Meet the team: Florencia Vita

Andrew Morris wrote:

There are skills that come naturally to each of us. Florencia Vita was born to sell. Her first job was at American Express, selling health insurance to Platinum customers in Buenos Aires. Despite her lack of experience, she won Best Sales Rep three months in a row, and was promoted to Team Leader. She was happy in the role, but less so with the commute from La Plata, as her daughter Juanita was just two at the time. When a friend mentioned that ProZ.com was opening an office in La Plata, she sat up. She’d heard of ProZ while still a translation student and had even set up a profile. She applied for the new job in 2006, and was soon sitting anxiously for an online interview with Henry. “OK, sell me the AmEx product”, he said. Which is exactly what Flor did, in a few minutes flat. The job was hers.

These were the early days of ProZ.com in Argentina, and setting up the office with the team of five meant even buying the furniture. Flor began in support, but moved into running contests, localisation, and finally to sales of corporate membership to agencies. Busily working the phones and emailing, she remembers the day they hit 500 corporate members, having started out just months earlier, at under a hundred.

How does she explain that success? “Passion! I threw myself into the role, without planning or setting targets, and it just happened. It didn’t even feel like work. It’s about doing what you love.”

Flor then worked in advertising and certification, but now spends her time working alongside Enrique Manzo, fielding requests for remote interpreters and recruiting talents from an extensive pool round the world, sifting through thousands of application emails forwarded by Boostlingo, or networking via LinkedIn, as well as overseeing quality assurance.

Yet another role sees Flor organising local payment contacts – giving people in countries that have no access to the dollar the possibility to be paid in their local currency. Not to mention the regular webinars she runs for meeting clients and reviewing Plus profiles. Multi-tasking is clearly another of Flor’s talents…

When it comes to interesting life stories, Flor is no exception. This one would need a film rather than a post, but hey…

So in 2014, glamorous woman gets on plane, with her mother, daughter, and three aunties. Handsome pilot notices her from the flight deck. In the middle of the night on a long-haul trip to Cancún, her eyes half-closed, she sleepily asks a passing flight attendant to bring a blanket. Except the flight attendant is in fact… the pilot. The blanket soon arrives, with a chocolate on top. During a courtesy visit to the cockpit to thank him, names are exchanged, and maybe even a hotel name is mentioned.. Three days later, he shows up out of the blue at the hotel. They talk for hours, and six years and a marriage later, there’s still plenty left to say…