Newsday.com

They meet to eat and to help job-seek

Five seasoned professionals, all of whom had been downsized out of a job, started linking up three years ago for weekly job-search support breakfast meetings.

Now all but one has landed a job - and they're looking to help others through what has become the Long Island Breakfast Club. Their goal is to provide advocacy, support and job referrals to about 30 people who are on their e-list.

During their own searches, the five - Valentina Janek, 54; JoAnn Fiorentino, 55; Patricia Locurcio, 42; Chris Fidis, 48; and Stephanie Carlino, 58 - helped one another strategize and keep spirits up through disappointments and near-misses. Even when asked to leave the diner that was their meeting place - it seems they had lingered for too long without ordering too much - they left laughing.

Then, a few months ago, they started getting hired:

Janek, of West Hempstead, as director of marketing at ARS Financial Services in Jericho.

Fiorentino, of Holbrook, as director at Rainbow Chimes, a childhood education and development center in Huntington.

Carlino, of Wantagh, as director and chief executive of the Long Island Neurological Institute in Rockville Centre.

Fidis, of West Hempstead, as an implementation manager with Verizon, working from his home office.

Locurcio, of West Hempstead, has multiple sclerosis, and is still looking for work she can do from home as a legal secretary or in communications.

The meetings are "like medicine to keep you going," says Janek, who met Carlino in a waiting room as each was about to be interviewed for the same job, which neither of them got.

The next meeting of the Long Island Breakfast Club is Aug. 11; see pro-fusion.us.

- PATRICIA KITCHEN

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In this family firm, it's a bare market

Talk about double exposure.

The owners and staff of a tony Garden City interior-design firm landed in a Times Square electronic ad that left just a little to the imagination.

Mother and daughter, Rosemarie and Annemarie diSalvo, and their staff at diSalvo Interiors appeared in the Jumbotron electronic ad atop the Reuters building. They were bare shouldered and covered otherwise by a large, shared piece of silk cloth.

DiSalvo Interiors was one of 150 business winners nationwide in Dell's "We Believe" small-business ad campaign. The computer company chose the winners from a group of 300 customers who submitted ads with the most "compelling message." The winners received free electronic billboard space on July 9 and 10.

The diSalvos' "Naked Ad" creation cycled through the Jumbotron with those of other winners on those days. "It's not typical for a design firm," Rosemarie diSalvo says of the ad. "That's what made it so different and so unique."

So were they fully clothed under the silk cloth?

"Yes," diSalvo says. "We have clothes on."

- CARRIE MASON-DRAFFEN



Home is not always where the execs are

For a company once considered so Long Island-centric that it practically required its executives to live in the region, the former Computer Associates has come a long way - several states away, at least.

When CA was run by founder Charles Wang and his onetime protege Sanjay Kumar, a home on Long Island was considered so important that CA offered financial incentives for executives recruited from elsewhere to buy homes here.

These days, not only have the local-home incentives faded, but most of the very top executives themselves don't live locally. In fact, only three of 14 executive vice presidents and above at CA have homes on Long Island.

Three - chief executive John Swainson, chief financial officer Nancy Cooper and executive vice president Donald Friedman - live in Connecticut. Chief operating officer Michael Christenson lives in New Jersey. Two other executive vice presidents are based near their homes in Massachusetts - chief technology officer Alan Nugent and chief administrative officer James Bryant.

Another, Amy Fliegelman Olli, executive vice president and general counsel, lives in North Carolina, while executive vice president and general manager for worldwide sales George Fischer lives in Pennsylvania. Three others - executive vice presidents Kenneth Handal, Jacob Lamm and Ajei Gopal - live in New York City.

The three who live on Long Island are vice chairman and founder Russell Artzt, executive vice president of worldwide human resources Andrew Goodman and executive vice president of worldwide sales operations John Ruthven.

CA isn't the only company that has geographically disparate executives, and, as a CA spokesman pointed out, technology and a global market make it somewhat less important where executives are based. "CA is a global company," said the spokesman. "Over the years we've gone out to attract the best talent. We have found that because it's a networked and wired world, it's somewhat less important where the executives live."

That aside, he said, the company's executive management team spends a "substantial" amount of time in Islandia, as well as "substantial time on the road at other CA facilities or with customers."

Long Island, he said, "is the corporate headquarters for CA and we're committed to Long Island."

- MARK HARRINGTON



For Yellow Book, it's kung phone

Competition to establish money-making enterprises on the Web is stiff these days. So companies are looking for stand-out messages.

Yellow Book, the Uniondale- based telephone directory company, is hoping a national ad campaign featuring the veteran kung fu actor David Carradine will persuade small businesses to consider the company their ticket to building an online presence.

The commercial, which began airing July 9, depicts Carradine as a mystical advertising guru, telling business owners how to increase their customer base. Carradine has appeared in commercials for the directory since last year. The objective is to show that Yellow Book, in addition to its print and Internet yellow pages, offers an advertiser search engine. "As the world of search advertising evolves, Yellow Book wants to show that its products are poised to help small businesses gain customers," says Allan Charles, chief creative officer of Trahan Burden & Charles, the Baltimore agency that created the ad.

- CARRIE MASON-DRAFFEN