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About Sarina Russo

Sarina Russo is the founder and managing director of the education, recruitment and investment companies that form the Sarina Russo Group:

Achievements

Appointed to the Challenger Financial Services Board (2006)
A member of the Leading Women Entrepreneurs of the World board (2006)
Appointed to the Council for Multicultural Australia (2005)
Recipient of the Centenary Medal 2003
A member of the Women’s Leadership Board of the John F Kennedy School of Government (Harvard Business School 2003)
Co-author with Russ Gleeson of “Meet Me at the top!” Book (2002)
Recognised in Paris as one of the forty Leading Woman Entrepreneurs of the World (2002)
Appointed to the Queensland Education and Training Export Board (2002)
Appointed to the Queensland Tourism Board (2002)
Appointed as an Honorary Ambassador for the City of Brisbane, by Lord Mayor Jim Soorley
Appointed to the Queensland Premier’s Business Advisory Board (2000)
Elected by the people of Queensland as one of the Australian Republican Movement delegates to the Australian Constitution Convention in Canberra (1998)
Completed the Harvard Business School three year Owner President Management Program
Appointed trustee and chairperson of the Jupiter’s Casino Community Benefit Fund (1995)
Youngest and first female member of the Queensland Chapter of the International Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO) and now
A member of the World Presidents’Organisation (WPO)
Member of the Australiana Fund

The Sarina Russo Story

Meet Me At The Top is a story about the power of one woman’s self-belief, a power that lifted her from failure to superstardom in business.

It also led Sarina Russo to international celebrity in April 2002 when she was selected by a multi-nation judging panel as one of the world’s 40 leading entrepreneurs for the year 2002 and received the award in a grand castle in France.

Her book is an inspiring story of the journey of a child from girl to womanhood, and from small businesswoman to the entrepreneurial educator who climbed from the depths of adversity and entrapment in a smothering culture to the heights of success, financial independence and liberation as a woman.

The Child...

Sarina Russo came to Australia from Sicily as a five year-old. She had everything against her as a young migrant in Brisbane. The ‘smelly’ salami and parmesan cheese sandwiches she took to school for lunch brought scorn and derision from the other children. Her struggle with the new language she had to learn aroused scepticism and doubt in teachers who constantly failed her in English and told her she would never make it to senior school.

She was the student the teachers would have voted most unlikely to succeed, yet all the while she was the clever, resourceful and charming kid who helped her father in his modest business ventures. She won over the kids who scorned her for the lunches she took to school – and later she went to night school to gain university entrance.

The Young Woman...

Sarina Russo left those school gates feeling inadequate, totally disillusioned. She became a typist and was fired from job after job because she had an ‘attitude’ problem, but inside her a spirit was burning. Somehow she was going to make it, somehow she was going to ‘be someone.’ She would do it or die.

But her life had high walls around it. As the youngest daughter of a family that lived to a strict Sicilian tradition she was obliged to live at home with her parents and spend her spare time working on their vineyard until she married. Their destiny for her was motherhood, lots of children.

She didn’t want marriage. She wanted freedom and a career, but the ties that bound her were frighteningly tight. It was not until the age of 26 that she plucked up the courage to run away to find her own destiny.

The Fledgling Business Woman...

After being fired again and again she rented a room above a bank and started a small typing school. And that was when she discovered her real talent – getting people to the starting line of a new phase in their lives, motivating them to believe in themselves.

She got jobs for all of her students. As her reputation grew – with students who loved her motivational teaching style and employers who liked the skills and attitudes of the people they recruited from her courses – her business grew until today it is a major educational institute, Sarina Russo Schools | Australia with a campus for 1000 in the heart of Brisbane drawing students from around the world.

Alongside it she has built another major business, Sarina Russo Job Access, a network of recruitment offices around the eastern states of Australia helping thousands of people on unemployment, find jobs.

The Entrepreneur Takes Wing...

She had many setbacks – refusals by the education department to endorse her courses, a fire that destroyed her school, knock-backs from banks to whom she went for loans to finance business growth, people who told her couldn’t do this or do that, but by this time she had discovered the power of self belief and persistence. She was driven by it and would not be denied. Her motto was ‘it can be done’ – and so it was.

While she grew her business she embarked on a path of self development through constant learning. She honed her business skills by attending courses at the Harvard Business School in the US once a year.

The Queensland Icon of Today

Sarina Russo has achieved massive success as an educator, businesswoman and property owner. She owns four buildings (three high rise) in the Brisbane CBD as well as residential properties.

In her book she shares the secrets of her success in business: how to lead a business, how to recruit, how to enhance performance, how to win and retain customers, how to build a brand and much more.

This is a book that will make its readers see new possibilities for themselves; it will make them set higher goals and it will show them how to be the best they can be by acting on the secrets she shares about how ordinary people can become remarkable people by doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. By doing them the Russo way.

And for the success of every other individual she will be grateful, for her own motivation is this: by enhancing others, I enhance myself.