Brazilian American entrepreneur Roger Magalhaes was working as a truck driver when he founded his window treatment company. Now he’s so successful that’s he’s founded a consultancy firm that trains his competitors. Tune in to learn how personal experience led him to the controversial opinion that immigrants must Americanize to succeed. You can also watch a video sharing more of his story here.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed. Welcome to JobMakers.
[music playing]
Denzil Mohammed: If you move to, say, France; do you think you’ll be perceived as French? When you move to the United States, you become an American, part of that country that, for hundreds of years, has attracted people from a staggering array of nations, creating something diverse, entrepreneurial, cost-changing and beautiful. And what’s the main reason that people come here? Opportunity. For Roger Magalhaes, immigrant from Brazil and founder of Shades In Place, a window treatment installation firm and a trading and consulting firm in Franklin, Massachusetts, he didn’t even know just how much opportunity there was in the United States to advance and progress. So when the opportunity to start installing shades as a business occurred, he seized on it. Today, he is one of the most influential leaders in his field, which doesn’t even have a school where you can learn the trade! This business he built from the ground up and never missed an opportunity to learn and improve. Today, he’s teaching his competitors. By the way, Roger Magalhaes is also the 2022 Barry M. Portnoy Immigrant Entrepreneur Awardee for Business Growth, an annual honor bestowed by The Immigrant Learning Center, co-producer of this podcast. Check him out on YouTube. Roger now is an American citizen. He believes immigrants must, quote, “Americanize” in order to fulfill their potential and have the biggest impact. A debatable view for sure, but one rooted in his own experience and success. As you’ll hear more about in this week’s JobMakers.
[music playing]
Denzil Mohammed: Roger Magalhaes, founder of Shades In Place, Trading Up Consulting. Welcome to the JobMakers podcast! How are you?
Roger Magalhaes: Doing good, man! Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate it.
Denzil Mohammed: Tell us what’s your business.
Roger Magalhaes: My 30-second elevator pitch is that I’m a shady business, basically. So I started out just installing window treatments for retailers and eventually I started selling them as well. 15 years later, I developed my techniques and know-how and now I also teach how to install the best way and how to form new installments because we don’t have it in the industry.
Denzil Mohammed: So you basically almost created a virtual textbook for how to do this shades installation, right?
Roger Magalhaes: Basically, yes. And my friends say now I teach my competition how to be me.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh, that’s hilarious. So, I know you stumbled into this kind of business. Why do you find this interesting or something that you really want to develop?
Roger Magalhaes: What happened was, I bought my house and I rehabbed over the weekends after my job and I really liked the hands-on and construction and breaking things apart and putting them back together. And I thought, “Wow, I’d really like to develop more into this but there’s no job that’s going to go in and out on the same days.” So if I start a company to replace flooring or paint walls or whatever activity you need to do in a house, it’s not going to be done in one day. So, I didn’t want to leave my job as a truck driver to start something. I would’ve come to Mrs. Jones and said, “Mrs. Jones, I started the job today but you’ve gotta be without flooring until Thursday, which is my next day off, so I can come and finish.” It didn’t make sense to do anything like that, something that gets me in and out of a house and I can’t have it done in a day so I’ll have to come back because I didn’t finish on the same day. I can fill my days off between driving trucks and that’s where I started out. But you don’t know what you don’t know, right?
Denzil Mohammed: Right. And now you’re doing even better.
Roger Magalhaes: Yeah.
Denzil Mohammed: Your story with entrepreneurship began all the way back in Brazil, when you were born, right?
Roger Magalhaes: Pretty much, yeah. As I said, I’m a workaholic. Since early days, I like to keep doing things, I don’t like just to be sitting around. And then, let’s call it my first business, at age six. I had two twin cousins that I really loved and they were probably four, five years older than me. They were my role models when I was a little kid. And they liked to fix bicycles. They were always doing something. At one point, they shined shoeboxes. They were going around on the streets and doing it. And I said, “Can you have one of your friends build me a shoe-shine box so I can go around and ask the neighbors here?” And he said, “Yeah, sure. Six years old, what the heck is he going to do with that?” So one of his friends built the shine-shoe box and gave it to me and I would go around to the neighbors and ask them. But obviously, it was different because the husbands were not home. It was just the wives. They would give me just the shoes and say, “Here.” I really like when you knock on a shoebox and it switches legs so you could do it. But I couldn’t do it that way because there was nobody wearing the shoes at that time! But in the end, I made some money and I liked it. It was really my first entrepreneur thing.
