I am the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. My parents got married in 1950, in Ribeirão Preto, but I was born in São Paulo, in 1966. I was fortunate to grow up in a Christian family and, from an early age, I always had a very intense desire to do something that would lead me to financial independence. However, before talking about myself, I want to briefly introduce my parents, because both of them were very important to me. My mother, Dina Sassi Steagall, is the daughter of Italian immigrants from Sicily, very loving and religious. My father, Denisarth Steagall, was born in Santa Barbara d'Oeste and is the grandson of an American from San Antonio, Texas, who immigrated from the United States after the War of Secession (1861-1865).
As my father spoke good English, he was hired by an American company called International Harvester, a manufacturer of tractors and trucks. He ended up becoming the manager for the Ribeirão Preto region, which was very strong in sugar cane. In the second half of the 1960s, IH left Brazil and Chrysler ended up buying its Brazilian plant in 1966. My father was then transferred to São Paulo, with responsibility for ensuring the replacement of parts for those who already had the equipment. Later, in 1972, he opened his own company, Cotema, which manufactured oil prospecting and drilling equipment.
Inspired by the example of my parents and older brothers, I sought work early on. At the age of 14 I was hired as an office boy at a beverage company. At the time, I could only get a Work Card at the age of 16, which is why the date my document was issued is January 6, 1982, exactly one day after my birthday. In the meantime I did my elementary school education at the Dom Pedro II State School, at Largo Padre Péricles, in Perdizes, and then I went to Mackenzie College, where I did my high school education. However, I didn't finish any of the college courses I started. My first attempt was Engineering, at the Instituto de Ensino de Engenharia Paulista (IEEP), where I stayed only six months. Then I tried Administration, at Mackenzie, which I didn't like either. I also passed in Law, at Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC), and did not start. The last attempt was Economics, at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), also without success.
My mother made fun of the fact that I graduated in the early years. My father didn't take kindly to that. He worked hard so that we would have a good education. I even worked at Cotema for a period during college, but due to my student failures and uncertainties, I had to leave the family company and pursue an independent career. The chances of it going wrong were great, but I battled on and made it work.
The beginning of the story with fuels
At the beginning of my professional life, I went into the commercial area and was invited to be a salesman for an alcohol mill in the city of Matão. They offered fuel alcohol, anhydrous alcohol (to mix with gasoline) and a type of alcohol that was used a lot by the beverage industry. At that time, the beverage industry was very bad; however, I got a big client from the Camaçari Petrochemical Complex, in Bahia. They were very impressed with this achievement, to bring in a company of that magnitude and outside the ranks of those they were used to dealing with.
So I started looking for other opportunities, and for a while I ended up working with fuel distributors, always on a freelance basis and without an office. I was always working as a freelancer and without an office. I was always walking around and making a certain amount of money, and when I needed a space for meetings, I would use the facilities of the companies I worked for. I began to earn good money while still single, which guaranteed me a certain comfort. Around 1997, I became interested in setting up something of my own. In 2000, I got this plan off the drawing board, with a first venture to make essential oils, working with what was left over from the Paulínia refinery.
I already had some knowledge because of the contacts I made. One of them, a Petrobras engineer, I met at an end-of-year party at my father's company. In an informal conversation, he told me that the refineries received many products out of specification due to transits in piping or even storage errors. Since these facilities only work with one inlet, that is, they only receive crude oil, they are unable to utilize the material. This material would end up in a "non-compliance tank" and an international company would buy it for nothing, reprocess it and, after a simple distillation, resell it as gasoline, diesel or naphtha.
The biodiesel discovery
I got that in my head and searched for more explanation. I started interacting with people in the industry and professors. I found out that there was a company, in Charqueada, which was under composition with creditors. This company made essential oils and had the structure ready for what I needed. I decided to make an investment there and, with all the difficulties in the world, two years later I managed to recover it. Now, all that was needed was to apply for the environmental license to expand the plant, and, finally, bring the "non-compliant" from the Paulínia refinery and submit them for distillation.
