When Carlos Cardoso graduated from college in 1981, the country was in a recession and jobs were hard to come by for everyone, let alone recent graduates.
“A lot of my peers couldn’t get an interview and my biggest challenge was deciding where to go,” he says. “I had plenty of offers and opportunities and so forth.”
But instead of joining a company, he made the bold to move to start his own company. If he thought he knew everything about business before taking the leap of being his own boss, he soon found out he had a lot to learn.
“I realized that I needed to lead, I needed to sell, but I needed to work, too,” he says.
In the morning, Cardoso would dress in a suit trying to make sales, and by the afternoon, he would change into working clothes and make what he was selling a few hours earlier.
That experience was a wake-up call for the young entrepreneur. He thought he could do it all himself, but he soon realized he needed to surround himself with people to support him. Also, because he came from more of a process-oriented and scientific type of training background, Cardoso didn’t have a “soft side” and had to work on that aspect of his leadership.
“That’s a humbling experience, being 23 years old,” he says.
Today, Cardoso can look back on that experience and use what he learned to help guide Kennametal Inc., which posted almost $2 billion in fiscal 2009 sales.
“My belief is that, first of all, when you stop learning, you stop living,” says the chairman, president and CEO of the manufacturing company. “I really believe that. I also believe that you can learn from everybody that you meet at any one point, at any class, at any background, if you give yourself an opportunity to listen — just talk and listen. That has been a model for me that I try to learn from everybody I come across every day.”