Denzil Mohammed: When you moved to the U.S., it was around 2000, right?
Roger Magalhaes: Correct.
Denzil Mohammed: And did you have the intention of thinking that you were going to be able to start a business in the U.S. at the time?
Roger Magalhaes: No. My plan was more or less learning English, that was one of the main reasons. And because we had a strong economy, I said, “Maybe I’ll work a few years here, save up some money and then I’ll go back to Brazil eventually and open a business there.” Because I always wanted to have a business somehow. I’d capitalize and go back and open some sort of business. And then the pandemic came and this might be the opportunity to close it. Because my mind was like, “Who the heck is going to buy shades in the middle of a pandemic?” Shades should be at the bottom of the list in priority. And it ended up being exactly the opposite because everybody was home, nobody was sick. Everybody was just trapped inside the house. We need to spend the energy we have here. We’re not traveling. People were working from home so income was coming and everybody started remodeling homes and changing rooms into offices and the next thing you know, we’re busy as we’ve ever been. At the same time, I was teaching already, conventions and seminars and that got really intensified because nobody went to the real conventions, because everybody was home, “Let’s do a live! Let’s do a seminar! Let’s do a webinar!” And then I start getting way more requests to share knowledge and, “Why do you think this is happening?”, “What can we do for …” And becoming more influential in the industry. And then, in September of 2020, driving to a job in the Berkshires, I was thinking, “I really built this from blood, sweat and tears. I don’t want to just give it up.” And one training app came on and I said, “Wow! I could actually just transition from hands-on work and more physical, into training new people and passing on the knowledge and keeping my connections.’ It was really how the whole thing started with training app. And at the same time, because we were so busy with Shades In Place I said, “I cannot just close it.” I originally thought, “I guess I’m just going to train them and bring people in so I can be the lead on both companies. I can have people working for me, at the same time I can test chronology to all the people as well.” And that’s really where we are right now.
Denzil Mohammed: And so your showroom became like a workroom.
Roger Magalhaes: Yeah. We don’t have a showroom anymore, we’re going to turn the showroom into a school facility so I can develop different types of windows, different applications so I can shoot classes and shoot videos and explain how things should be done and what is the difficulty you’re going to see with each window, what kind of products you can use for certain applications and that became the scoop.
Denzil Mohammed: And so your reputation goes well beyond Massachusetts and you’re requested in several states across the country all the way down to Florida. Take us back to when you first moved here. And coming from Brazil, the economy has started to do better but it must’ve been a real change for you.
Roger Magalhaes: Well, definitely. First, the weather. The language barrier, being away from family. I only have one cousin here but still, it’s not the whole family. Culture, the way people do things and even England is a little more conservative that the rest of the country for the most part. So, all of those things I had to adjust. And obviously, it takes time and it was a big learning curve.
Denzil Mohammed: And you mentioned earlier that you’re training your competition, which I find so interesting. You have found very creative ways to give back and to promote the success of other entrepreneurs. Can you describe some of those initiatives that you have and what impact you had?
Roger Magalhaes: Right. I know a lot of people who won’t share anything because they are so afraid that if they share what they know, they’re going to be displaced, somebody else’s going to take over. And I truly believe it is totally the opposite. The more you share, the more people rely on you because they really see you as a trusted resource. So I’m not the least afraid of losing work to the competition. As a matter of fact, I think it is great because the competition can see how you do. You can improve the whole experience for everyone overall. So in 2014, I started a Facebook group called “Free Speech Window Covering Pros” for that reason. Just to share knowledge, because that’s pretty much how I learned the business. There’s no school for what we do. So you just learn by shadowing someone, by going to training, by going to seminars, making a friend so you can body up and ask questions. And that was really how I learned. It became a really great resource and we have over 1000 members now and it pays off so hugely. And it’s unbelievable.
