Young entrepreneur never takes 'no' for an answer

Joe Maddalone of Asharoken doesn't just refuse to take "no" for an answer. He won't even accept a "maybe."

Maddalone has hosted three business conferences in New York, called T. Boone Pickens 30 days in a row until the Texas energy maven gave him an internship in December 2008, and started his own consulting firm, Maddalone Global Strategies, in Garden City, in December 2010.

So is he done? Hardly. Maddalone is all of 22. He graduated from the University of Scranton in 2010 after three years of study. "I always had a passion to work for myself," Maddalone said. "I've always wanted to build something, whether I've succeeded or failed."

His consulting firm, only 7 months old, has already garnered six clients, four on Long Island and two in Manhattan. Jim Lavaliere said he hired Maddalone to help him build an email marketing and communication company in Smithtown. "I hired Joseph to create a marketing plan that will first attract clients and recruit employees," Lavaliere said in an email. "The best advice he has given me is, you have to sell yourself before you sell anything else. This may sound obvious, but this is often overlooked in business."

During a summer college internship at the banking firm UBS in Manhattan, Maddalone attended a conference on what business would look like in a decade. He was surprised, he said, that no one there was under 30. He cold-called colleges until he persuaded NYU to allow him to host a similar business event at the college.

He called Pickens' office in the fall of 2008. And called and called. Finally someone called him back, asking him to hold a rally in Times Square on Election Eve in 2008 to promote Pickens' energy initiatives. Maddalone got 100 people to show up, and in December, Pickens offered him an internship. Pickens himself showed up at a conference Maddalone held at Thomson Reuters in January 2010.

"I just don't believe in the word 'no,' " Maddalone said. The future? Maddalone says he'll turn his firm into a billion-dollar company and then "run for president." He doesn't joke about such things.