Luiz Carvalho’s passport is
decorated with a lot of stamps, thanks to the time he’s
spent traversing the globe to
visit clients and employees.
As CEO of Proudfoot
Consulting, he recognizes that
people are the lifeblood of his
$160 million organization and
maintains his focus on them.
“We don’t have any assets
other than people,” he says.
“There are no machines. There
is no equipment. We don’t own any buildings. People is all we
have. … It’s so important to
spend time with people.”
Besides traveling, Carvalho
also keeps in touch with his
assets through his CEO advisory panel. Four times a year, he
brings about 20 people from
Proudfoot’s offices in 14 countries to one destination so he
can pick their brains for two
days.
Smart Business spoke with
Carvalho about how he conducts these forums and how he
makes decisions about which
ideas to implement and which
to put on the back burner.
Conduct forums. We make an
effort listening, probing and asking more questions. They will
talk for two days about different
ideas, ways of doing business
and functions.
They advise me on what they
see out in the marketplace,
what they hear from clients,
what they hear from our people,
suggestions, views, complaints.
There’s absolutely no rule other
than the fact that I’m supposed
to listen. I go in with an empty
yellow pad and just listen and
make notes.
The gathering of that data gets
spread out amongst the people
that work for me — presidents,
heads of functions — and we’ll
look at some of the ideas. Some
we’ll take on and do something
about, and some we’ll put on
the back burner for next year,
and some we just dismiss.
We fit back into the people in
our regional local meetings. I’ll
brief the group in terms of what
we decided to take on from the
panel. We don’t try to justify the
ones that we didn’t. If you see
20 people for two days, you end
up with a huge list of things.
Decide what’s feasible. If the
ideas are good, and we believe
there’s a reason to try them out,
then we will do something.
Our clients are priority zero,
one, two and three. Anything
that has a positive effect in
terms of our ability of delivering
to our clients, we’ll take an in-depth look at.
The second would be our people. Things that we can do or
ideas we have to improve
recruitment, retention, development, succession planning or so
forth, we’re also going to take
an in-depth look at.
By doing those first two, we’re
creating value for our shareholders. Anything that has to do with clients or people will take a
priority view. This is really all
we have.
If it wasn’t for our clients and
our people, we’d be out of business. It’s, in essence, the survival
and the growth of the business.
