Bruno Pegado is the Founder and CEO of Grupo Bruno Miguel Pegado, a 100% Angolan Automotive Brand. The company also has online visibility on Facebook, and YouTube. Based in Africa, Bruno comes from a family having a rich culture of unity. Currently, he lives in Dubai, where he aims to achieve a brighter future for his company.
Bruno Pegado had his hardships. Bruno Pegado had difficulties starting the company, faced obstacles, and even had a tragic near-death experience. However, he kept moving forward and never gave up.
Bruno Pegado is a person who believes in God and works hard to achieve all his goals. Our interview with Mr. Bruno Pegado inspired us greatly, and we hope it inspires you as well. Learn more about him and his life through our interview below.
Explain the background of you and the company in detail.
I am Bruno Pegado, CEO and Founder of Grupo Bruno Miguel Pegado and the first 100% Angolan car brand Pegado Motors.
On September 8, 1981, I was born in Luanda, Angola, and graduated from the University of Zimbabwe in 2005. Currently, I live in Dubai, where I came after more business opportunities and investments for my projects. Therefore, life is divided into trips to Luanda, where we have an office, store, and a motorcycle assembly line and provide various services.
We are an Angolan company with offices in Luanda, Angola, and Dubai, UAE. Furthermore, we have a social purpose in the automotive sector, import and export, general trade, and technical assistance in various services and products like mail management, management of private cab fleets, and entering the field of technologies.
We started the Grupo Bruno Miguel Pegado and the brand Pegado, initially in Angola in 2008, with mail management services for 2 years. In 2010, we began to produce the first bicycles of the brand Pegado in China, where since 2008, we have maintained partnerships with local manufacturers. We made many good friends and partnerships that allowed us to grow in this increasingly competitive market. Unfortunately, in the early stages of the project, we faced our first financial difficulties. Sooner in 2014, we launched our first cars in Angola.
We are a very young company with a fighting spirit, resilience, and unity and are dreamers.
Bruno Pegado What are your goals?
We have our goals and are very focused on achieving them. Unfortunately, however, we struggle to obtain financing or partnership to boost our projects and goals, including constructing an industrial pole in Angola in the province of Waku Kungo, where we have already acquired 104 hectares of land to construct various manufacturing units and assembly lines of our cars.
We intend to market throughout Africa and partner with distributors and dealers on the continent. In addition, we want to have our headquarters in Dubai because it facilitates being connected to the world, and in terms of financial transactions, banks give guarantees of functionality. Dubai ends up being a hub for our re-exports to Africa, and we intend to have this realized in the coming years.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/your company right now?
My greatest strength is in God. I believe that “His” plans for me in this world are very big and are beyond what I can see.
What I can see, fight to do, and accomplish is already something unimaginable for a young African and Angolan. I can idealize and materialize projects, whether large or small. I started working at 14 years old, and at 23, I had my first job on behalf of someone else. In addition, I made a revolution in that company within 4 months. Furthermore, I was invited to go to another company. Unfortunately, I was not informed at the time that it was on the verge of bankruptcy and closed before I even started.
Later on, I worked for 2 more companies where our ideas and goals differed. After that, I decided not to work for anyone else and opened the BMP Group, where I worked for 14 years with my own ideas. I have always believed in God and believe that we will achieve our goals, and we are already surprising Angola with what we are doing with our own capital. Imagine if we had robust financial support where we could be?
As a company leader, our strength is in the union, I am hard with my employees, but at the same time, I try to pass my vision to each of them. I do not hire employees for hire; I like to explore the maximum of each one and empower them because a team that understands each other can achieve good results. In addition, I like to feel that we are not just a team, we are a family, and together we can ensure the daily bread for all to take home and feed our family, making us a great team. We are not many, but we are the necessary ones at this stage to make what is happening to us happen.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
Believe me, it hasn’t been easy, but we have God. So, as a team leader, I decided that we would take the farthest path and not the easiest, but we would get there no matter when.
Until today, the biggest difficulty we have faced until today is a lack of financial support. I had to sacrifice a lot to be here, including selling almost all my personal property to give life to these dreams. Nevertheless, my team and I believed in our goals. Our success’s proof is our acceptance in the markets, having a name, a brand, and a culture that we represent. The population supports us. We only lack funding because they look at me as young, black, and African, and no one wants to support me, but many want to stay with my projects.
If you ask me why I don’t sell? The answer is very simple; you can’t sell a child. I am open to investors and partners, but I am not prepared to abandon my newborn child.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
I believe that with my projects, I will help many people have jobs and help families. There are projects for society, and in Africa, we have many social problems. It includes people investing in Africa to take what Africa can give, and the little they leave is insufficient for growth. It’s similar to giving you the fish but never teaching you how to fish to be self-sufficient. I experienced such social problems personally and know how it hurts to live that way.
My greatest motivation is my neighbor and helping them. We are in this world to give love, to live with compassion and not misery. The fruit of this good work for a society that we are developing will be our financial growth. At least, we are teaching how to fish with our vision of self-employment, the industrialization of Africa, and the transfer of knowledge to others.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I had a very serious accident in 2017, almost losing my life. A door weighing 250+ kg fell on my head. As a result, my face and head were deformed (disfigured).
I stayed 1 year and a few months at home recovering where I couldn’t work and felt a lot of pain just thinking about it. I couldn’t hear noises, and looking at myself in the mirror was difficult.
Further, I thought I would never be the same again and wouldn’t be able to fulfill my dreams.
During all this time, I lived isolated from the world, I did not receive a single friend in my house during this time, and I only asked GOD to give me back my life.
