Channeling legacy in valuable ways: Fernando Simões, The JSL Group

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The Instituto Julio Simões in the Brazilian city of Mogi das Cruzes has a replica of an old truck on display. In any other context, the truck would have little or no relevance, but for JSL, Brazil’s biggest logistics company, it has special significance.

“It was the truck where it all began,” says Fernando Simões, Chief Executive of the JSL Group, “the first truck my father used to start the business in the 1950s.” Simões’ father, Júlio Simões, left a sizable legacy. An immigrant from Portugal, Júlio created the biggest logistics company in Latin America’s largest economy. It’s a legacy that is intertwined with the extraordinary growth of the Brazilian economy in the years since JSL was founded. And it’s the legacy of a company that has done as much as any company in the country to create employment opportunities and better working conditions.

JSL employs 24,000 people and operates a fleet of thousands of trucks and cars. It has diversified into vehicle dealerships and leasing through its subsidiary Movida. It also has a car and truck rental business.

In the first decade of the new millennium, JSL witnessed unprecedented growth, with net revenue rising from R$181m in 2000 to R$1.5bn by 2009. In 2017, JSL had revenues of R$8.1bn. It is also listed on the “B3” stock exchange in São Paolo, although Simões family members are the biggest shareholders.

Simões says that one of the company’s main values and a significant factor in JSL’s success has been putting the customer first. “This has always been a big part of the company’s culture, something that started with my father and moved over to the next generation,” he says. “We seek to understand the real needs of each client – seek to provide the best service – which all helps us to have long-term business relationships.”

Simões’ work at the family business began early. He started working for his father’s company when he was just 14, in 1981.

The role of his father at this early stage was obvious, Simões says. “I did not start working here because I liked the company; I started working here because I liked my father.”

His skills also were a significant factor in following in his father’s footsteps. Simões moved up through the company until the early 1990s, he began sharing management of the business with his father.

In 2009, Júlio passed him the chairmanship of the company, which he took public a year later, changing the company name at the same time. Simões says this is also when the company sought to reinforce the importance of perpetuating its core values, which were defined and shared at the company in 1991. Those values are the importance of the client, the employees, hard work, simplicity and profit.

He says these values are important to the overall culture of the business and are used when recruiting staff.

“We have many thousands of employees and recruit many every year, but what we always try to do is use our values to help us make the right decisions when hiring,” he says. “We always seek to hire people who have principles in their DNA that are in line with our values.”

In 2006, the family business set up the Instituto Julio Simões, a nonprofit organisation that channels JSL’s investments in socioeconomic projects. It not only focuses the group’s values “more practically,” says Simões, but also “helps to channel the legacy of my father.”

The institute has concentrated on areas like raising awareness of the importance of primary healthcare and providing free healthcare to many of JSL’s vehicle drivers. Launched by the institute in 2011 and still an essential part of its work today, the Pela Vida Program aims to minimise the risks to driver safety. Drivers often deal with long hours, poor eating habits, irregular sleep and social isolation.

The institute is also trying to become a reference point for good safety practices in road transport and sustainable development in the logistics sector.

Simões, now in his early 50s, likes to emphasise not just the role his father played in his life and the business but also the role of his mother, Elvina Benedicta Simões. Without her influence on encouraging harmony within the family of eight, he says, his father wouldn’t have been able to create the business he did.

Simões says the values and the legacy of his father and mother are in good hands with the next generation. His son Fernando Simões Filho sits on the board of JSL. The family has not yet drawn up a family constitution, but “this is something we are looking at,” Simões says.