The American dream begins with networking

Hasmukh Rama, 57, certainly started that way. Rama was born to an Indian family living in Malawi in Africa. The family sent him to India for school, then, in 1969, he came to the United States with $2 in his pocket and an acceptance from the MBA program at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He started in the hotel business in Pomona, Calif. at age 25, at the urging of his maternal aunt’s husband.

“Most Indians are introduced that way,” he said. “They know some relative or friend already in the hotel business. They learn from each other, they help each other to locate the hotel or motel and they also help financially.”

He is now chairman and CEO of JHM Hotels, where his four brothers and a nephew also work. The company owns 32 hotels and has 1,000 employees.

“I learned on my first property after I bought the hotel,” he said. “I learned everything from making beds to cleaning the parking lot to making minor repairs to rending rooms.”

Cornelia Zicu, by contrast, knew what she would do after she fled Romania, which was then ruled by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. While living in an Austrian refugee camp from 1989, she cut hair and did women’s makeup.

“Every morning, I have one hour of beauty,” she said. “That was my technique, starting in dictator times, to transform the ugly face of life.”

Zicu came to the United States in 1992 with no money and no English. Her first job in the U.S. was washing stairs, but she says she knew it was temporary. She studied English and eventually became a facialist at the expensive Peninsula Hotel.

She built a dedicated clientele, one of whom is married to a successful real estate developer. Together, they opened a spa called Cornelia on swanky Fifth Avenue last year.

The 130 employees at the spa come from all over the world, but 35 are Romanian.

Why? Partly because they understand how she thinks. Romania has 22 million people and 230 resorts, she said. Even under Ceausescu, every Romanian got one free trip a year to a resort. The first thing teachers did in school when Zicu was a girl was examine the nails of every child in class.

“Maybe people didn’t have food, but every two weeks they got a manicure and pedicure,” Zicu said.

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