Ricardo Eletro founder’s trajectory has gossip, prison and billions in sales

Ricardo Nunes was only 10 years old when his father died, in 1979. He left a jewelry store in Divinópolis, a city in Minas Gerais, 121 kilometers from Belo Horizonte, as an inheritance.

But two years later the jewelry store was robbed, cousins ​​were shot and the mother sold the business, scared. To prove to Dona Marina that there would be no shortage of bread on the Nunes’ table, Ricardo, then 12 years old, had the idea of ​​taking the gossip from the family’s farm and selling them at the college door.

But he found that his screams annoyed some teachers. More than quickly, he began to offer free gossip to those who complained. When he set up a stand in front of the institution, competitors emerged. To differentiate himself, he started selling peeled gossip.

With an entrepreneurial streak, the second of Dona Marina’s four children began to go to São Paulo with his mother, to shop in the area of ​​Rua 25 de Março. He took stuffed animals and any other “fashionable” product to resell in Divinópolis. At age 18, he opened his first store in the city. It was the beginning of Ricardo Eletro.

A simple start, but not modest: in the small point with two meters of counter, Ricardo made a point of putting up a sign warning: “We cover any offer of home appliances”. There were almost no products of the category in the store, there were few blenders lost amidst a multitude of stuffed animals and other trinkets. But it was his way of attracting customers.

The recipe worked and Ricardo Eletro became a phenomenon in sales of furniture and appliances in the 2000s, with hundreds of stores in the country. In 2010, it joined the Bahian rival Insinuante, giving rise to Máquina de Vendas, the country’s second largest electronics chain, only behind Pão de Açúcar – then owner of Casas Bahia, Ponto Frio and Extra.

The Vending Machine became gigantic, as it incorporated other regional retailers: City Lar from Mato Grosso, Eletro Shopping from Pernambuco, and Salfer from Santa Catarina. About ten years ago, it added up to R$ 10 billion in annual sales, with more than a thousand stores in all states of the country and 30 thousand employees.

But management and governance problems, coupled with the 2014-2016 financial crisis, began to bring the business down. The company changed hands in 2019, became just Ricardo Eletro, its financial situation became increasingly critical, until it filed for judicial recovery in August 2020. It closed all stores and only sold online. On the 8th, it had its bankruptcy decreed by the Justice, which identified “several factors of asset emptying”.

Two days later, the bankruptcy was suspended by an order from the 2nd Reserved Chamber of Business Law of São Paulo. At the end of 2021, Ricardo Eletro’s debts exceeded R$ 4 billion.

While the company languished, the former gossip salesman collected scandals, related to tax evasion and active corruption.

“During my administration, there was no peep of evasion,” he told Sheet Ricardo Nunes, noting that he ceased to be a partner in the company in December 2018, when control of the company passed to the Brazilian private equity firm Starboard, a partner in the American fund Apollo. Today, Ricardo Eletro belongs to the former executive of Starboard, Pedro Bianchi.

Nunes guarantees that he has ceased to be part of the company’s executive management since 2015, when consultant Enéas Pestana (formerly Pão de Açúcar) was hired as CEO, with the mission of unifying the group’s various banners and capturing synergies.

Eneas spent less than six months in the post. Nunes returned to the presidency of the group. Even after Starboard took over, he remained a poster boy for the network.

Today he works as a coach for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, promoting the RGV Method (Ricardo Gestão e Vendas) on Instagram, where he has 172,000 followers. “In three days of mentoring, I explain the success step by step, with marketing, sales and people management techniques, my specialty”, he says, stating that he started posting videos at the beginning of the pandemic, to encourage entrepreneurs, and ended up being encouraged by a professor to make his knowledge available to those interested. On his YouTube channel, he has just over 13,000 subscribers.

She is still not as successful on the networks as her youngest daughter, model and influencer Lívia Nunes Marques, 23, who has 637,000 followers on Instagram.

