Juan Agudo

Amanco is a Latin American building materials company, leading its segment in most of the 20+ countries where it is present. It has been a case study in several themes, from Balanced Scorecard to Sustainable Development.

My mission is to build innovative service businesses across Latin America, leveraging Amanco's contacts with millions of end consumers and stores.

By adding services and information to our products, we want to provide complete solutions to our customers, increasing Amanco's sales and at the same time contributing to social inclusion and eco-efficiency.

Our first solutions were developed with a number of partners including service providers, finance companies, international development banks, NGOs and other manufacturers. They include:

RETAILERS
- Credit card programs, Loyalty/CRM tools, Training, Consulting.

FARMERS AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
- Irrigation and infrastructure financing and technical support.

April 2005 – October 2005 (7 months)

After leaving Omni, I spent some months trying to buy or start-up a sub-prime finance company with some Private Equity groups. We did not succeed, but I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot.

I had more success investing in and helping to drive growth of two very young companies related to Financial Services, which remain excellent investment opportunities:

- a software house focused in customized, high impact solutions to business problems ranging from marketing to collections strategies optimization ( lighthouse.com.br )

- a niche credit card company focused in low-ticket retailers ( dmcard.com.br ).

1 visible endorsement for this position [manage]

“It was great to work with Juan. He has a deep knowledge of the huge opportunities the banks have to improve their results, and a clear vision on how to translate these opportunities into action and results. Juan is a rare person who speaks both 'business' and 'IT' language, and has great listening and selling skills.” (October 28, 2005)

Alexandre Fraga, Owner, LightHouse E-Business
worked directly with Juan Pablo at Newcos

May 2002 – March 2005 (2 years 11 months)

Omni is a young finance company, leading the sub-prime segment, with R$400m+ served assets. It has an interesting business model, with distribution 100% through agents (franchisees).

I was hired to lead both Growth and Risk, leading a team of 50 in HQ and 1,000+ indirectly on agents.

The company was a great school on franchisees selection and management, and on how to optimize results in the sub-prime world, including Marketing, Pricing, Risk/Credit policies, and Operations.

Omni became a lab full of innovations, and grew 180%, through development of competitive advantages in speed, flexibility and service, with innovative systems developed in-house.

Delinquency decreased 50% with incentives alignment, motivation by rankings, best practices identification and dissemination (conf calls, training, manuals), and substitution of under-performers.

Other initiatives included successful launch of Six Sigma reducing costs, BSC/strategic alignment and HR excellence frameworks.

2 visible endorsements for this position [manage]

“I learned a lot with Juan. He has a great ability to deliver results in the short term while devoting a lot of time to developing the human capital of the company for the long term. Juan coached, empowered and motivated us to implement several new and powerful tools for the business. The result was the building of robust competitive advantages in speed, flexibility and service.” (July 7, 2005)

João Eiji Watabe,
reported to Juan Pablo at Omni “Juan made a profound impression on all of us. He involved each one of us in the creation of a compelling vision for the business, and motivated us to reach levels of excellence we never thought we could achieve. The results were impressive: a sucession of record performances in both sales and low delinquency.” (June 30, 2005)

Antonio Carlos Soares Junior, Manager, Omni SA CFI
reported to Juan Pablo at Omni

February 1999 – October 2001 (2 years 9 months)

Here the challenge was starting-up a GE business in Argentina from scratch. This basically means an exercise on solving a great variety of unstructured problems daily, with tight deadlines, interacting with several demanding stakeholders both locally and internationally.

My contributions included:

- Acquisition of small finance company, banking license and start-up of GECF in Argentina

- Hiring and integrating local staff to GE culture

- Negotiation, design and implementation of private label credit card programs with six leading retailers (Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Jumbo, Easy, Auchan, RadioA) – quickly reaching leadership in the market, with $80m credit volume in 18 months.

- Building a high level team of 50 and coordinating software development efforts, which built competitive advantages around features such as web imaging instant credit, database intelligence and automated profitability alerts.

1 visible endorsement for this position [manage]

“Very customer focus. A customer advocate. Technically savvy. Good vision of the business as a whole and the impact of different decisions. Excellent supporter of his people, giving empowerment to make decisions, coaching and holding people accountable.” (July 14, 2005)

Georgie Consoli, Marketing Director, GE Consumer Finance
reported to Juan Pablo at GE Consumer Finance

October 1998 – February 1999 (5 months)

I was getting used to Six Sigma, and GE, in a typical way, moved me way out of my comfort zone and I ended-up coordinating a team of 25 French banking marketing professionals.

Since I knew close to nothing about Marketing, it was a great learning experience on how to strengthen product offering, build database / cross-selling / CRM capabilities, test new channels and optimize pricing and sundry revenue for auto, mortgage and consumer finance.

1 visible endorsement for this position [manage]

“"It was a pleasure to work with him: always positive, giving people a lot of autonomy and using quality tools that work and are still used in my day to day work (cap, processes, way of thinking). The great thing about it is that you can use some bits of it in different environments and motivate people because results show".” (June 28, 2005)

Isabelle Morandeau, P & L leader consumer credit, GE Money Bank
reported to Juan Pablo at GE Consumer Finance

April 1997 – October 1998 (1 year 7 months)

One year into the integration of this acquisition, Jack Welch became an enthusiastic convert to Six Sigma, and every business selected a Six Sigma leader. I was fortunate to be chosen to lead the initiative in Consumer Finance, France.

We selected a team of 10 Black Belts/Master Black Belts and coordinated the identification and execution of 50+ strategic projects, ranging from Operations Streamlining to New Product Design and Sales Force Effectiveness.

We also trained 1,000+ associates in France and Spain and set-up Strategic Measurements, Process Management and Voice of Customer frameworks.

The French were fantastic: France won a GE Award for the world’s fastest Quality progression in a new business.

February 1996 – April 1997 (1 year 3 months)

This was a humbling and interesting experience on cultural change.

GE acquired Banque Sovac (3,000 employees, $8bn assets) and I was selected to be part of the integration team, probably because I was one of the few people around who could speak some French. The cultures could hardly be more different: traditional French Banking and GE's traditional American 'show me the money'.

We contributed to the integration of cultures and practices in each function - Operations, Systems, Risk, Compliance, etc. - and it was 2-way, since the French had a number of Best Practices that were very beneficial to other GE businesses.

Tools included 100-day Integration Plan for each function, Communication Plan and Work-Outs. Later activities included coordinating integration projects in each area, reduction of workforce through voluntary programs, and spin-off of Banque Sovac into 5 focused businesses.

June 1995 – February 1996 (9 months)

Right after the MBA, my career evolved to retail consumer finance. I was hired by GE Capital Global Consumer Finance, a new division in rapid international expansion. It was acquiring 5+ businesses per year, and had plenty of opportunities for operational improvement and best practices sharing among the businesses.

After some months being trained in the different functions, I was chosen to lead a team of 3, coordinating efforts on a worldwide basis to facilitate success transfer. Reengineering projects included Service Bank (Germany), CFI Insurance (UK), Countrywide (India), Finanzia (Spain) and Credito Real (Mexico) - up to $1m impact by project.

On our free time, we also helped with M&A activities - due diligences in Argentina, France, and Portugal.