Scaling Would Have Been Irresponsible

Between 2013 and 2015, I was scaling the Gerardo Bastos auto repair network when I saw the bottleneck. Growing at that speed, the way things stood, would have been irresponsible.

The problem was not lack of demand. It was what growth was doing on the inside. Payroll costs were rising out of control, and every new store widened the imbalance. Scaling on top of that meant turning expansion into improvisation. I saw that I needed to make two moves before the critical phase, not during it.

The first was to bring payroll under control. The second was harder: producing reliable labor at scale. The conclusion was that I needed my own training center. But training was not my field. Instead of improvising, I went after the people who knew: I opened a negotiation with Bosch Brazil.

The cost of building the school was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was having to wait. Running a pulsing operation and forbidding it to expand, because it would not survive the pressure of expansion, made it almost impossible to act. The decision to stop was the most painful one I ever had to make, at a stage when the market and the company were demanding the opposite: volume was falling because of heavy traffic, and we needed to react to restart growth. Waiting exacted a high price. Losing customers to traffic and standing still in time, both at once.

The negotiation went up to Bosch Germany and took around two years. We had to prove car volume, the size of the business, revenue, and design countless partnership formats until the franchise emerged as the most viable one, because it was the model Bosch could control. The first worldwide Bosch Training franchise was being born, inside my company.

All the support from Brazil was not enough. Approval only came when a top executive flew in from Germany to see the operation and witnessed with his own eyes the scale of what we were building. The center was located in our largest store, 10,000 square meters. From there, it took about three more months of contracts and construction until it was running.

The result exceeded what I had projected. A 30% reduction in labor per store and a 20% gain in productivity. The operators who were already with us became the foundation of the growth, and the productivity jump funded the expansion. The structure I built during the wait was exactly what sustained the critical phase.

But the number I am proudest of was not in the plan. The center was open to the entire market, not just my operators. In my time, more than 3,000 training sessions went through it, including mechanics from shops that competed with me.

The city rose to a new level. Quality and price gained uniformity, because knowledge stopped being a privilege of the big shops. Mechanics began displaying their diplomas on the wall with pride.

All growth demands a choice: pay the price of waiting before, or the price of collapse after. I chose the wait. Today, looking back, I consider this my greatest call. Not because of the 30% or the 20%, but for having narrowed the distance between big shops and small ones. The greatest gain was the one that never fit in a spreadsheet.