A Taste of TAB: Atlanta North Business Owners Sample Board

I am a small business owner and a TAB Certified Facilitator and Coach.

For 35 years, I was a C-suite executive in Brazil, running a $30 million/year manufacturing division of a German multi-national capital goods corporation. When I started there in 1978, the company's revenue was around $3 million/year with 50 employees. When I left for the US in 2013 the revenue had increased 10 fold and the company had 200 employees. We more than doubled the shop floor area, modernized the manufacturing facilities and processes, created new lines of products and opened export channels to countries such as China, India, Italy, Spain, France and especially to the USA, Canada and Mexico. All growth and improvements were supported by cash flow generated locally, without any parent company investment.

I also wanted the best-trained engineers and managers, and so I made sure we invested in their education. Several, including me, got MBAs with Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC) the most prestigious business school in Brazil. FDC has a partnership with Wharton and is rated in the top 10 or 15 business schools in the world. We paid 80% of tuition for employees to gain high school, college, and advanced engineering degrees. To develop the skills of our middle and upper management, we also engaged the company in a comprehensive training program with FDC.

My core values, as a manager, have always been total transparency in communication, and to help others grow and become independent, to rely on each other across silos and to feel empowered to make increasingly better and more independent decisions. I suspected this was impacting our bottom line growth and received confirmation when I commissioned reports by HR consultants who were helping us implement new tools. Both times, the results indicated that what drove the company was trust in the relationships.

In 2000, I opened an agency in Houston to better serve our North American customers. In 2013 the parent company sent me to Houston, TX to be the VP of their North American Sales and Distribution unit, a position that I held for 5 years.

What excites me about TAB is the opportunity to help business owners grow both financially and personally. Watching managers and employees grow and become independent was the part of my job in Brazil that made me the happiest. TAB gives me the opportunity to step into that role again, something I know I excel at.

I have a Mechanical Engineering degree from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and two MBAs, one by Candido Mendes University and one by Fundação Dom Cabral. I’m an American citizen since 2018.