Every week, Tuesday to Friday.

Your Board has a vote to grow. It has no vote to shrink.

Every growth agenda has a ritual. Retrenchment has none, and it happens without minutes.

I made one of those decisions in 2024. I will not say in which company.

The mechanism repeats itself. The table approves growth unanimously. Then the opposite signal arrives: defaults rising, cash stretched, debt maturing before revenue comes in. Nobody proposes shrinking, because that means signing off on a smaller number in a country that only knows how to ask how much it will grow. Then someone acts. If it works, the result belongs to the Board. If it fails, the name on it belongs to whoever acted.

The table did not reject the retrenchment. It never had anywhere to vote on it.

A table that only deliberates growth hands the company's most expensive decision to a single person.

Acting alone kept the company alive and fixed nothing. The ritual still did not exist, and the next person who sees it first does the same math I did: proposing costs your name, acting costs your name, staying quiet costs nothing.

Retrenchment never gets on the agenda by itself. It gets there when cash forces it, and by then nobody chooses the size.

At the next meeting, ask which trigger forces the table to discuss shrinking. Without an answer, the decision is delegated to whoever acts alone, and the bill goes in his name.

The Board did not decide. It waited until it no longer had to.

Have you ever voted, on a Board, to ban something that was already running inside the company?

The table rarely decides on technology. It waits until it no longer has to decide.

July 2024. Fifteen to twenty people, partners and Board Members at the same table. The reference was Samsung: engineers uploaded internal code to ChatGPT in April 2023 and the company banned generative AI in May. Three people closed the ban, all three from multinationals. The tool was already running inside, on personal accounts, with no audit trail.

In the first half of 2025 I proposed the ugly way out: a single shared password, everything auditable. Bad security practice, and the only thing that exposed the real size of the usage.

What changed the Board came from outside: a corporate version, a closed environment, a team workspace. In 2024 it was a toy. Today it is a machine.

The Board did not change its mind. The risk was solved by someone else.

Blocked use does not become zero use, it becomes unrecorded use. Whoever comes in after the vendor has solved the risk arrives together with everyone else, and together means average. Two quarters stalled, almost a year to reopen, two years to use with force what was already in hand.

A table that only signs after the risk is gone is waiting for permission. And permission arrives for everyone on the same day.

There is always a technically correct number draining cash. Nobody touches it because it came ready-made from someone who knows the subject.

Whoever signs the opinion does not pay the bill · The reference error nobody authorized.

January 2022, my first month as CEO of the energy group. With the controller and the executive team at the table, I saw that we were selling 10 to 15% below what we had paid. The price list followed accounting cost, correct in a large corporation, where the difference disappears in volume and is reimbursed at month end. That was not our case. I froze sales that same day and rebuilt the price list on what we had actually paid.

Sales, purchasing and accounting wanted to kill me. On the screen, all I was doing was raising prices.

The number was right. Right for another company.

A decision that moves cash stops being technical and becomes the owner's. Whoever signs the opinion is not the one who pays the bill.

Three months of operation were being financed by a wrong reference that nobody had to authorize. It did not show up in the income statement, because the income statement closed. It showed up in cash, which is where corporate governance is tested, and always afterwards.

In September your company chooses how it will pay IBS and CBS, the new Brazilian consumption taxes. It will arrive as an accountant's matter. The effect is cash and credit along the chain, it applies from January to June and reopens in March.

You have until September 30 to find out who, in your company, will tick that option. After that, it has already been ticked.

Disagreeing with the owner is the easy part. The hard part comes later.

Early 2016. He came back from a meeting at a luxury mall in love with a car service shop project I did not want to do. I knew the system: he fell in love with an idea, ordered it executed, and the bill landed on me. I said I will not do it, and do not even go to that meeting. An owner is an owner. He came back the way I feared, and I, in protest, said that if he wanted that dream so much, he could make it happen on his own. Then he used my curiosity against me: I accept, as long as you prove it will not work.

Six months with the union, city hall, architect, engineer and legal together, plus neuroscience and mall behavior. The store opened billing like a street unit, with half the fixed cost. The pandemic stopped the expansion at three stores, and the malls were already calling me an anchor.

I did not prove it would not work. I proved it would, and the proof stayed under my name.

Prove it will not work is the most elegant move an owner has to transfer risk.

If it goes wrong, the blame already has a name. If it goes right, the idea still belongs to whoever only had the idea. And the executive learns to disagree less next time.

From a firm no to a passionate yes. To this day I do not know whether I won that argument or lost it in a more expensive way.

When the numbers turn, the table does not ask what to do. It asks how much it will cost.

January 2023. Year-end close, Board Members and partners at the table, me with one year as CEO. Until the next slide: the price of the goods was falling and within the quarter the drop would reach 30% of the value sold in December. The year would open with a loss already declared. The happy faces disappeared and what remained was anger and worry. The only weapon was a lean inventory: sell it off fast, and the loss would not reach the projected 70%.

It was decided right there: sell it off before it drops further.

Then came the blunt question, almost in unison. How much will we lose. Nobody knew when it would stop falling. What came out of that room was a committee to follow sales monthly until inventory stabilized.

The number the table asks for at that moment does not exist. The request does.

A committee created to answer a question that has no answer does not control risk. It spreads the weight of a decision already made.

• a committee born from the wrong question measures last month and calls it control
• the impossible number comes back on the agenda at the next meeting, and the one after
• and cash finances every month between the question and what has already been decided

The meeting ended bitter.

