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SUCCESS STORIES:
Belyea, Forrette & Bilello is not the name of an advertising or public relations agency, but if they started one together, it would be a tremendous triumph. They are the last names of three success stories, two of which were Bill Smith’s students, and one who just happened to bump into Bill on a Malibu hillside networking party for Florida State University students. In each of these cases, this has been an on-going relationship; not a love-um-and-leave-um process.

1. Dave Belyea was one of Bill Smith's elite students in an integrated marketing communications class at Emerson College in Boston, where a team of 10 pitched a publically traded company, and created a strategic plan and campaign, much of which was used by the client. The creative director for the team was Dave. Bill saw in his young student something of himself some 30 years back, when "risk" was an in word. Dave asked Bill to help mentor his dreams, and co-founded Jack Rabbit, a multi diciplined, brand building company in Boston, that today has a Blue Chip client base. If it had stopped there, Bill would have been satisfied, but he knew there was something else, a vision way beyond the box. Dave didn't disappoint. He co-founded Turtle Transit, where he and his partner created bleeding edge, in-you-face advertising in 3-dimension mobile masterpieces that roamed the streets of America. (Dave has since left Turtle to concentrate solely on his first love, Jack Rabbits.)
   
   
2. Erica Forrette met Bill in the classroom at Emerson College, where she graduated cum laud with a degree in marketing communications. She’s been on a fast track ever since, beginning with MGM Studios in Los Angeles as an assistant to the director of national promotions. Today, she is Director, Marketing at Adapt Technologies, where she handles all strategic and tactical marketing efforts online and off. Adapt is a leading-edge company that created the software tool called SEM-in-a-Box (link to http://sem-in-a-box.adapt.com) to help marketers effectively manage their pay-per-click search marketing ad campaigns on Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. She has also become known as a specialist in pay-per-click marketing methodology, contributing the lesson on Copywriting for Search Text Ads to the SEMPO Institute, as well as regularly speaking about search engine marketing to groups such as the Direct Marketing Association of SoCal and SCORE.
   
   
3. Ready to be discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps, Mike Bilello ran into Bill at a Southern California Seminole Club networking affair. They had a lot in common: Marines with the same MOS (combat correspondents), both had hands-on experience with Marine newspapers and broadcast, graduates of FSU, and beautiful companions, who struck it off. Bill discovered that Mike had “squired” CNN reporters around the combat zones of Iraq, which made him a natural for a public relations position in Los Angeles, he being a natural under “fire.”

   Mike got an immediate lead from a high-powered PR agency. But how do you take a combat veteran and transform him into an every day suit? Role-play, and that’s what they did. The two dreamed up every scenario that could possibly happen in a one-on-one interview, as well as in a group session. The hardest part of all of this was to get Mike away from calling everyone “Sir.” He passed muster and became a civilian PR star overnight. There's a P.S. to this. Both married their beautiful companions.