The novice broker, who would construct makeshift lemonade stands with her brother as a child, began with four employees and now has 100-plus agents. Londono Realty Group is an empire led by a beautiful empress, similar to the ones we used to see in old Hollywood movies. Add smart and driven to success and you can start to conceptualize Tatiana Londono.

The receptionist is young and inviting, and similar to a telethon, phones constantly ring throughout the office’s foyer. The walls are very thin: my guess is that Londono chose this space so that her distinct pitch and tone could be heard from any room. This most likely ensures staffers to learn from the best by listening to the best, regardless of the distance between them and their boss.

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I hear her before I see her, and when she walks in, she greets me with a smile. Londono escorts me into the boardroom just before she enters an urgent call in another room that allows me to be alone in her boardroom – divine intervention! This gives me time to get ready. Distracted by the familiar surroundings, I realize that I’m sitting at the glass table often seen on the show she hosts. I notice that the window in front of me looks out onto the foothills of Westmount, a southwestern city in Quebec that is home to a wealthy residential community. The view serves as a constant reminder for Londono Realty Group that beyond these walls rests a mountain of high-priced homes to conquer and sell.

As I prepare my things, I notice how clean the boardroom is. Just before I can smear my finger across the table to check for dust like a cynical mother-in-law, Londono, a woman of power and strength, walks in.

Her energy allows her to hop like an Energizer bunny through 14-hour-work days, and her enthusiasm is absorbed by anyone in her presence. Her resilient attitude is what makes her a real sensation for all to enjoy.

Londono is a mother, an entrepreneur, and her exposure from The Property Shop has given more people an opportunity to view her as a strong role model. Her disdain for failure makes her invincible – fear and failure are not part of her vocabulary. I ask her what advice she can provide to little girls who are afraid to follow their dreams. A frustrated look stares back at me, and she blurts out as if I have offended her, “I don’t fail! I can’t even process that question because it has the word ‘fail’ in it. I ignore any negative energy and people who say ‘You can’t do it.’ For the little girl or boy who looks to me to with fear of failure I say, ‘Go for it! Live it! Take the risk because guess what? What’s the worst that could happen?’”

And that’s exactly what she did. At 19, she spent over a year in the Canadian Military, and as second century BC playwright Terence once wrote: “Fortune favours the brave.” She then went to McGill University, worked as a telemarketer, and entered the real estate industry with Re/Max Group, Sutton Group, and finally, founded her very own Londono Realty Group three years ago. The Property Shop is a grand compliment to all her hard work.  “I feel like a rock star. I’m on top of the world.

What Londono has accomplished in such a short time isn’t just impressive, it’s supernatural. She was born to sell. Her raw talent was refined by all the non-stop work weeks over the past 15 years. She’s pretty as a peach, and has two beautiful children and a loving husband to support her. “My children are my biggest achievement, my marriage is my second, Londono Realty Group would be my third biggest achievement and my TV show would be my fourth. My children inspire me, because of them I want to do my best; I want them to have a good future. My husband’s patience inspires me. When I was working as a telemarketing manager, I said to the other managers, ‘I belong on TV.’ Everyone said, ‘God, you are so full of yourself. What would you do on TV? You’re just a telemarketing manager.’ A lot of people confuse ambition with arrogance,” she says. “I believe I have a special personality. People laugh when I talk, and people listen to me. Everyone is always very happy when they are around me.” Perhaps we are more than what others think we can be.

She sits right next to me and she is beautiful. ‘Your courage allows you the capability to complete your goals, with your ad signs popping up like petunias and your hit show The Property Shop on HGTV making you a star,’ I ask. ‘My question is, are you satisfied or is there more room for success?’

She remains stoic as she listens; her eyes light up and a smile slowly spreads across her face. “I just got started! There is a lot more to do, you will see the Londono Group everywhere – in Quebec and hopefully in Ontario very soon. The sky is the limit. I’ve achieved a lot – this is just the first step.” After hearing that, I break from my line of questioning and coyly say, ‘so it’s a big mountain?’ “Huge!” she replies. “Wait and see. You’ll come back and interview me again in a year from now.” With pleasure I think, with pleasure.
www.londonogroup.com

One of the first things that strikes you about Ricardo Larrivée is that he loves to talk, he loves to engage and converse in a robust and stimulating way. Ricardo is movie-star handsome. He is a friendly person who claims to have fallen into his current position as one of the hottest and talented cooking show hosts in the country by accident. He explains his success by saying that he has always had an innate knack and talent for cooking. This tells me that his current success is nothing near an accident, but rather a harmonic convergence of the right guy being in the right place when the right opportunity came around. And most importantly, making the absolute most of that opportunity.

