DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz

by Cristiane Correa

  Mourão’s first mission was to move to São Paulo to take care of an operation that was smaller than the head office, but that held great potential. The company forced him to abandon an old habit of calling Lemann “Mr.”

  “One day he told me that we were partners and it no longer made sense to call him that anymore.” Not bad for a boy who began his career at Garantia carrying the owner’s tennis rackets.

  Mission announced is

  mission accomplished

  Working in the financial market – inside and outside Brazil – has, of course, never been easy. Making decisions that move lots of money over short periods of time means being under constant pressure. Those without nerves of steel give up halfway.

  Life on Wall Street, the financial center of the United States, has always been particularly tough. According to Charles D. Ellis in his book on Goldman Sachs, workaholics are the norm, and the routine at the world’s most powerful investment bank requires employees to dedicate almost their entire lives to work. New hires usually work from eight in the morning until six in the evening, stop for a quick meal and then resume their working day until nine or ten at night. For many employees, it didn’t even stop there.

  The working day was equally frenetic at the former Salomon Brothers, founded in 1910 and sold to Travelers Group in 1998. Former employee Michael Lewis, who worked there in the 1980s, dramatically recounts the life of an analyst like himself in his book Liar’s Poker:

  “Bosses attached beepers to their favorite analysts, making it possible to call them in at all hours. A few of the very best analysts, months into their new jobs, lost their will to live normal lives. They gave themselves entirely over to their employers and worked around the clock. They rarely slept and often looked ill; the better they became at the jobs, the nearer they appeared to death.”

  The pressure and merciless pursuit of results at Garantia were raised to levels of paroxysm. There was nothing exceptional about arriving early, leaving late and working through the night. The working day often lasted 12 to 14 hours and extended to the weekends. Personal and family life was obviously sacrificed.

  “I worked a lot and did not see my children grow up,” former partner Diniz Ferreira Baptista admits. In the open-plan offices where everyone scrutinized everyone else, anyone who got up to leave earlier than usual to go home was usually greeted with a round of applause. This was done in a sarcastic way and usually accompanied by an awkward question: “Are you working part-time?”

  The tone may have been jocular, but the venom could not be hidden. Obviously not everyone could stand this kind of set-up. A legendary story arose about a lawyer who was hired by Garantia and walked out on his first day. He went out to lunch and never came back.

  Dedication was uncompromising, and Garantia staff had to be ready to change their departments or even cities at a moment’s notice. For example, former partner Clóvis Macedo was “invited” to transfer from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo at the beginning of the 1980s to prospect for clients. Although he had never considered making this change, he accepted it since refusing an offer like this was not an option, at least for those who wanted to expand their careers within the bank.

  Marcelo Barbará, who came from a long-established Rio family and began his career at Garantia as a telex operator, had a similar experience in 1993. He was working on the trading desk when Lemann asked him to take over the bank’s administrative department and assume responsibility for activities such as custody, systems and compliance. Since the collapse of Invesco in the 1960s, Lemann had never neglected this area in his investments. However, the magic, adrenalin and money passed through the trading desk where Barbará was and not in the bureaucratic administrative back office. It was like switching from front to back stage, but he did not make a fuss and accepted the move.

  “I was very loyal to Jorge, and it never entered my head to turn down a mission. It would also not have been seen well. Jorge also made it clear that this was the fastest way to become a partner in Garantia.” Barbará played his part, obeyed and took care of the administrative part of the bank. Lemann also upheld his part and Barbará became a partner 18 months after the transfer.

  Detecting as quickly as possible those who could last the course was essential. The resilience tests began as soon as the job applicant was interviewed, another aspect in which Garantia resembled the big American institutions. One of the techniques used by interviewers at Salomon Brothers was to ask the candidate to open the window of the room on the 43rd floor of its head office in Wall Street where the interview was taking place. The trick was that the window was sealed. The interviewer only wanted to see the candidate’s reaction. There’s actually a story that one young applicant was so desperate to get the job that he ended up throwing a chair to break the glass.

