By Filipe Pacheco

Marco Stefanini tells an interesting fable. “There were two entrepreneurs from the shoe business who had the opportunity to expand their operations in Africa. One of them said, ‘I am not going to invest in a place where hardly anyone wears shoes.’ The other one responded: ‘Great opportunity! Everyone will buy shoes from me!’”

Stefanini considers himself closer to the second one, of course. Founder and president of one of the biggest Brazilian IT companies — Stefanini IT Solutions, present in 26 countries, with more than 12,000 employees and expected earnings of $822 million in 2011 —Stefanini built up his own empire from scratch. Graduated in geology from the University of São Paulo at the end of the 1980s, he worked for just one month in that field. Right afterward he joined a technical trainee program at Banco Bradesco, one of the biggest Brazilian banks. “I didn’t switch areas simply because I wanted. I did it because of the situation at the time: there were no other choices,” he says.

From that moment on, Stefanini never left the IT world. At 26, he founded a training company for IT workers. He had patience and teaching experience; when younger, he used to tutor to earn some extra money.

Two decades later, he works from 12 to 14 hours a day and travels the world to take care of the company that bears his name and now serves 32 global clients, including Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Dell, and Santander.

In order to not be away from his family for too long, he usually brings along his wife and two sons. “Sometimes you need to bring even their friends, girlfriends, the mother-in-law… all that to keep everybody together,” he says.

Even though he obviously takes work very seriously, the same can be said about vacations. “Business to me is a personal sacrifice, not a penance. At least a week of vacation with my whole family, in a place we choose together, is sacred for me and for them.”

Whether Stefanini IT Solutions is going to be managed by a second generation cannot be answered right now, Stefanini says. Both of his sons are students, and he says they should choose the career area they wish, independently of what he thinks. After they graduate, he says, they need to enter the workforce and have bosses who are not their dad, “to be recognized for what they do, and not for who they are.”

Seize the Day, and Three Companies

Stefanini says that moments of crisis are the best ones to grow, when the really good opportunities come up. Not coincidentally, in the past year his company acquired two firms in the United States (TechTeam and CXI) and one in Colombia (Informática & Tecnología).

With the acquisition of CXI, Stefanini expanded its capacity to offer American clients services in staff augmentation, turnkey IT solutions, end-to-end ERP services, and functional sourcing. It also reinforces the alliance with SAP that CXI has had since 2006 — which makes Stefanini an SAP certified partner in the States.

TechTeam, acquired in December of 2010, has more than 2,300 employees that now wear the Stefanini uniform, working in more than 16 different countries. “Both of the companies acted in areas that we know very well, where we already have the experience. We did not lose any clients, which means a lot today,” Stefanini says.

To facilitate the integration of the new teams and to make the transition smooth, Stefanini says, the new workers have to be in contact with the culture of the parent company, have to understand the meaning of the brand. Success depends not just on technical knowledge and skills, he says, but also on everyone understanding the goals and spirit of the company.

What will come next? Will the company invest in data centers, for example, an area targeted by some of its competitors, like CPM Braxis Capgemini? Stefanini says that’s a hot market not just in Brazil but abroad, so there’s a natural business interest in it. “We keep our eyes on it,” he says.

The Stefanini IPO on the Brazilian stock market was postponed due to the international financial crisis. “It’s not completely out of the scene yet,” he says. He admits it will not happen this year, but probably within the next three years.

For now, there’s enough to do. “In 2011,” Stefanini says, “we need to keep doing our homework. We have a treasure in our hands.”