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Irene Forte
Interview Phadria Prendergast
Wellness Director at her father’s namesake hotel empire, Rocco Forte Hotels and founder of her own namesake beauty brand Irene Forte Skincare found in the likes of luxury retail giants NET-A-PORTER, Irene Forte is a true EntreprenHER, choosing to delve into her own innovative path. WOTC spoke with the heiress about the ins and outs of family business, global leadership and the books she likes to read.
Phadria: You come from a well-known family business and I guess that’s where your own stems from.Tell me a little bit about being in a family business, what is that like?
Irene: There are a lot of positives. It’s very rewarding but then there are also I guess some negatives. I guess in terms of a positive and from my experience, I’ve been in the business for 9 years and the great thing is that I’ve been allowed to focus on any area where there was a need, which most definitely would not have been possible if I had just joined another company.
The other thing though is, working in a family business you definitely have to be very careful. You have to tread carefully, and you have to prove yourself because you have to earn the respect of your colleagues and other people working in the business. I guess that potentially puts more pressure on you to succeed or it doesn’t - you could go the other way, but I think in my experience, it definitely put more pressure on me to kind of excel and do well etc.
I guess the other thing is that obviously as it is family, it means you only talk about business together and the lines are very blurred between family and business. You never really get to switch off and not talk about business almost, it’s always there - not because we don’t want to speak about anything else, but because we love it so much. We enjoy working as a family.
There are also lots of positives in the sense that obviously, you’re also invested in the company that you’re working for and I see that it’s very rewarding for my father for instance, to have us in the business - there’s a legacy of all the hard work that he’s done over the last 23 years with his business. The other good thing is that you trust your family implicitly. With my siblings, anything I do I trust their opinion and they can tell me it’s terrible whereas, I think often with colleagues they are not as willing to give you an honest opinion.
P: You said something really interesting about having to prove yourself. Now I’m sure a lot of people probably think it’s quite the opposite; ‘I’m working for my family so I can slack off’ and ‘I can do what I want’, but you’re right! When you’re actually in a family business, it’s time to prove yourself more because it’s as though you’re having to prove that you’re not just there because you’re family but that you’re actually a key part of that business.
I: Exactly. I mean, I think it depends because the reality is, I could have probably just sat there and not done much and no one would have fired me but then it also depends on character and upbringing and ethos. My dad worked really hard most of his life so why would I want to sit there and be someone who’s not doing much? I think it depends very much on character and upbringing and lots of different things but, I definitely could have got away with probably doing nothing and it would have been fine but it wasn’t in my character and that’s why I didn’t.
P: Of course, and I can imagine that working for your father and with your family is what helped you to start your skincare line?
I: Yes, I launched a very small line for the hotels and what I learnt from doing that line ultimately allowed me then to develop my own line. I was also lucky enough to have the guaranteed distribution of the hotels for the spas but then on the other side of the coin, the hotels preferential rates and I built something that worked perfectly for the hotels. To be honest, doing my own thing has been one of the most difficult parts of family and family business. There is so much to focus on in the hotels so I probably could have/ my father would have probably preferred that I focused most of my attention on something within the hotels rather than launching a skincare line. However, he has understood that I'm very entrepreneurial. I'm not good at sitting in one role.
I like to learn and move so I guess the family business has been a great starting point, but it also made it a tougher decision for me by taking on this role of launching my own skincare company. It also means I had to take a little step back from the family business as I can’t dedicate 100% of my time to the family business and I also felt like I was letting go of something that I’m still really passionate about. I adore the hotels and all the people I work with - it’s a catch 22.
“As an Italian family, family is very important, our mum has always kept us all together…”
P: You also mentioned that working with family means you have to still tread lightly and lines can get blurred sometimes because you’re working together, so there’s pretty much no time to rest. How do you work with them because I know what my relationship is like with siblings and sometimes it’s normal to get annoyed, but I suppose in the area of business it’s a bit more delicate and you can’t just throw your feelings around, so how do you cope with that?
I: It’s true, you can’t really throw your feelings around. You tend to try and do that offline or outside the office environment for sure. With us, it really depends on who your boss is. My dad has always been extremely fair with all of us so there’s no favouritism and we’ve all had our specific areas that we focus on and therefore, as a result our roles don’t cross over really. We have our areas of expertise so it’s not like we’re on top of each other so the beauty of it is, we’re more coming to one another for advice on the areas that we’re working on rather than competing with who’s doing something similar.
P: I love that, so you all pretty much know your roles, you stay in your lanes!
I: Exactly, we stay in our lanes. Luckily, my brother doesn’t want to do skincare.
P: (Chuckles) What’s your relationship like with your brother?
I: It’s great. We’re all really, really close because we work in the same office, we spend a lot of time with each other. As an Italian family, family is very important, our mum has always kept us all together, we quarantined together.
P: You mentioned that at first your dad didn’t really understand your choice in wanting to go into skincare. When was it that you realised ‘I think I don’t want to do my own thing but I want to venture out’, how did you go about explaining that?
