Every company I run has to answer three questions. Does it have the right people? Does it have a process that works? Does it deliver a product that people want? The three words belong to Marcus Lemonis, the American businessman who has applied them to companies in difficulty on the CNBC programme The Profit: people, process and product. I chair the board of Grupo Boa Vida, and the same three questions sit behind the way I run my companies, from the offices to the building sites of Cidade Boa Vida.
Three questions for any business
Marcus Lemonis has explained why he settled on such an elementary model. In an interview with TV Insider in July 2025, he said of it: “It’s a simple way for people to think about any business.” I agree, for a practical reason. A rule is only useful if everyone can carry it. With close to ten thousand people building Cidade Boa Vida every working day, the rule has to be clear to a director and to a site foreman alike.
The three questions also expose a weakness quickly. A company with a good product and no process delivers late. A company with a good process and the wrong people delivers badly. A company with good people and a product nobody needs works hard for nothing.
The order matters to me. I start with people, because they are the ones who write the process and build the product.
People come first
What I value most in a person is responsibility. I want people who take a task and carry it to the end, who say what is ready and what is missing, and who can be trusted with a decision. I give it first, and I expect it to be honoured.
Behind that sit the seven values of the group: Customer Satisfaction, Professionalism, Team Spirit, Resilience, Serving with Humility, Leading by Example and Materialisation. Materialisation is turning ideas into value. Leading by Example is coherence and integrity. I use them to judge each worker’s contribution, in the same way I use results.
The customer is not No. 1 to me. They’re No. 2, right behind the employee.
Marcus Lemonis, quoted by CNBC
I recognise the idea. In 2024 I launched M.E.T.A., a programme of working conditions and benefits for the people of the group, in which those who stand out most are rewarded with a car and a house. I wrote then that “valued and supported employees are the key to a service of excellence and to delivering our ambitious projects.”
When a post opens, I look first at the people already doing the work. That is why the most important measure of a manager is the capacity to multiply leaders: to shape the people around them so that the next leader is already in the team. It is also why I created the Instituto de Liderança, which trains leaders for the whole country. Most of its training goes to other organisations. A good leader trained in Angola serves Angola, whichever company employs them.
Process: discipline every day
Good people without a process spend their energy on confusion. For me, process begins with a few habits that every manager in the group knows.
The first is to never bring problems, and always bring solutions. A problem that reaches me with a proposal attached is half solved. The second is to either do a task at once or write it down, so that nothing stays in the air. The feeling of tiredness comes from the accumulation of pending tasks, and the cure for it is follow-up and immediate feedback. The third is the standard. Whoever is not faithful in small things is not faithful in great ones.
There is no such thing as badly done work, only badly directed work.
Tomasz Dowbor
When a job comes out wrong, the responsibility does not lie, before anything else, with the person who did it. It lies with whoever directed it: with the leadership, the process or the communication. That is why a manager starts by looking at what was asked, how it was asked and with what means. This does not lower the bar. It is the reason for the three habits.
If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.
Marcus Lemonis, quoted by CNBC
That line describes the last part of process: deciding with data. A decision on yesterday’s numbers arrives late.
Product: the house that is handed over
In my companies, the product has a face. It is a house, and a family waiting for its keys. Cidade Boa Vida is planned for around 7,000 homes, and more than 2,000 have already been handed over. For each family, a house is not a unit of stock. It is the dignity of a home of one’s own.
That is why I do not accept almost. A house that is 99 per cent finished is not a house a family can live in. In delivery, 99 is worth nothing. An independent inspection team checks what is built against what was designed, because the customer should never be the one who finds the fault.
A handover is the moment the three questions are answered together. The right people built the house. The process brought it in on time. The product is standing in front of the family who will live in it. I have said at handovers that such a day is a day of proof that Boa Vida keeps its promises.
The order I keep
In the companies I chair, the order stays the same. I invest in people first. I hold the process to a standard every day. And I measure the product by one thing: the family that receives its keys on the date it was promised.