  Another strategy the Salomon Brothers interviewers used was to remain silent. The candidate would enter the room and the interviewer said nothing. The candidate greeted him but he said nothing. The candidate related his experiences or told a joke and there was no response, not even a smile or a word. The interviewer would only keep his eyes fixed firmly on the poor sap in front of him. How long could anyone hold out in a situation like this? How would the candidate react? This was what the interviewer wanted to know. One recruiter at Goldman Sachs at the end of the 1970s went to the absurd length of asking a student from the Stanford Business School if she would have an abortion if she became pregnant in the middle of a deal that was important for the firm. (This question was only regarded as a slight exaggeration within the bank.)

  Each candidate at Garantia was usually submitted to a battery of at least a dozen evaluations before being approved. The interviewers always included some of the senior partners, including Lemann. Rather than ask about the applicant’s education or experience, which could be seen in the résumé, the interviewer wanted to know whether he or she was made of the right material for the bank. Candidates were required to have a gung-ho attitude and fire in their eyes and nobody was spared the ordeal.

  Dick Thompson and Lemann met at the Americana School, where both had studied. Thompson was three years older than Lemann and a friend of Alex Haegler. They met again in the 1960s when they were both working at Invesco. Thompson applied for a job in Garantia’s sales area at the end of 1972 after selling his small brokerage. Even though he had known Lemann for decades, he was submitted to the same ritual as any other candidate. “About eight or nine people interviewed me. They were all around the same table, including Jorge Paulo, and fired questions from all sides,” Thomson recalled. “You needed to be very self-confident not to leave that room completely shaken.” He was accepted and eventually became a partner, only leaving two decades later to devote himself to a completely different activity: producing organic foods on a beautiful property covering 50 hectares, Sítio do Moinho, in Itaipava in the highland region of Rio de Janeiro state.

  The toughest interrogator candidates faced was Fernandes. In the days before political correctness, he had a repertoire of questions that would result in a scandal if any human resources professional were to use them today. He would ask, for example, if the applicant was homosexual or how often a week he had sexual relations.

  “The answer in itself was not important,” said Fernandes. “I only wanted to know how the person would react and whether they would fit the bill. This was why we created a very aggressive interview process. After this, it got a bit out of hand...”

  Alexandre Abeid recalled the questions Fernandes asked at his interview. Abeid is 1.95 meters tall (nearly six feet five inches) and had lived a very different life from the other Garantia professionals. In addition to working in the financial market, he was also a member of the Brazilian volleyball team, having competed in the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972 and in Montreal in 1976. When he completed his MBA at the Coppead business school in 1975, he was invited for an interview at Garantia. His first conversation was with Fernandes and went something like this.

  Fernandes:
“Hi, do you like marijuana?”

  Abeid: “No, Cezar. I don’t. I live the life of a sportsman...”

  Despite these idiosyncrasies – or perhaps because of them – Fernandes had a knack for hiring good people. However, none of those he hired would have such an impact on the Garantia story as the young Marcel Herrmann Telles.

  Marcel Herrmann Telles was from Rio and went to work in the financial market for a single reason: to make money, lots of it. He was born on February 23, 1950 to an airline pilot and a former secretary of the American embassy who devoted herself to raising her family after marriage. He studied at the Colégio Santo Inácio, a traditional school in Rio. “At that time, the school was very closely associated with the original ideas of St. Ignatius, an officer in the Spanish army in the 16th century,” said lawyer Paulo Aragão, a partner in the firm of Barbosa, Mussnich, Aragão and a schoolmate of Telles. “Our education had a strong military aspect and was very focused on discipline.”

  Telles was an introspective, studious boy and took home a report card filled with good grades. He liked to write poetry and paint in his spare time. (Sport only entered his life when he was in his 20s, partly under the influence of his future Garantia partners).