The committee worked, just not for what it was created for. It did not find the number, it shortened the reaction time.

Every Board approves investment in structure. Almost none approves the time it takes to stand up.

Between 2013 and 2015 I was scaling the network of auto repair shops. The bottleneck was not demand, it was payroll growing in a disorderly way. I lacked standardized labor, and training was not my field. I went to Bosch do Brasil. The negotiation went up to Germany and took about two years, format after format, until a franchise emerged as the only model they controlled. Approval only came after a German executive came to see the operation with his own eyes. Then there were still three months of contract and construction.

The expensive part was not setting up the school. It was forbidding myself to grow while the operation got ready, in a period when volume was already falling. Two years paying before receiving anything.

The structure built during the wait funded the next phase: thirty percent less labor per store, twenty percent more productivity, and expansion carried by people who were already in house.

Structure has a construction lead time, and it does not start on the day of the decision. If your company will need one in 2027 and it is still on paper, the delay is already contracted. That math fits in one conversation, and it is better to do it before it reaches the bottom line.

Yesterday I did not have time to comment, but I ask you to look carefully at these photos.

Sindienergia Ceará, the FIEC System, my president Luis Carlos Queiroz and everyone in the photos, as well as so many who do not appear in them, carry a large part of the credit for the advance of renewable energy in our country.

It is a lot of people working for years to turn potential into development, investment and future.

Proud to be from Ceará and to have followed part of this journey up close.

I wrote here that direction is measured by what the company accepts to lose. I left out the time I dropped one in less than a week.

I had just reached half of the group's retail, which was the number I had been aiming for. With the number in hand came the next question: where to expand. There were two doors, opening body work or taking air conditioning all the way. Until then we went as far as changing filters. I wanted full maintenance: leaks, part repair, the whole service.

In the first week the service showed what it was. To reach the leak the car has to be taken apart, and by the time the quote is ready it is already above what the customer will pay. I pulled back that same week.

I called it focus. Focus is the elegant name we give to going back to what was already making money.

The concentrated line stayed concentrated. Neither air conditioning nor body work came back to the table. The expansion that came later was a new unit for trucks, even closer to what was already making money.

Your company's diversification will die in the first week it costs cash. And you will call it focus.

Changing direction has a reputation for instability. That is why almost nobody changes: they change the speech and keep the portfolio.

In 2016 we sold more than two thousand truck tires to fleets that bought one or two hundred at a time. The industry began serving them directly, at factory prices. A distributor does not compete with the factory. Instead of fighting on price, we changed the customer profile: accounts of up to fifty tires. Then it happened again, and we went down to ten. By the end of the cycle the line was selling ten percent more, with higher margin and fewer defaults.

In 2023, in energy, the change was in purchasing. We stopped importing from China and started buying stock on the ship: shorter lead time, and cash stopped spending ninety to one hundred and twenty days outside the company.

Downgrading the customer and giving up direct purchasing look like retreat. They were the two most structural changes in both companies. Direction is measured by what the company accepts to lose.

• While you hold on to the big customer, it is your margin that pays for his discount.
• Money sitting in lead time does not show up on any line of the income statement, and that is why nobody cuts it.
• When the change comes late, the portfolio is not migrated. It is rebuilt.

Every stuck company is defending a portfolio that has already been beaten somewhere else.

Gustavo Carriconde, it was a very high-level event, with consistent content, relevant discussions and insights that truly add value. Every moment was worth it for the quality of the reflections and the opportunity to broaden perspectives. Thank you for the invitation and for the opportunity to take part.

You already know which area it is. It has a name, it has an owner and it has your signature.

Air conditioning in the shops, in 2007. Outsourced car wash, around 2010. Good fronts, well executed, high margin and tiny revenue.

All of them were labor intensive and outside my core. All of them required someone senior watching. And all of them pulled my team away from what created value to take care of less than 5% of revenue.

The criteria for shutting down are no secret.

First: revenue that does not pay for the structure that sustains it.
Second: an operation that consumes senior time out of proportion to what it delivers.
Third: a line that only runs with the owner inside.

No owner gets these three wrong. What blocks it is that every line has a surname, a partner or an old promise stuck to it.

None of them died from lack of effort. All of them died from too much of it.

I did not shut down when the number said so. I shut down when I had to defend that line in front of partners and the Board.

Cash does not feel the small line. It feels the senior person it occupies. And it feels the executive agenda spent deciding what the number has already decided.

Open the income statement by line and add up the senior hours each one consumes. The number already exists. What is missing is the meeting where you read it out loud.

You know this conversation: the margin is excellent, the operation just needs to get going.

The hard decision was not getting in. It was switching off something that still worked.

In 2024 we added pool heating to the portfolio. It made sense: same customer, same job site, margin above the rest of the portfolio. We invested in training, in material, in a team. And we signed together with whoever did the installation, because installation was never ours.

Four salespeople came through in two years. Installer turnover I never stabilized.

The margin was there. It was never the problem.

What the sale paid did not cover the cost of the lead that generated it. No growth strategy survives an acquisition cost that the sale itself does not pay.

Whoever executes owns the channel. I owned the brand that signed underneath.

• Two years buying leads for a product that did not pay for its own lead.
• Four salespeople passing through an operation the leadership was already discussing shutting down.
• And the training and material that left the cash and did not come back with the channel.

We shut it down at the end of 2025.

The channel is still promising. It just was not ours.