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Got This Perspective?
What if you are not aware of something about your work?
What if there are new perspectives that can change the way you and your team do things, maybe, in a better way?
What if you can see trough the lens of someone who already did want you are trying to do?
Our story begins with a passion of our founders, António Ferreira and João Cascão, for business books that expanded into an even greater interest than just reading books... learning and talking directly with people who have done incredible things in their companies.
The journey begins.
António, a veterinarian who loves animals, and João, a personal trainer who helps people to be healthier, both running their own businesses.
They sitted on their desk and started searching for courses and masterclasses, in-person, in Europe with great instructors. We found a bunch of MBAs, Masters with Professors without skin in the game, lot of corporate language, post graduates and catedratic professors.
“But we want to learn from the real insiders with skin-in-the-game, not from academical teachers or motivational speakers.”
“Maybe books and biographies are all we have?”
We got a EUREKA moment: "what if we bring these great insiders with true skin in the game to Portugal?"
Excited with the idea, we started to have a clue on those names pricing fees and oh boy! That's a lot of money, specially for two young men. Despite that little (enormous) obstacle we kept moving forward on our search.
We found some really interesting names along our search, but a new obstacle got in our way: agencies, our soon to be known as our main obstacle. Why? Bureaucracies and the price fee increases a lot, we mean... a lot!
Until we found someone who isn't represented by a agency, a former Navy Seal commander, Jocko Willink. Jocko was responsible to lead operations on war between U.S.A. and Iraq, with lots of experience on leadership under strenuous situations.
Jocko is amazing! But really expensive for our pockets. After some calculations, we found that we needed a lot of sales to get to breakeven.
"we think we can do that!", our naive founders exclamated.
Long story short, we did a compromise with Jocko, we failed at selling because we had no clue about our business model, brand positioning and value proposition and, for sure, two part-time men could never had chance to do such a high amount of sales.
Sending a cancellation email to Jocko was a slap in the face, and till today we carry that lesson with us: be audacious but calculate your capabilities and circle of competence.
We took a couple of months under the rock, until one day we read about how a former marketing director of Harley-Davidson helped the company turn-around.
Ken Schmidt and his partner, Martin Flaherty from Coca-Cola were a angel sent from sky, really cool persons that helped us a lot to gain traction.
With a much smaller breakeven number, we did it! Well... the organization of the masterclass could be a book at itself.
From grabbing a really heavy grill destroying the grass, going to the kitchen helping with plates and make the chef accountable. Such memories we have!
The masterclass was a success, we had full house and we learnt a lot about brand positioning. Despite this success we ended up with a reasonable amount of financial loss due our lack of experience and the expenses were away bigger than we expected. We needed a new name to turnaround the situation.
We got a new name, Liz Muller, former chief of design of Starbucks.
Liz Muller did an amazing job sharing her view on retail experience and we did profit for the first time!
We were starting to gain momentum! Ah! and of course, we were learning and connecting with great names like we envisioned at the beginning.
Until now we did really great avoiding agencies, a necessary step to bring big names to Portugal at a good price, so we can charge less to our participants.
With that in mind, we got successful reaching out to Prasad Setty, a former People Operations VP at Google, for our soon to be true, People & Culture masterclass.
Prasad delivered an amazing masterclass, sharing his perspective and how he did things at Google. All 35 participants took new and unique ideas into their teams and organizations.
By this time we found that we can bring, consistently, those names to Portugal, being the bridge between them and Portuguese professionals.
With our profit we appointed João as a full time presence to increase the amount of masterclasses per year and to increase the quality of the masterclasses experience.
Right now we are working to bring Greg Hoffman, CMO from Nike, Colin Bryar, VP & Bezos Shadow and Matthew Luhn, lead storyteller from Pixar-Disney.
The story will continue, and you will be part of it (we hope)...
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