However, when I said we were going to work with petrochemical fractions, with petroleum solvent, the Environmental Company of the State of São Paulo (CETESB) warned us about the Macris Law, which restricts industrial activities in the drainage areas of the Piracicaba River, even preventing the enlargement of the constructed area of establishments with a high polluting potential. I didn't even know about this business. It was then that a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Ribeirão Preto, Miguel Dabdoub, told me that he had a product that we could distill, since it was vegetable oil: the methyl ester. These are solvents too, and do not come from petroleum. He said more: that we would succeed if we believed in the idea. Then, soon afterwards, in 2003, when Lula took office as president, there was a lot of talk about biodiesel, which is nothing more than a methyl ester. There I saw a way out for that plant and for acquiring the license.
I took the idea to some interested parties, who became passionate about biodiesel. Several important shareholders came in, paid a good premium to be part of the business, which was founded in 2005 and named Biocapital. I became a minority shareholder, and those involved understood that it was better to focus only on renewable energy and discard the original idea (distillation of the non-compliant products from the Paulínia Refinery), since this would end up tainting the company with a product of fossil origin. The option for renewable had logic, and today I know how important it is to re-evaluate yourself with the course of life. Everything gives experience and it is these experiences and perceptions that make us a more complete professional with a much broader vision.
I stayed at Biocapital until the beginning of 2008, when they were in the process of going public. I left because, although I liked the biodiesel, I was against the idea of buying raw material that had already been industrialized, while the other shareholders didn't want to get involved in the origination part. I understand that when you don't own the raw material, the market will always hurt you. That's when I remembered an old visit I made to Roraima. I left and set up Brasil BioFuels (BBF) in March 2008, and started planting palm that same year in São João da Baliza, a town 350 kilometers south of the capital, Boa Vista.
A fantastic and promising culture
It was in 2002 that I visited Roraima for the first time. A friend, Giuliano Bertolucci, a soccer player businessman, received an invitation from the governor of Roraima to get to know the possibilities of investment in that state, and he called me to come along. "What am I going to do in Roraima?", I asked him, and he answered that there would be a new agribusiness frontier there. This state has a very characteristic situation. Its northern part, from the capital upwards, has a savannah area similar to the savannah of the Brazilian Center-West. From the capital downwards, 50 kilometers to the south of Boa Vista, the forest and jungle region begins. During my visit, a very simple local lady asked me: "Are you really going to come back here to do something for us?
Roraima and that visit stayed in my soul. As director of New Businesses at Biocapital, I imagined an ethanol plant in the savannah region, in the northern part of the state, where it would be well accepted by the market. There was an ethanol boom going on and, in view of the existing sugarcane projects in Goias and Mato Grosso, I presented the possibility of a plant there. The company was interested; however, a federal law soon came into effect, prohibiting the planting of sugarcane in the Amazon, and the project did not go ahead.
However, when Biocapital gave up the projects in Roraima, I quit the company. The question I had asked six years earlier still had no practical answer. I decided to believe in the potential of the southern part of the state, and it was there that I bought a farm and started to develop the palm culture. But before that I did a very deep study, visited some facilities, and went to Costa Rica to get to know the local oil palm industry and see how they dealt with this crop.
I found it all fantastic and promising. Oil palm is a 100% manual crop and cannot be mechanized. In this way, I would take all that needy, despised, and abandoned labor from the region and offer a new reality, in which everyone could have a job. With this, I also contributed to substituting diesel, which came from far away, for another biofuel that started to be produced and consumed locally, without the state needing to create a large infrastructure to make the project viable.
In 2009, a great victory came. We were able to publish Law 12,111, which brought the Isolated System into the regulatory framework of the National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL). It is about energy facilities not connected to the National Interconnected System, whose production is made from diesel oil or fuel oil.
Another achievement was the establishment of the Oil Palm Agroecological Zoning. Before starting the investment, I made a questioning to the federal government about where I could plant oil palm in Roraima. This became law in 2010, through Decree No. 7172/2010, allowing oil palm planting only in areas that had been deforested before December 2007. There is georeferencing for this and it is a fantastic tool, because it prevents the investor from putting money where he cannot plant or harvest.