  From Santo Inácio, Telles went straight to the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro to study economics. When he was completing his undergraduate course, he noticed some acquaintances arriving for classes on trendy motorbikes and wearing smartly-cut suits. He wanted to know where they came from and learned they worked in the financial market.

  Having no idea how the sector operated and no contacts whatsoever, he tried to get in through the back door. He found a job at the Marcelo Leite Barbosa brokerage in 1970, one of the largest in Brazil at that time. He began checking stock payment slips from midnight until 6 a.m., but shortly afterwards, went to work in the information technology area.

  One day, he heard that the owner of the brokerage remarked in the elevator that if he could, he would get rid of all the company’s activities, keeping only the eighth floor where the open market operated. Telles had taken a course in trading and decided that the open market, which was little known then, was where his future lay. He initially tried to get a position within Marcelo Leite Barbosa, but failed and started looking elsewhere.

  As arranged, Telles arrived early at the Garantia office, but had to wait for a long time. Fernandes, taking the interview, as Lemann was traveling, only appeared at the reception at the end of the day. He greeted Telles and went off without any explanation. No interview.

  Telles, who was 22, stubborn and ambitious, did not become downhearted. He returned the following day and, this time, Fernandes saw him. Besides the usual off-putting questions, he warned Telles that even though he was a graduate, he would need to start at the bottom. There was a rule at Garantia that the first job for any new hire was in the settlement area, or the “asphalt ballet,” as it was known in the firm. Despite its poetic sounding name, there was not a bit of glamour about it. The job was nothing more than being a glorified office boy who carried all the securities the bank traded up and down. Telles was unfazed. He would do anything to become a trader on the open market.

  The job only lasted a few weeks before Telles was transferred to the bank’s technical area. He was in a hurry. To get nearer his objective, he asked one of the main traders to handle a simple operation known as the “BB check,” which involved moving Banco do Brasil securities between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., a period that did not disrupt his work in the slightest. As an extra argument to convince the trader to let him edge closer to the trading desk, Telles promised to give him a ride every day in his blue 1972 Volkswagen. Whether he had genuine faith in Telles or was simply desperate for a ride to work, the trader accepted the offer, and it didn’t take long for Telles to show his natural talent as a trader. He was cool and determined, took decisions quickly and was always well-informed.

  Meanwhile, thanks to his connections abroad, Lemann helped obtain an internship for Fernandes at the head offices of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in the US. Fernandes, who was dyslexic and had never been able to learn other languages, needed someone to accompany him as an interpreter. The interpreter had to speak English, understand the financial market and be reliable. Telles was chosen. Fernandes described their trip:

  “The internship was great. Marcel was a really intelligent guy and when he was exposed to the best banks, he understood everything quickly. When we were at Goldman, we heard the word ‘overnight’ for the first time. What on earth was this investment that could be redeemed the following day? In Brazil, we only knew how to handle money for 30 days, 180 days. We learned what it was and brought the overnight technology to Brazil. We then went to a company called Discount, which was the Fed’s biggest dealer at that time. We saw how they handled the Treasury bonds and auctions and also brought this back to discuss with the Brazilian Central Bank.”

  Telles’ good performance on the trading desk and ability to put new things into practice drew Lemann’s attention. He praised him and told Telles that he could become a partner. For a young man from the middle class who had never foreseen the possibility of moving up from being an employee to an owner, the carrot his boss was dangling in front of him was tempting. Making money and, even better, doing things his own way seemed too good to be true. Less than two years after joining the brokerage, Marcel Telles had earned the right to buy a stake of 0.5%. It may not have been a lot but it was a start.