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“Well, if you think about it like that, yes, that is quite true,” says Ricardo. “When I was just five-years-old, I would make cakes simply by watching my mother make them – I couldn’t read, so I was doing my cooking simply through observing and experimenting.”

Professionally, Ricardo had his sight set on working in the hotel business and even went to school to pursue that avenue. Later on he discovered that that wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. “I loved the social aspect of the hotel business,” says Ricardo. “But the day-to-day financial aspects of running a hotel was not something that interested me in the least. And because that is such a crucial aspect to the hotel business, it wasn’t really for me.”

Ricardo went back to school to study broadcasting and ended up at the CBC in Regina one summer. Because he didn’t know anyone there, he would just invite people from the office and studio to his house for dinner so he could meet people and make friends. Quickly, the word spread that Ricardo’s place was the place to get an invitation to, as the food was fantastic. Not long afterwards, Ricardo found himself being offered his own cooking show, something he was a bit nervous about but embraced wholeheartedly. “I was scared, of course, and there was this feeling that because I was French I would not get an audience,  but people seemed to like the show right from the start.”

Caught in a massive wave of CBC layoffs, Ricardo returned to Montreal to start over again – and it was in Montreal that Ricardo was approached again by a broadcaster who offered him his own cooking show that would celebrate, among other things, his French background. “I love Quebec and I remain based in and my show is shot in my town of Chambliss, but the more I have travelled around the country and the world, the more I see that despite our language differences and cultural differences, we are all a lot more similar than we are dissimilar,” says Ricardo. Ricardo practices what he preaches on this level by doing his show, Ricardo and Friends, in both French and English.

The element that makes Ricardo and Friends a unique show is that it focuses not only on recipes and cooking but on an examination of food, the manufacturing of food, the various local traditions and the stories behind the traditions – so each episode offers a one-of-a-kind culinary adventure. “I am interested in sharing my excitement for things,” says Ricardo. “I want people to be excited about food and cooking because food is the one thing in this world that unites us and brings us together. Food is an important part of how our culture and the cultures of other countries is defined.”

And when you get Ricardo talking about food and culture and national identity, you can practically see the passion cracking around him like an electrical charge. “On a visit I made to New Zealand, I was fascinated to see that the customs and foods of its Aboriginal population (the Maori), were proudly incorporated into the mainstream culture of New Zealand,” said Ricardo. “But here we need to do some work on that . . . many of the dishes that we call indigenous to Canada or Quebec specifically actually do have their roots in Native cultures. I want to talk about that and I want to show that so people can appreciate it.”

But Ricardo is trying to take it one step further – he is trying to spread the word to children in schools in the towns and regions he visits. “It is an indisputable fact that parents that make it a habit of sitting down to meals with their children encounter far fewer social and developmental problems with their children,” says Ricardo. “So I am trying to work in a love of food, a curiosity about food and where good food comes from in children from an early age so that my enthusiasm and curiosity then becomes theirs as well.”

Ricardo has a lot of practice when it comes to relating to children. He and his wife have three little girls,  aged four, seven and nine. “They are very much a part of everything that I do – since we shoot the show partly right here in my house – they are always around and can feel that they are directly a part of the celebration of food and culture that is going on around them,” says Ricardo.

What it all comes down to is having fun with food and with cooking. “Most definitely,” agrees Ricardo. “I want everything I do on the show with food and cooking to be wrapped in fun. You take more away from a fun experience you have had than from any other kind of experience.” And when asked if he feels himself to be something of an ambassador for Quebec and French culture, Ricardo laughs.

“I am not a political person, even though I understand the power of politics, but if you wish to call me an ambassador I think I would only be defined as such in that I take very seriously my role in bringing the positive aspects of French culture, of this beautiful province and all its unique little regions and cities and towns, to people that might not otherwise have thought that way about Quebec.”

And what about away from the show, how does Ricardo define relaxation? “Well, it is very interesting,” he says. “I don’t really see much difference between what I enjoy away from my work with what I do when I am working. I love what I do, I am constantly excited and enthusiastic about what I do and because I have my family and friends a part of it all, every day seems like I am on an exciting, adventurous vacation.”

When Oscar Wilde said: “Find a job that you love and you will never work a day in your life,” – Ricardo Larrivée was definately listening.