One crucial aspect of Brazilian culture that you must be aware of before doing business here.
Doing business in Brazil is very challenging, not just by the fact of our burdensome tax and work laws that might scare you a lot. Unfortunately, there is more to worry about than this 7.5 tons of paper. With over 41 thousand pages of tax law, over here, we redefined the term bureaucracy.
Depending on the kind of business that you are willing to start here, there is a critical aspect of our culture that you must understand. Important to mention that I suppose that you are already familiar with the “jeitinho Brasileiro” or the Brazilian way. If you are not, there is this excellent article:
Our unusual perception of the street.
Many consultancy agencies, even the famous ones, miss this vital point while building their reports. We face the street in a very particular way, what is public, in our view, belongs to no one. This mindset entertained in our culture ends up in harmful behaviors for our society and also for the economic ecosystem.
If it’s not mine, it’s not my problem.
Did you watch the world cup games? I’m asking that because I want to draw your attention to the matches involving the Japanese team. After the games, the Japanese soccer fans cleaned the soccer stadium, mostly messed up by us. While some people were applauding this gesture, on some social networks and chat groups, there were people make fun of it. “I pay to use the stadium not to clear it.”
The street here is savage.
We have one particular idiomatic expression that promotes these awkward behaviors. For example, when someone is threatened to get fired, or during a family fight, there is this expression: “Vou te jogar no olho da rua” raw translated to “I’ll throw you on the street.”
As a society, we miss that the street is a space that is shared among all citizens, that we must respect and protect. We lack the understanding that it belongs to us all. On the contrary, it is the place we use to curse, and where there are all the bad things.
Why this matter? Well, put together this cultural aspect and the Brazilian way, it gets messy. You would be surprised by the things that some citizens brag of being achieved. Allow me to give you some examples.
If there is any possible way to take advantage of something, it will be exploited.
Family plans: Implemented by Spotify, Netflix, and many other tech companies, this kind of pricing here becomes peer plans. We also organize it, splitting the bill using apps like PicPay.
Free tiers that are limited by the number of emails: Implemented by companies like BitBucket, and many CRMs. Here, some companies create a shared email account to keep operating under the free tier forever. Others even make a rotation on the emails based on staff allocation.
Are you getting the point?
Don’t think it is only about products and services. You will have also to observe your processes too. Delivery apps: some delivery workers are applying this trick. When they are about to charge you for your order, instead of using the POS of the company that they are working for; They will handle to you their own POS, sending the payment to their account.
Are you bringing a brand new car-sharing solution? Stay sharp, that are cases where people have rented a car to swap their car parts, like the battery, etc.
Therefore it is imperative to take these factors to your SWOT, or any other strategic planning framework that you use. By now, you might be thinking that it is too much to bear, yet it is one of the best places to test if your business model can thrive. As a project manager, I learned that is very important to take cultural aspects into consideration while building the business model. Over here particularly, how could anything related to a project be exploited, and how they might affect the numbers.
That’s why when I read an article about any Brazilian entrepreneur that built a business here, and now is taking this knowledge further into a non-hostile environment, like Henrique and Pedro are doing with Brex. I bet they will accomplish something incredible, and I’m quite sure that the background they built here is playing a fundamental role in their endeavor in the USA.
I know many cases of Chinese companies that after establishing their business here, they have to swap their Chinese managers to locals, once they were not prepared to deal with these situations.
Many advisers and lawyers will send you away, yet is an excellent opportunity to make your business model stronger than ever.
If you want to dig deeper into this matter, the author that inspired this text, was the Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta.
