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José Paulo – Ideal Decision
is crucial to know who are the ones following you. A guideline I
bring with me is: I like making friends at work, but not to work
with friends, because when I establish a friendship in the work pla-
ce, in favor of a common objective it is a sign I am a well related
leader.
Most of the times, when you bring a friend from your social cir-
cle into the work ecosystem, automatically you bring the kinship
and the usual treatment from outside into the company, which can
cause problems for frustration or for not meeting the expectations,
for example.
An excellent friend may not be a good coworker and that can
hurt results and especially the friendship.
I have changed the boards of the companies I preside many
times, and I still do it because this is needed to extract the best in
each one and place them in the right positions to develop a good
job. And when you have a good relationship and “professional”
friendship, a good leader can do this easily because everyone un-
derstands that the purpose is the result.
If there is some advice I can give you is to analyze people in
whom you will invest your time well, check their fruits. And do
you know why that is? Simply because you may be wasting your
time, your energy and even your money by investing in someone
who does not want to have results. And time is life!
Without a good team you cannot have good results. What mo-
ves a business are the positive cycles of results, without people of
good fruits this is not going to happen.
Besides people, it is important that you understand that posi-
tive results are not connected to what we like to do, but to what
needs to be done. In my cycle of failures and adversities I learned
that some factors are paramount for successful results.
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José Paulo – Ideal Decision
First, you have to make a thorough research on the market
you intent to act on, about cases of success, if there is room for
growth in the market and if you are financially ready to face the
challenges until your company reaches the break-even point. In
another words, it means to keep your company up until it pays it-
self. Another important point is to analyze how long after reaching
the financial break-even your company will repay all you invested.
You must be sure you dominate and understand the field you
have chosen, and I emphasize again that what you like, most of
the times, is not what will succeed, that is why studying the field is
vital. Do what needs to be done, not what you like. We are talking
about entrepreneurship and not recreation.
After you analyze the above-mentioned points, you must pay
double the attention to costs, profit margin, lean operation, de-
mand, if what you plan is scalable and for how long. Any imbalan-
ce in one of these factors can take you to failure.
To make it clearer, I am used to say that the cashflow is the lung
of the company, and I compare the expenses to a hemorrhage, but
do you know what that means? It means the income is the air that
keeps you alive, but there is no use in having an income if the ex-
penses grow with time. Expenses are like a hemorrhage that slowly
kills your company because most of them are imperceptible and
silent, when you realize it, there is no coming back.
It is necessary to have balance in everything, it is certainly im-
possible to do everything with excellence, so prefer to do a few
things with high quality than precariously doing many.
When you realize you are having good results, a new cycle of
good things will start as well, such as: better people will come arou-
nd you, many opportunities will appear and it will keep everything
working in harmony.
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