Director
State Bank of Amazonas
Brazil
Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes was born in 1956, in Manaus,
Amazonas, Brazil, the second child of Mario Cardoso Gomes, a director
of the State Bank of Amazonas, and Derly Faria Gomes, who had given up
studying law to be a mother and housewife. Precocious and energetic,
Mario grew up in a middle-class home in what was then a rather
provincial, torpid and remote state capital in equatorial northern
Brazil in the center of the gigantic Amazon rain forest.
Mario was an avid and talented student from the start of his formal
education, and was always restless for activity and challenge. In 1967,
Manaus was designated a free trade zone by the Brazilian government and
a package of attractive financial incentives was offered to certain
industries to establish manufacturing operations there. Overnight the
sleepy river-port city was transformed into a hustling and bustling
boomtown which it remains to this day (in 2006, over US$20 billion
worth of goods were manufactured there). A year later, 12 year-old
Mario, sensing a golden opportunity and with the help of his father,
started importing electric slide projectors and selling them to small
retail stores in Manaus. He thereafter expanded his product line to
include other small consumer electronics. Mario had discovered his
vocational identity – a natural-born entrepreneur!
At 15, Mario participated in a student exchange program whereby he
spent a year going to high school in Wyoming, Michigan, and U.S.A.
Living with a host family he became acquainted with American culture
and consolidated his English language skills. He loved it all, from
pancakes to snow skiing (no such thing in tropical Amazonas) to TV
sit-coms. He continues to stay in contact with surviving members of his
host family and his best school buddy of the time, Mark Hartman, who,
after high school, went on to West Point and is today a general in the
U.S. Army.
Back home, Mario reached university age and decided to study law. He
gained admittance into The Federal University of Amazonas School of
Law, the second oldest law school in Brazil. He excelled in his
studies, was elected class president, and graduated at the top of his
class in 1978 as that year’s Valedictorian. The next year, he passed
the Brazilian Bar Exam on his first try with the highest score of any
examinee in Manaus and received his license to practice law. Just 23
years-old, Mario was now Doctor Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes in
accordance with Brazilian nomenclature.
Taking a break after the Bar Exam, Mario made the grand tour of Europe
and spent three months in France studying French. He kept up his
practice in the ensuing years and is today fluent in French, his third
language after Portuguese and English. In a pinch, he can also get by
in Spanish.
Coming home, instead of setting up a law practice, he opened a bakery,
Brazilians love their bread and in Brazil, bread means FRESH bread.
Every morning millions of Brazilians make their way to the corner
bakery to buy it. The process is repeated in the evening. Since man
does not live on bread alone, they usually also pick up some butter,
ham, cheese, coffee, milk, and maybe a coffee cake, all of which Mario
kept well stocked. A good bakery in Brazil can turn a tidy profit.
There are a lot of well-off bakery owners in Brazil. Of course, Mario
knew this so he rolled up his sleeves and put his hands in the dough,
so to speak. Up each morning at 3:00am to see that the product was
coming out of the ovens, he was off in his van by 5:30 to deliver bread
to commercial customers while his employees minded the retail counter
at the home base. He soon expanded the bakery to include a catering
kitchen and landed a contract to supply a company with 125 breakfasts,
lunches and dinners five days a week. This business grew steadily as
Mario acquired new clients, principally electronics factories in the
Manaus Industrial District. By the time he sold the business in 1997,
to Puras International, French multinational, it was preparing and
serving as many as 25000 meals per day.
In 1988, while dining on fish at the La Barca restaurant in Manaus,
Mario met a charming and very pretty young lady, Naybe Lents. It was
love at first sight, for Mario at least, and he immediately set about
with his usual daring and determination courting her. Some of his
friends thought he was engaged in a lost cause. A herd of young Manaus
bachelors had their eyes on Naybe. She was much too beautiful for
Mario. Well, today Mario and Naybe split their time between Miami and
Manaus along with their two daughters, Maite and Mariah.
In the mid-90s, Mario expanded into other retail food service areas. He
brought the first Bob`s fast food franchise (the second largest in
Brazil after MacDonald`s) to the north of Brazil which he opened in the
Amazonas Shopping Center.
A little earlier, Mario had gone international but in a completely
different direction. Just as he had inherited a lawyerly bent from his
mother, he took a bit of the banker from his father. He bought himself
an apartment in Miami Beach, Fla. and started Support Financial, a
factoring company. He recruited a local bank manager, John White, to
join him and run the day-by-day operations. Starting small with a
conservative approach to making accounts receivable collateralized
loans, the business increased each year and today has clients
nationwide. It worked out so well, in fact, that Mario decided to get
into the same line back home in Manaus. In 1998, he started Rio Claro
Trust and Receivables which is today one of the largest and most
respected factoring companies in the north of Brazil. Its management is
now in the hands of Mario`s long-time right hand woman, Elizabeth
Coelho. Mario is a member in good standing of The National Association
of Factoring of Brazil, as well as The National Syndicate of Factoring,
and he has served as the Vice-President of the former and President of
the latter. He is also a director of The Commercial Association of
Amazonas, an organization along the lines of The American Chamber of
Commerce, and an active Rotarian in the Manaus Chapter of The
International Rotary Club.
The year 2000 found Mario’s various enterprises thriving. He was now 44
and financially set - time to kick back a little. But that is not
Mario. When he learned that The Getulio Vargas Foundation from Sao
Paulo, one of Brazil’s finest graduate schools of business and finance,
was offering the very first MBA program in Manaus, he jumped. With all
his practical, real-life experience in business, he probably should
have been teaching the course. Indeed, the other students in the
program constantly sought him out for assistance and advice.
Nonetheless, he assumed the role of student again with enthusiasm and
intense interest. In 2001, he completed the program with the top honors
and added one more title of academic distinction at the end of his
name, Master of Business Administration.
Somehow with all his businesses to oversee, a family to care for, and
the heavy work load of an MBA course, Mario found the time and energy
to get started in yet another totally different type of business. He
and two partners began The Platinum Construction Company in 2000.
Manaus was growing fast and the demand for mid to upper price range
residential, high rise apartments there was outstripping the supply.
Ever with the eye for opportunity, Mario went for it. 100% capitalized
with Mario`s and his partners` money, not a borrowed penny from a bank,
investor or stockholder, PLATINUM bought land, contracted architects,
designers, engineers, tradesmen – everything needed – and started
building. Since then, Platinum has emerged as one of the principal
players in Manaus residential real estate development with over 1000
units completed and sold to-date. It recently launched a luxury condo
project in Boa Vista, the capital of the Brazilian state of Roraima,
which lies north of Amazonas. There are several new projects on the
drawing boards at Platinum including a large scale tract home
development.
What is next for Mario? Whatever it may be, you can be sure that
whether Mario is at his lovely home in Manaus, cruising the Amazon
River in his yacht, enjoying a cigar and scotch on-the-rocks on his
beachfront apartment balcony with a panoramic view of the Atlantic
Ocean in Miami, or skiing the slopes of the Swiss Alps, he is
contemplating some new, ambitious enterprise.
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