About Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes
Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes was born in 1956, in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, the second child of Mario Cardoso Gomes, a director of the State Bank of Amazonas, and Derly Faria Gomes, who had given up studying law to be a mother and housewife. Precocious and energetic, Mario grew up in a middle-class home in what was then a rather provincial, torpid and remote state capital in equatorial northern Brazil in the center of the gigantic Amazon rain forest.
Mario was an avid and talented student from the start of his formal education, and was always restless for activity and challenge. In 1967, Manaus was designated a free trade zone by the Brazilian government and a package of attractive financial incentives was offered to certain industries to establish manufacturing operations there. Overnight the sleepy river-port city was transformed into a hustling and bustling boomtown which it remains to this day (in 2006, over US$20 billion worth of goods were manufactured there). A year later, 12 year-old Mario, sensing a golden opportunity and with the help of his father, started importing electric slide projectors and selling them to small retail stores in Manaus. He thereafter expanded his product line to include other small consumer electronics. Mario had discovered his vocational identity – a natural-born entrepreneur!
At 15, Mario participated in a student exchange program whereby he spent a year going to high school in Wyoming, Michigan, and U.S.A. Living with a host family he became acquainted with American culture and consolidated his English language skills. He loved it all, from pancakes to snow skiing (no such thing in tropical Amazonas) to TV sit-coms. He continues to stay in contact with surviving members of his host family and his best school buddy of the time, Mark Hartman, who, after high school, went on to West Point and is today a general in the U.S. Army.
Back home, Mario reached university age and decided to study law. He gained admittance into The Federal University of Amazonas School of Law, the second oldest law school in Brazil. He excelled in his studies, was elected class president, and graduated at the top of his class in 1978 as that year’s Valedictorian. The next year, he passed the Brazilian Bar Exam on his first try with the highest score of any examinee in Manaus and received his license to practice law. Just 23 years-old, Mario was now Doctor Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes in accordance with Brazilian nomenclature.
Taking a break after the Bar Exam, Mario made the grand tour of Europe and spent three months in France studying French. He kept up his practice in the ensuing years and is today fluent in French, his third language after Portuguese and English. In a pinch, he can also get by in Spanish.
Coming home, instead of setting up a law practice, he opened a bakery, Brazilians love their bread and in Brazil, bread means FRESH bread. Every morning millions of Brazilians make their way to the corner bakery to buy it. The process is repeated in the evening. Since man does not live on bread alone, they usually also pick up some butter, ham, cheese, coffee, milk, and maybe a coffee cake, all of which Mario kept well stocked. A good bakery in Brazil can turn a tidy profit. There are a lot of well-off bakery owners in Brazil. Of course, Mario knew this so he rolled up his sleeves and put his hands in the dough, so to speak. Up each morning at 3:00am to see that the product was coming out of the ovens, he was off in his van by 5:30 to deliver bread to commercial customers while his employees minded the retail counter at the home base. He soon expanded the bakery to include a catering kitchen and landed a contract to supply a company with 125 breakfasts, lunches and dinners five days a week. This business grew steadily as Mario acquired new clients, principally electronics factories in the Manaus Industrial District. By the time he sold the business in 1997, to Puras International, French multinational, it was preparing and serving as many as 25000 meals per day.
In 1988, while dining on fish at the La Barca restaurant in Manaus, Mario met a charming and very pretty young lady, Naybe Lents. It was love at first sight, for Mario at least, and he immediately set about with his usual daring and determination courting her. Some of his friends thought he was engaged in a lost cause. A herd of young Manaus bachelors had their eyes on Naybe. She was much too beautiful for Mario. Well, today Mario and Naybe split their time between Miami and Manaus along with their two daughters, Maite and Mariah.
In the mid-90s, Mario expanded into other retail food service areas. He brought the first Bob`s fast food franchise (the second largest in Brazil after MacDonald`s) to the north of Brazil which he opened in the Amazonas Shopping Center.
A little earlier, Mario had gone international but in a completely different direction. Just as he had inherited a lawyerly bent from his mother, he too
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