Good brands can’t resist bad management, say retail experts

Retail industry sources told Sheet that Ricardo Nunes’ hasty and aggressive style generated disagreements with the other partners – from the Insinuante, City Lar, Salfer and Eletro Shopping chains. Nunes has always been more interested in selling than in managing and the company suffered from the strategy of covering price at any cost, out of stock (when there is no product in the store), difficulty in administrative and logistical integration, in addition to the delay in starting the operation. in e-commerce.

“He is very aggressive and commercially talented, he has a great sense of opportunity”, says consultant Alberto Serrentino, from Varese Retail. “But the growth model by incorporation generated a very complex governance in the Sales Machine”, he says, remembering that the culture shock came from the beginning: Insinuante was a conservative and verticalized company, nothing to do with the leverage that marked the Ricardo Eletro, who grew up with few assets and a fragile capital structure.

“Ricardo has an extraordinary marketing streak, an incredible consumer perception, he is a marketing genius”, says consultant Eugênio Foganholo, from Mixxer. “But in the Sales Machine, where he took on a leading role, he left a lot of loose ends: poorly coordinated governance, very impulsive, he had problems with relationships with suppliers and some of them had violent losses”, he says.

Both Serrentino and Foganholo agree that strong brands – such as Ricardo Eletro and other retailers such as Mappin, Mesbla and more recently Daslu, auctioned this month – do not survive bad management.

“In these cases, there is an attempt to rescue the brand’s recall in a new business, so that it doesn’t start from scratch, being unknown in the eyes of the consumer, and can give it some credibility”, says ESPM branding professor Marcos Bedendo . “But what will happen with this attempt to survive the brand will depend on the new management: if it will combine the memory of good past experiences with a new positive proposal for the consumer, which is not an easy task.”

At Ricardo Eletro it is already possible to notice some wear and tear. The retailer is classified as “Not Recommended” on the Reclame Aqui website, for not responding to consumer complaints.

The problems involving the founder’s image also played against the company’s credibility in the market.

Entrepreneur wants to leave “legacy” to entrepreneurs

In July 2020, when he was no longer part of Ricardo Eletro, the businessman was the target of the “Direct with the Owner” operation, carried out by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Civil Police, State Treasury Department and General Attorney of the State of Minas Gerais. The objective was to dismantle an alleged criminal organization that would have withheld R$ 400 million from ICMS. Ricardo Nunes was arrested in São Paulo on July 8 and released the following day. The eldest daughter, Laura, was also arrested, accused of involvement in the scheme, but was released.

In December 2020, Nunes was the subject of a new complaint, referring to an evasion scheme of R$ 120 million that would have been in force between May 2016 and November 2019.

On the 15th, the Public Ministry of Minas Gerais denounced Nunes for the third time for tax evasion. This time, referring to a debt of R$ 86 million of ICMS in the period from June 2016 to May 2018.

Before that, still in 2010, the year of creation of the Sales Machine, Nunes would have paid a bribe to a tax auditor of the Federal Revenue so that Ricardo Eletro would not suffer a tax assessment. The civil servant was arrested as he left one of Ricardo Eletro’s stores with R$60,000. At the time, the businessman’s defense said that he had been “victim of extortion” by the inspector.

Nunes was sentenced in the first instance to three years and four months in prison for active corruption. But he was acquitted in the second instance by the Federal Regional Court (TRF) of the 3rd Region in August 2015.

The businessman rejects all complaints, especially those involving tax evasion. “An American fund would not buy a company without an audit. And everything was being audited by Price”, says Nunes, noting that the debts with the tax authorities were declared. “We were waiting to enter Refis [Programa de Recuperação Fiscal]”, he justifies. “If you are going to arrest every businessman who declares tax but doesn’t pay, he would have to arrest the whole of Brazil.”

About to turn 53 on the 23rd, Ricardo Nunes guarantees that he is committed to leaving a legacy. “I worked too much in my life, I didn’t even see my daughters grow up, I was working from 8 am to midnight,” he says. “I have a lot of good things to do. There are people who want to step on my name, but I won’t let them.”