I came back, invested, and created more than 6,000 jobs
We all have our guardian angels. I could count on many. That friend who invited me to go to Roraima, Bertolucci, is certainly one of them. Today he lives in London, is very successful and a great soccer players' manager. Another is Professor Donato Aranda, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He was the one who was on his way to Costa Rica to visit an oil palm company and invited me to accompany him. He is recognized for his studies related to biodiesel production and the development of a catalytic process for the production of this fuel from palm oil.
I also learned a lot from Fernando Castro, who is a chemical engineer and has a long passage through Rhodia. Another angel is Setsuo Sato, ex-BASF, who taught me how to make biodiesel in a much easier and simpler way. These are people that helped me a lot in my journey. How can I not mention that lady who held my hand and asked me if I was really going back to Roraima?
She didn't just touch my hand, she touched my heart. It was as if she was saying to me: "Will you be able to leave knowing that here we live in this poverty, in this helplessness?", "Will you continue to sleep peacefully knowing our difficulties now?". That bothered me and I could never be the same again. I believe that it's not men who inspire us, but God, who often uses some men as instruments. In the comfort of my home, I asked myself: "What can I do? I'm not a politician, I don't understand almost anything, I'm almost 2,000 kilometers away". However, the answer was: "You can!". I went back, invested, fought, resisted and we created more than 6,000 jobs, generated income and reduced the cost of electricity for the population using a sustainable matrix: palm biodiesel. This is my greatest professional success story. And it has a name: Brasil BioFuels.
However, today I know that my true mentor was my mother, because she taught me lessons that I still carry with me and that I will carry with me for a lifetime. In 1989, she gave me the book O empreendedor - Fundamentos da iniciativa empresarial, by Ronald Degen, perhaps the first in Portuguese to deal with the concept of entrepreneurship. She wrote the following dedication: "Milton, many want to, but few can. I know that if you want to, you can be the greatest entrepreneur to increase not only yourself but the nation that welcomed you. Your mother, who has great confidence in this son. I was 23 years old and barely knew what I wanted. And I, who read about two books a month, spent a lifetime without investing in this Swiss author's masterpiece, afraid of failing with it and ashamed of not living up to his expectations. There are people who really have a distinctive spirituality, and my mother was certainly one of them. She was able to foresee that I could be more, provided that, as she stressed, I wanted to be.
We should work with the same joy as when we go for leisure
Once my mother said: "Pay attention, because 90% of the people in the world don't know why they wake up or why they go to sleep. I never forgot this sentence and every day I kept asking myself the same question. I have always had a reason for going to sleep and waking up, and those who have this clear do not fall into the trap of discouragement. They have conviction about what they want, they don't stand still waiting, but run after it, they act. The great leader is the one who can see in the team a great disposition for action. If I want someone to follow or validate only what I think, anyone will do. However, on a day-to-day basis, we need professionals who complement each other. I want my people to express just what they can be better at than me so that the company, as a whole, will prosper. But what I expect from them the most is that they have moral values and goodwill.
This doesn't mean that I don't value good education, because it is fundamental. The fact that I have not studied does not mean that I am a supporter of those who do not value education. However, besides brilliant curricula, I look for good principles, good will and initiative in those who are with me to improve themselves. I say this because not everyone wants to move forward. Some like to walk sideways; others, backwards. And I want with me only those who go forward, and if they have a good resume, all the better.
I often tell my children that we should go to work with the same joy as when we go to our leisure time. We invest more than half of our lives in the corporate environment, so if we work with what we don't like, we will have a sad and joyless life. In these cases, we are accumulating resentments and are unable to share joy, love and self-denial. We can only share that which we are full of. So it is worthwhile for us to try to do what we really love. In doing so, regardless of the economic condition that our choices may bring us, we will be very well-resolved people, and we will be able to contribute much more to our society. And that is the higher purpose of all of us.
By Fabiana Monteiro
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