I: I was kind of going through it and wanted to see how the skincare went before saying ‘I’m going to really focus on this’ because I didn’t really know. That’s why in the end, in the first instance I built it with the hotels in mind. It’s for the hotels, it’s highly complementary for the hotels.
I think the difficulty now is that I’m getting more retailers and a lot of work outside of the work I do for the hotel. The hotel distribution is limited to certain properties and having kind of done that first step, now it seems like a lot of more time is actually spent not on the hotels. I guess when there was really the demand for retailers and interest, I was like, there was a future for a potentially strong business. It’s more recent that I started to realise that I can’t do both fully.
P: I understand. You’ve won quite a lot of awards, what was that like?
I: For skincare, yes a few. The Tractor Beauty Award for the Pistachio Face Mask was our first one and we were very geekily excited. Everything is an extra high when it’s your own company, you feel the lows or the things that go wrong really badly and everything that goes well is super exciting - it really dictates your mood.
P: What do you think it takes to be a global leader? Of course, working for the hotel and being that you have so many different locations, the way that you may lead your department in one country may be different to how you lead it in another or how people might receive it in another country. What do you think are the key things it takes to be a global leader?
I: First and foremost, people come first. The only way you’re going to succeed and earn respect from people that are working for you and that you’re leading, is by treating them well and fairly and being empathetic. Being able to adapt to different types of people, different circumstances, different nationalities. The way I work with my Italian spa team is very different to how I work with my German spa team because the Italian team needs a lot of emotion and me telling them constantly how wonderful they are - it’s much more of an emotional relationship. Whereas the Germans, they just want to be told ‘well done’, ‘these are the standards’, ‘this is how it goes’ and they want to follow that. It’s not that one is better than the other, that’s just how they work better, and I can get the best out of them. The key thing to being any leader is treating your people with respect and being empathetic and making them feel like their opinions count. Building a team of people around you that compliment your own skill set, whose opinions you really value because ultimately, you need people around you that are going to add to your own expertise and skill set. There’s no point trying to hire people that you think you’re better than because that’s not going to get you anywhere. That’s one of my ethos’s and something I learned from the hotels because people are incredibly important, they are everything for the hotel.
P: I love that. How were you able to tell? Would you say it was time that allowed you to get to know your team or what would you say it is that allowed you to really know ‘ok I have to do this for this team and do that for that team’. What was it that helped you to do that?
“My attitude was always to work harder than everyone else so that I earned their respect and to always be ready to get my hands dirty…”
I: I think a lot of it goes on gut in the first place. You have to try and read other people and understand personality types and have a bit of emotional intelligence - that’s easier said than done because for some people, emotional intelligence comes less naturally than to others. I think it’s always about trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes and trying to see things from another person’s perspective. With me in particular, especially with the hotels, I was the boss’s daughter. My attitude was always to work harder than everyone else so that I earned their respect and to always be ready to get my hands dirty, so I worked my way up through various departments. I think it’s really important. I hate leaders that see a piece of rubbish on the floor and point at it, in a hotel for instance, and think someone else should pick it up - it’s silly things like that. It’s about showing them you’re managing them but you’re also on their level to a certain extent. For me, as I’m still quite young - not that young anymore but youngish, I’m younger than some of the people that I’m on top of, it’s important to also make them feel that you’re on their level as well but I’m not a scary boss.
P: What would you say is the key thing that your father has taught you over the years? I know there may be many but what is one thing that sticks to you all the time?
I: The main thing is that the business world is tough. You’re going to get knocked through it whatever business you’re running. You’ve got to learn to be resilient and adapt to the circumstances. It’s not going to be easy work, things don’t get handed to you on a plate - we have to earn them, that’s something that he’s really taught me. Even with the situation now (referring to COVID), my dad is still positive and working very hard and pushing through that people come first - I’m sure we’ll come out of this stronger than ever.
P: I love that. Do you read a lot?
I: I read quite a lot. I’ve had a bit less time over the last year but being in quarantine has given me a bit more time. I usually travel most weeks, every week to be honest. I studied French and Italian literature at university, so I had quite a literary degree. I actually stopped reading fiction for a long time because I read so much fiction at university.
P: What key books that you’ve read, would you recommend?
I: If we’re going into fiction, I just read ‘A Rising Man’ by Abir Mukherjee. It’s a crime novel set in colonial India and it was quite a fun easy read. I think there’s a series of novels that follow that. What else have I just read? It’s non-fiction but I really like the book by Bill Browder. Can’t remember the name but it’s about the Magnitsky Act and Bill Browder in Russia, I found it a really good book. I love Shoe Dog by Phil Knight who created Nike. He is a case in point that success isn’t handed to you, his story is amazing.
P: I take it you like autobiographies then?
I: I do a bit because I’ve always read non-fiction. Now I can read fiction in a second because non-fiction is harder to read but I feel like I remember fiction less as it’s stories merged together.
