Uruguayan celebrities who entered the business world

sport values

Sports values ​​such as teamwork were some of the pillars of Enfoque, the business that Andrés Scotti opened with Diego Godín, Vicente Sánchez and Mario Rebollo. The sports center has two branches in Montevideo and plans to create a sports center, the director, Scotti, told Café & Negocios.

Camila Casas

The players during the opening of Approach.

The idea to open Enfoque arose while he was playing for the Uruguayan National Team. He talked a lot with the kinesiologist Walter Ferreira and the doctor Alberto Pan about the need for a place where athletes could rehabilitate after a season of play, so the idea of ​​creating a place that brings together sports activities, spaces for rehabilitation, strength and physical activities.

“More than as a business, I think of it as a purpose that started with business thinking,” said the former player, referring to the fact that physical exercise translates into health, physical and mental.

He asked for various advice before undertaking, and some businessmen told him ‘I invested abroad’. But he was convinced wanted to invest and give work in their own country.

He studied business management, and is convinced that life has taught him much of what he applies today in business. “Soft skills are not taught in any university,” he said.

Undertaking is taking risks and trusting that the investment will be profitable and that the delegated tasks will be done well. “If I didn’t trust, I would live unhappy. I prefer to trust my people, my team and my country, if I didn’t think like that, what’s the point of undertaking? The whole team is aligned,” she said.

In addition, investing with friends is a challenge, he accepted, in which progress is made between agreements and disagreements.

Story of love and inclusion

The journalist Magdalena Prado met her boyfriend Felipe in the environment of the Down Association of Uruguay, she has a brother who is a member of the institution, and he a nephew.

He had worked in a triple impact venture, where he learned that the market “can be a transforming factor”and years after being in a relationship and wanting to start a business together, she and Felipe took a risk, invested their savings and founded Stardust.

Felipe and Magdalena are in charge of Stardust

The fashion brand has a message behind it, it talks about the importance of inclusion, diversity and empathy, he highlighted. The t-shirts leave a message about the inclusion of people with down syndrome, also immigrants and refugees. In addition, the company’s objective is to include these people in the processes, some of them are brand models, for example.

“When in a market as competitive as that of fashion you manage to break through with a different imprint, it is attractive”, said Prado and added: “we wanted to show people the desire we have for a heterogeneous society, and how important it is to include others. I believe that companies have to have this look of ‘I generate a good or a service, but in addition to spilling work, what can I spill?’”.

Part of the Stardust sales are donated to the Down Association of Uruguay and part to the Ecumenical Service for Human Dignity, but the background of the venture is not that customers buy to collaborate, but that they enjoy the products and then discover that they have a inclusion story, he mentioned.

She loves journalism, and assures that she doesn’t see herself doing anything else, but her entrepreneurial life – in which she has been for a year now – has taught her a lot. Thinking about the designs, contacting suppliers, manufacturers, organizing sales, stock and new proposals has been quite a challenge, from which he has learned, he commented, mainly that “there is always someone to lend a hand”.

Musician and inveterate entrepreneur

The leader of Los Fatales, Fabian “Fata” Delgadoassures that he is “a worker of life”, and his interest in embarking on new projects led him to enter the business world.

From his father he learned the value of work and the importance of saving, values ​​that you want to pass on to your children. For this reason, from a very young age he always wanted to try his luck with business in partnership with friends, who should be trusted and with whom one should work as a team, he commented, because that is the key.

Money is not everything, he said. “For me, health comes first and money is far away, it’s not that I live all the time wanting to earn money,” she said.

Photo: Leonardo Carreno.

Fabian “Fata” Delgado

One of his first businesses that he had was an alfajores factory, together with a friend. They worked for a while on that venture until “it didn’t work anymore” and they decided to sell the machines to another factory and close it.

If business has taught you anything, it’s that failure is possible.he acknowledged.

With that partner he also got involved in real estate deals, although today he no longer belongs to the company.

Now he has two businesses. On the one hand, he is a partner at the Cordon Beer brewery, where he works with a young team with many ideas, which he enjoys when creating new proposals; He found out about the company through one of his partners, Alejandro González, a member of the murga La Trasnochada.

On the other, he opened PoolBall, a company of wooden courts for PoolBall, a large-scale pool game.

Cordon Beer has two branches in Montevideo, one in Cordón and another in Pocitos, and will soon open one more in the Prado.

PoolBall has four courts, designed and manufactured with Birch wood and handcrafted, in Uruguay.

Los Fatales also functions as a business. He is the manager and who is in charge of the administrative part. In this role he has learned a lot that he applies to business, mainly how to negotiate. His accountant is a fundamental support in his order, he mentioned.

For him, the most important thing that the business world has left him is the possibility of generating jobs for many families.

Pros and cons

Being known prior to having undertaken had its pros and cons, they agreed.

Scotti appreciated that this opened many doors for him and that the link with the sports institutions that he had was very positive when showing his proposals. One of the cons that he highlighted was that “sometimes there is an imaginary that the soccer player has money and it is abused from that place in procedures, negotiations or complaints”.

Prado maintained that the good thing was to easily access the media, and the bad thing was to question the link between his profession and the business. “It was very difficult for me to say ‘I am a journalist and I am in the world of entrepreneurship’. We journalists are sometimes guilty of believing that we only know how to do journalism, but I am a lot of other things. I have always made it very clear to myself that I have to separate the two things, I am one and my work is another,” she said.

For Delgado, the best thing has been the possibility of disseminating his projects easily, because he is known, and the downside, which he said, is always thought about when starting a business, is the risk of investing, which he has faced.