Denzil Mohammed: Wow, that is incredible. One question for you, as you’re from Brazil, we’ve done research on Brazilians and their self-employment rates and Brazilians have the highest rates of self-employment of entrepreneurship in the greater Boston area. I mean, that’s both incorporated and unincorporated businesses. Why do you think that is?
Roger Magalhaes: What I really think it is, first we’re very creative. We are creative because we didn’t have the resources; because everything is so scarce, we just need to be creative to survive. That’s really survival mode. I’m taking back in Brazil. And Then when we get here and we see the opportunities here and we see that it’s so above here that pretty much, there’s market for everything. And these people start saying, “Well, you know what? I already have a second chance just to be here, let me use my knowledge or my instance and move forward.” And I think that’s what it is! We just see the opportunities that we didn’t see back home. And we just run with them.
Denzil Mohammed: It’s funny that you mention that because someone that you and I know, Jitka Borowick, who has a business called Cleangreen on the Cape, it was the same thing for her, especially coming from a communist country, the Czech Republic. And just seeing how much opportunity was here as did you, you were at those opportunities and it was the same thing with her and you all’ve expanded. Even during the pandemic, she opened a new business, Nové Yoga. You opened your consulting business. You went online, you were all over Zoom, you were training. I’ve seen videos all over the place, instructions and things like that. That’s the message we want to get out on this podcast, really.
Roger Magalhaes: I appreciate it.
Denzil Mohammed: And you come here and grab opportunities and create jobs!
Roger Magalhaes: I’m not special, I don’t have privileges or anything, it’s just hard work. But one thing that I really think is extremely important. Don’t try to run your life here the way you run your life in your country. So you come here, you need to learn the language, you need to get used to the customs, to the culture, the way people live here because you can live here for 50 years but you’re still an immigrant; you’re still a farmer. Even 50 years later, even as an American citizen, for the lack of a better word. A lot of people don’t see that. They want to do their way and that’s what I think people miss the opportunity to grow even bigger because I can tell from everything that I’ve done and all the success I have achieved, the first thing that comes to a lot of a lot of the comments from people say, ‘Roger, we really appreciate that you respect our culture, you respect the way things are, you’ve learned the language; you really do things the way they’re supposed to be done. And that’s why you’re successful. Because you’ve got the respect from your home community, you’ve got respect from the Americans because they saw you respect the country.’
Denzil Mohammed: I feel as if there’s a subtle dig at other immigrants in what you’re saying that perhaps some don’t acclimatize and therefore that holds them back.
Roger Magalhaes: I don’t know exactly what it is or even between Brazilians; some Brazilians are very successful between the community. But they don’t expand wider because they feel like they want to stay within their own community. And I think this is wrong. You really need to cater to everyone and open to more cultures and all of that but you need to be, for lack of a better word, Americanized. Your culture comes second. The American culture’s always going to come first. You are in that game. You are in that playing view. You put your Brazilian zest in it or whatever culture you have and it should not be the primary culture. And that’s what some people miss the point.
Denzil Mohammed: You do the running mare here, not the soundbar, right?
Roger Magalhaes: Exactly! We can play a couple suppers between the whole night but it shouldn’t be the silver night.
Denzil Mohammed: And so finally, you’ve been given tremendous opportunity and you’ve run with it. You’ve been successful and led other people to be successful. How do you feel about the country that took you in and allowed you to thrive in this way, the United States?
Roger Magalhaes: It is very ironic because when I was in Brazil, I never planned to be in the U.S. and then eventually I came and I saw the opportunities and I saw that pretty much whatever you do here, there’s a market for it and people respect you. They may not agree with you but they still respect your point of view and the opportunities are just here. Regardless of what you want to do, there’s always a market for it. And I respect that. There is a reason why the U.S. is the biggest market on the planet. Because the opportunities are just incredible. I cannot be more ten-for-nil. As a matter of fact, I’m an American citizen, so that may say that I really enjoy and appreciate this country.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s really nicely said. Roger Magalhaes, founder of Shades In Place and Trading Up Consulting, thank you for joining us on JobMakers and sharing your story.
Roger Magalhaes: I really appreciate the opportunity.
[music playing]
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston and The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us on this week’s story about immigrant entrepreneurship and remember, you can subscribe to JobMakers on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. And please, give us some stars. I’m Denzil Mohammed. See you next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers.