but an approach for how to handle that kind of problem. That outlook really opens your mind.