Chapter 1 - Vecchio Tour

WHEN MY PARENTS DIVORCED, I, Ralph Vecchio, was still a freshman in the Tourism course looking for my place in the sun and I barely had time to mourn the end of his marriage of almost twenty years. My friend from college, Celso Moraes, was living in a flea-filled kitchenette in a dorm in the Lapa neighborhood, in the West Zone of the city, and it was his idea to open an agency to get out of the tight spot.

— Brother… We have nothing to lose. With your parents' divorce, you are now the man of the house, soon you will have to support your mother and sister. Even if they are heirs to a fortune, it will be a while before your father, God forbid, kicks the bucket. Soon, the money will be short. A partnership is the best thing we can do right now.

I lived in a comfortable house in the neighborhood of Perdizes with my mother Laura and my sister Rarissa. We had money, stability and a car in the garage, but all of that was still supported by my father's salary, who was a respectable civil engineer. The divorce had been quite impactful for all of us and even if my mother started to receive a considerable pension on account of the separation, as Celso had well reminded me, very soon I would have to take over the household bills. The creation of the Vecchio Tour was my best way out of that perilous situation.

Celso had little to offer in society other than the old Volkswagen Polo he drove and his own sweat. The son of a humble family from the interior of the state, he had lost his mother a few years ago and struggled every month to guarantee the rent for the kitchenette, in addition to paying for the expensive tuition fees at the college where we studied. As the heir to a good part of the fortune that my old man had, I was able to fully afford the initial capital for the creation of the company, in addition to taking care of all the bureaucracy that was implicit in the package. My partner was then responsible for all the rest of the heavy lifting, which he was able to handle due to the expertise he had in the area of tourism. Although, at the time, we were still students, Celso had already worked for several years with an uncle in an agency like the one we intended to open, and from him he learned a good part of the secrets that made the cogs of a travel company work.

— In the beginning, we can get some tips from those who have been in the business for longer than us — said Celso in one of our first meetings, already in the property that I had bought to install the agency —, but in a short time, we will already be walking with our own legs.

Vila Madalena was one of the nicest places to set up our business in São Paulo, but getting the three-story building in the location I wanted had been extremely challenging. The bohemian neighborhood was perfect for what I had in mind at first, and its vibrant setting combined with the more laid-back approach that both my partner and I were thinking of giving to the development. In order for the legal procedures for the purchase to be finally finalized, I ended up needing the help of my father, who, even though he lived in another state at the time and did not agree with the profession I had chosen to follow, guided me through his lawyer.

We had bet very high on the creation of the tourism agency and we were still completing our graduation in the area when we opened the doors of Vecchio Tour. Friends and relatives had supported us at the inauguration, but even those closest to the two of us still doubted that mere kids inexperienced in running a business of that size would be able to go much further. Things like “they are going to go bankrupt in about six months”, “they have no idea what they are doing” or “they are playing at entrepreneurship” were some of the phrases said behind our backs and although it hurt to hear that, we ended up using all the distrust in our abilities to our favor.

— We are going to make this agency the largest in the state of São Paulo and perhaps in Brazil!

We were toasting with cheap champagne during the opening, but that very day, I made my partner a promise.

“We're going to get the Vecchio Tour off the ground faster than the ominous think and we're going to laugh at these people in the future. A toast!

- A toast!

And it worked. In two years, Vecchio Tour was appearing on all specialized websites as one of the best travel agencies in the city and it didn't take long for, with our hard work, it was yielding enough profit for us to start thinking about opening branches across the country. .

Again, people around us started trying to pull the reins, saying that thinking about new units was still a step too far, even with the net and proven success of the first one, but as before, we decided to bet on our feeling. That same year, we inaugurated the Espírito Santo branch and put a friend of ours named Lúcio Rodrigues in the management chair. The guy was very experienced in the area, he had run a travel agency in São Paulo for years and he was our best bet for the vacancy.

The successes and mistakes of managing a small company in one of the most powerful and expensive cities in Brazil ended up shaping our executive character and what many people called “beginner's luck”, I called competence. Descending from Italians who had oil exploration and engineering as their professional base, I really had everything to sink in an undertaking that, in my father's eyes, did not match the status that the Vecchio family wanted to maintain. The crowd against had made a very big resentment grow inside me, but I knew how to use that negative energy as fuel.

"Tourism, Ralph?" You can only be kidding!

Julius was flushed in the face and a vein stood out in his left temple the day I informed him which college course I had chosen.

— Brazil is a populous country, father. There are many possibilities for tourism right here, without people necessarily having to travel abroad. A well-located agency with well-done marketing can yield good profits…

He was irate and it was like trying to reason with an African rhino as it ran at 50 km/h towards you.

— Your great-grandfather studied engineering, your grandfather was a petrochemical engineer, all your uncles study engineering… And what does my only son decide to do with his life? Tourism! Oh, for God's sake!

That conversation on the eve of the start of the Tourism course never left my mind and it had been quite tiring to try to convince Júlio that, even though he had other plans outlined for my future, the only person who could really do it was myself. . I spent two years having to hear him say, by hint, that he was reluctantly paying my course fees and when I finally managed to settle the debt with the money that the Vecchio Tour was starting to bring in, it was like winning a boxing match. by points. It had been exhausting, I had taken a lot of hits, but I had gotten the belt.