My Development: Where My Core Strengths Were Born
Before the titles and the negotiations, there was a workshop floor. It is honest to start there, because it was there, and not in a classroom, that my core strengths were formed. The formal education came later, to confirm what practice had already taught.
Let me introduce myself: I am Bernardo, with a degree in Business Administration from UNIFOR, a specialization in Business Management from Fundação Dom Cabral, and courses from Dale Carnegie, HSM, FranklinCovey, Board Academy and Instituto Empresariar, among others. But the diploma that weighs most in my story has no certificate. That one was earned day by day, starting from zero.
The first strength I learned was to prove with numbers. At 22, I wanted to open a workshop inside the largest tire shop in the Northeast, and to do that I had to convince the owner of the company, my grandfather. Being family did not help, on the contrary, it forced me to show up with the figures in hand. I showed, in numbers, that the flow of cars through the stores was being wasted, that the customer came in and left without leaving the service they could have left. I earned the right to build. And I learned early that, inside a company, authority is not inherited, it is demonstrated.
Building was only the beginning. To take an operation to volume, you have to master two things no one sees from the outside: standardization and process. I studied operational efficiency because a bottleneck does not forgive, a missing part, a new product, everything jams the machine. It was in that period that I had the honor of taking an in-person course with William Ury, through HSM, and learned the art of negotiation, which I later deepened in the Harvard Model. Revenue grew along with it, not by pushing sales, but by seeing what the customer already needed and did not yet have there: an oil change, a battery, a rim, a list that never ends, always in win-win logic. I did not invent defects, I solved problems. Years later, Uri Levine gave a name to what I did by instinct: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. That is what I did when I saw the customer in a hurry to go change the oil at the gas station, and I brought the oil into the workshop.
The turning point came with the fourth store. I was authorized to build it entirely to the workshop standard and, right after, to retrofit the old ones to the same standard. The group stopped being a tire shop and officially became a large workshop. With those concepts firm, came one of the biggest negotiations of my life, and the first international one: the first global franchise of the Bosch Technical Training Center. With the center set up, I raised standardization even further and opened the scaling process. We reached ten stores, 10,000 cars a month and more than 400,000 tires sold per year.
From that period also came an internship at Pirelli, in Milan, where I followed their distributor network closely, a little over 400 units in the Rede Driver. Seeing another scale, in another country, adjusted my own.
When the pandemic arrived, I was already the president's right hand, in services and in tires, and I faced the first major crisis of my career. We came through it. And it was in that tight spot that I prepared the company for sale, my first major M&A. Already out of the operation and living in São Paulo, I led the process with the General Director, because the company had come out of the pandemic professionalized, able to run without me. That was my first Exit, and perhaps the hardest lesson to learn: building something that no longer depends on you is the most mature way to build.
In São Paulo, I became a partner in renewable energy companies and deepened international negotiations, mainly with China and Europe. I joined as Advisory Board Member of ResumoCast Ventures and specialized in Boards for family businesses, a subject I did not study from the outside: I lived inside one for 21 years. I know from within the pain of those who work among relatives and of partners who grew up together, improvising. It is that pain I help to organize today, bringing clarity, strategy and governance. The same three strengths that, back then, were born on the floor of a workshop.