January 8, 2017

Meet Ric Browde of Tuscandream

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ric Browde.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Ric. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was a record producer/songwriter and author who had achieved some success producing platinum bands including Poison, Joan Jett, Ted Nugent and Faster Pussycat – and met my partner, Carolina Casini in 2003 through a mutual acquaintance, former model Janice Dickinson, Carolina had started TuscanDream in 1999 with the idea of providing luxury villa rentals throughout Tuscany and was looking for an American partner to help market our villa and wedding services in North America on the internet.

I had always loved Italy and after having a few bad vacations on my own thought this would be a great opportunity to try and provide vacation planning services with the level of service I would want if were my own holiday. We quickly grew from a $60,000 a year business when I met Carolina to a multi-million dollar company, utilizing the guiding principle that we would not represent any villas or castles that we felt we would not spend our own money to stay in if it were our own holiday.

We think TuscanDream provide the best vacations and wedding planning services possible throughout, Florence, Lucca, Siena and Chianti, the principle areas of Tuscany as well as the rest of Italy and Europe. I’m also proud that I take all my profits from TuscanDream and use them to subsidize pet rescue from California high kill animal shelters. I am a Board member of Wings of Rescue and this year we will have flown over 10,000 dogs and cats to safety at no-kill shelters throughout the Pacific Northwest and Canada, who would otherwise have been euthanized in local municipal shelters.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
When we first started there was not as much competition – and a company’s search engine results were not entirely dependent on Google ranking. Now Google is basically a monopoly and virtually owns the internet and if you don’t advertise with them or constantly adopt to their constantly changing content criteria – your company runs the risk of being virtually invisible to the world as they can demote you to the second page or worse of search engine results – which spells almost certain doom to any small business.

We’ve had a few run-ins with Google’s changing the way it evaluates websites – but somehow we’ve survived!

Please tell us about Tuscandream.
We provide luxury villa rentals, travel and wedding planning services in Tuscany.

We are proud that we provide personal, customized service and are able to provide our clients with the benefit of our personal knowledge that can only come from Carolina’s being a life-long resident of Tuscany and my years of traveling there.

Unlike most of our competitors we have personal relationships with each of our villa owners and service providers and have recently personally visited and inspected each villa and castle we represent, and we have a great team of experienced bilingual wedding planners on staff to make sure that we make brides’ wedding dreams come true.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We never anticipated the Google would end up conquering the internet and have a stranglehold on search engine results.

Knowing then, what I know now – would have spent more time and money learning web marketing and made sure that we were always able to stay on top of every change that Google contemplated.

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