01The night job
The day job was systems analysis for an international paper company, first in Cincinnati, then back in Campinas. The night job was teaching English to colleagues at home, with his wife Vania helping. By the mid-1980s the night job paid more, which is the kind of number an analyst notices. In 1987 Brazil legalised franchising, and Martins, then 30 or 31 depending on the month, opened his first school. He called it Wizard, after The Wizard of Oz, and when a franchisee later challenged him on the name he adopted it as his own middle name. That is why a Brazilian executive is listed on this site under a word from an American children's book.
His claim, which he set out in a 2015 interview for Harvard Business School's Creating Emerging Markets project, was that he had segmented the market and built a method that kept adult executives and ordinary students coming back, and then sold that method as a franchise rather than running the schools himself.
02Curitiba, Newark, Lisbon, Provo
He was the eldest of seven children of a truck driver in Curitiba, and the family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1969, when he was 12 or 13 depending on which account you read. The missionaries who taught them were American, and he learned his English from them. At 17 he left for the United States with $100 and found work clearing tables in a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. At 19 he went back to Brazil to serve a full-time mission in Portugal. He married Vania Pimentel at 22, and two months after the wedding was called as a bishop, which is young by any standard. In the early 1980s he took his wife and small children to Provo, Utah to study at BYU, and by his own account to the Deseret News he came close to quitting after a poor first semester in computer science. His wife's response, as he tells it, was to ask what the children would later say about a father who quit school early, so he stayed and graduated in computer science and statistics. The Church News profile from 2005 has him carrying two sayings from those years, one from his mother about dreaming high and one from the BYU campus sign that reads enter to learn, go forth to serve. He went home to a computer job. The English lessons started as a favour to co-workers, and the record is clear that the favour paid better than the salary.
03Grupo Multi by the numbers
| Year | Figure |
|---|---|
| 1987 | First Wizard school opens, the year Brazil legalises franchising |
| 2004 | Named Top Entrepreneur by a Brazilian national magazine |
| 2005 | About 1,200 franchises, roughly 500,000 students, 15,000 jobs; $3 million advertising budget |
| 2012 | Grupo Multi operating profit of £42 million (R$130 million) |
| 2013 | More than 2,600 franchised schools, over 800,000 students, brands including Wizard, Yazigi, Skill and Microlins |
| December 3, 2013 | Pearson agrees to buy 100 percent for £440 million (R$1.7 billion) in cash plus £65 million of assumed debt |
The Pearson filing with the SEC spells out who got paid: the Martins family held 78 percent, and the investment firm Kinea held the rest. Pearson's chief executive John Fallon described the target as the most respected English-learning company in Brazil. The Deseret News, writing in 2022, put the network at more than 2,600 locations in 10 countries at the time of the sale. By 2005 the company was already sponsoring professional volleyball and soccer teams, which is how a language school becomes a household name in a country where football is the second language.
04After Pearson
- Family investments since the sale, per the Deseret News (2022): real estate, financial services, sports, education and fast food, including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC franchises in Brazil
- Books: Vencendo a Própria Crise (2002) and Desperte o milionário que há em você (2012), the second a Brazilian bestseller
- Counted by the Deseret News among Brazil's roughly 30 billionaires as of March 2022
The record on the later ventures is thinner than on Wizard, and much of it sits in Portuguese-language press this site did not check. The one figure that is well sourced is the 2013 price. The Church News, for its part, noted in 2022 that all seven of his father's children had served or would serve missions, which says something about where the family's attention went after the money arrived.
05Bishop at 22, mission president at 45
His Church résumé would be long for a man who had never run anything. Bishop two months after his wedding. President of the Campinas Brazil Castelo Stake for several years before 2001. President of the Brazil João Pessoa Mission from 2001 to 2004, which meant leaving the company in other hands for three years at the height of its growth. Then, from 2018 to 2020, he and his wife served a humanitarian mission in Boa Vista, in the northern state of Roraima, where Venezuelan refugees were crossing the border; the Church News reports that with airlines and aid groups they helped move about 20,000 people to other parts of Brazil in under two years. The Freedom Award he received at a gala in Provo in 2022 followed that work, not the schools. He now serves as a ward missionary in Campinas and runs a weekly Instagram livestream on the gospel.
The night classes paid better than the day job. He noticed.
His own line on the subject, from a 2005 Church News interview, is short: "Every successful person carries within himself the feeling of fulfilling a mission." You can read that as piety or as a franchising pitch. He would probably say it is both.