I had to undergo 7 surgeries to recover, but when you have GOD, everything is possible, and I asked Him for this. In the 7 months, my face started to heal by itself. Currently, I only have a few marks, but I have already had a deformed face for those who don’t know me, and many have not seen me as a monster.
As for the work itself, I like challenges and regard them as a hobby.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Resilience
What makes you excited about Mondays?
It’s the first day of the week to make money. I like to earn money. The weekend comes to help spend it, so we have to love Mondays.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
Being African and being a united people, we used to be more united, we like parties, and in the family, this was our tradition.
Things are changing a lot these days, which worries me a lot; people are more focused on making money and having money no matter how.
I try to implement the family culture in my children. However, we cannot change minds overnight, so I am focusing on this with my children so that they can pass it on to their children, and it will go from generation to generation until we recover our true identity as Africans.
Being Angolans is something special. We are a very peaceful and patient people who love to receive people in our homes, socialize and catch up.
From our culture, I carry our identity so much in my projects that I baptized the names of all our car models with the names of our culture, places, and ancestors. It makes our catalog not only a catalog with information about our cars but also the origin of the names making it unique in the world because it offers a cultural and automotive exhibition.
Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
Talking about a project that made us innovate and create multiple opportunities for investors, us, the BMP Group, the unemployed youth, society, and the Angolan economy. In particular, I speak of the Gira Angola project as a platform where opportunity and need meet to generate amazing results.
We started with a minimum capital of USD 380,000 to get the platform up and running. Today, it’s already earning more than USD 500,000 every 3 months and tends to grow much more.
Our biggest goal is to cover Angola with more than 5000 Baza Baza, our tricycles for transporting passengers, and more than 10,000 diverse cars between sedans, SUVs, pickups, and trucks from 1-30 tons for transporting various goods. Thus, we are creating the opportunity for individuals to join these services and earn a lot of money doing absolutely nothing. They will only have to make the smart decision of joining the platform with an initial investment of USD 7,300, and they will receive a monthly return of 1,146 US dollars for 12 months and at the end of 12 months (contractual time), it will total 13,752 US dollars. It’s simply amazing for everyone.
The gains are not only for these private investors but also for us, the young unemployed who are employed, and the society that gains more mobility services and transport of various goods and merchandise.
As a bonus, all the means become the property of the unemployed that were hired after a while. We pass on our vision of entrepreneurship and advise them to hire other unemployed to work for them, and they continue to work for us. The cycle repeats itself with each new member of our Gira Angola platform.
This business and management model we intend to replicate throughout Africa and generate jobs and improvements in the lives of our African populations.
Today, the Gira Angola platform has already earned about USD 2 million in this first launch phase. With these earnings, until we have a real funding opportunity, we will continue to invest with our own capital. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve decided to take the long way due to the lack of financial support. However, with much wisdom, persistence, and faith in God, we will reach our goals at some point in our trajectory.
What are your company’s strategies, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
Our strategy is always to be true to ourselves, all investors who believe in us, and our customers, our main revenue source. There’s very unfair competition currently in African markets, where products without quality have greater market opportunities due to lobbying at the level of various governments. It creates barriers for us. Independent entrepreneurs have many difficulties accessing financing in our country of origin to contribute to economic growth.
Hence, we have to be true to reality and know how to sell our product with the ideas and dynamism of entrepreneurship that characterizes us. I even risk giving an example between an entrepreneur and a politician doing the same business, and you will see that the ways of sales are completely different. We born entrepreneurs will work with the basis of marketing and sales, but a politician will use all his influences to put your product as the first option of purchase and create blocks for us not to sell. However, the markets include millions of potential independent customers who are not part of the political world, and it is those who we are focused on working with. Our products have a quality adapted to the African reality, which makes all the difference. I won’t say more because the sales secret cannot be revealed. Lol
What are the key values that helped you overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership?
It has everything to do with the truth. Years ago, wearing a good suit and having a good car was already halfway to doing good business. Today our global reality already shows that it is not like that. Nowadays, people already want more information on where and why they will spend their money on a particular project. The knowledge already allows people to see a project’s potential only with the financial presentation and the market study where the project will be developed.
We will continue to invest in direct communication with our potential customers and partners. We’ll continue to invest in our product’s quality and continuous staff training to be prepared for the great challenges of this increasingly competitive market. Furthermore, we will continue to conduct business studies and real planning of each market where we will enter.
How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
Many things will happen within our business’s planning, projection, and vision in the next two years. However, I can already anticipate that we will launch our first sedan passenger car officially and physically in Angola later this year. We intend to make this the best-selling car in Angola by next year.
This is part of my vision and my methodology for doing business. We went through very complicated situations between the years 2019 and 2020, and we reaped the best of what we had to learn from all those difficulties. As a result, we have a better experience and clearer vision to take another crucial step in our project.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
In my leadership, I’ll lead many people to true prosperity. We’re providing better business conditions contributing to changing the lives of many families in Angola, and we want to expand all over Africa. This is a feeling of great pride to be doing good for society with my work.
My leadership vision allows not only the investors and me to prosper financially but also my employees and all those who are deciding to join us. My business vision is a vision for society, and the result of this excellent work will be our economic growth and all those who are joining us.
What services/solutions or products are offered by your company on par with the current industry standards? Tell us something about your upcoming products or services?
We have about 26 car models that we intend to launch depending on our economic growth or if we have God’s blessing and get funding or angel investment. It will help our rapid growth and supply capacity because our brand already has markets and customers eagerly waiting for the next products from Pegado Motors.
Please visit our website and Youtube; we have a lot of information and videos about the past, present, and future.
Connect with Bruno Pegado on LinkedIn and!