  Underwater fishing demands patience and control. The sportsman glides smoothly through deep waters without knowing what he will find. He needs to calculate exactly the time he will be submerged and at what depth he will need to surface in order not to run out of oxygen. His prey moves away from him and hides under the rocks, inside caverns and even sunken ships. All this occurs in totally silent waters. The fisherman must be invisible to get close to his target. His movements must be slow and calculated. He has to be attentive but never tense and to keep breathing calmly. His heartbeats slow. When he sees an unwary fish, he fires his harpoon. Even if the shot is perfect, this is no guarantee of victory. Big or fast-moving fish do not give up without a lot of struggle. The fisherman needs to have cold-blooded precision and rhythm to return to the surface with his trophy. Carlos Alberto Sicupira is a specialist in underwater fishing. He is even a world-record medalist in six categories of this radical sport. His biggest conquest is a blue marlin weighing 301.2 kilos, hooked off Cabo Frio on the Rio coastline in 2006.

  Sicupira, known as Beto since childhood, was born on May 1, 1948. He always loved the sea and said his future lay with the navy. His father was a public employee who made his career in Banco do Brasil and the Central Bank and his mother was a housewife. He only started seriously thinking of becoming an entrepreneur in his adolescent years when a friend offered him the capital for their used car business. He was so gripped by entrepreneurship that the sea would become a hobby from then on and he set off on the course of an activity where the sky was the limit.

  Apart from used cars, Sicupira also sold jeans (which he himself brought from the United States) and at the age of 17, he obtained legal authorization to buy a license to become a securities distributor. A year later, when he was studying business administration at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), he sold the distributorship and spent just over a year in the public sector. He worked in the National Railroad Department, Rio de Janeiro port and the Federal Data Processing Service. They were all bureaucratic and too slow for someone who was looking for a job where there were no boundaries. He felt the time had come to try his chances in the financial market once again.

  In 1968, two years after buying his first license, Sicupira joined a group of friends to buy a small securities distributor, which they merged with Cabral de Menezes shortly afterwards. He worked in the brokerage for four years, during which time he met Fernandes on a flight from New York to Washington when the two found themselves sitting together on the plane.

  “Beto s
poke a lot and was crazy to meet Jorge Paulo,” Fernandes recalled. Thanks to undersea fishing, which both practiced, the 21-year-old Sicupira was introduced to Lemann, who was nine years older. They quickly became friends, fishing together, discussing business and gaining each other’s confidence. Despite their growing friendship, when Sicupira left Cabral de Menezes, he accepted an offer from Marine Midland Bank in London, and it was only when he returned to Brazil in 1973 that he finally accepted Lemann’s offer. He had no idea how much he would earn or what his job would be, but he felt Garantia presented a promising future.

  “None of the people I ever saw who were bothered about cents ever made any great success,” he once said.

  Deliver the goods, or

  you’re out

  Without growth, meritocracy is just a nice word. How do you create opportunities for the most talented people if a company is not expanding? How do you remunerate your most successful employees if the firm’s earnings are not increasing? Lemann always knew that if his thinking was to make any sense, the engine had to be constantly revved up. So when JP Morgan, then the largest bank in the world and wanting to start up an operation in Brazil, approached him in 1976 to offer him a partnership, he almost gave in to the temptation.

  Negotiations got underway. For the Americans, who had no idea how to operate in Brazil, having the daring, arrogant staff from the Rio brokerage would be the best way of opening doors. For Garantia, being an associate of the American bank would not only represent an injection of capital for the brokerage, but it would also be a kind of international quality seal. Above all, it would be a chance for quick growth.

  All this made sense in theory – that the two companies would be more efficient together than apart. But Lemann was always a person with his eyes focused on the future and his enthusiasm evaporated when he began to think about the effect of the deal in the long term. He would end up losing control of the firm – the culture he had created being swallowed up by the giant corporation. The experience of his internship in bureaucratic Credit Suisse was still fresh in his memory, and he did not want to undergo a similar development with his own company, so when it came to choosing between making lots of money in the short term and trying to gain room on his own by maintaining his personal values, he opted for the latter.