Nothing sells itself, not even Ferraris: the active patience behind Bluetek

Bluetek was not born as the company it is today. Patricio noticed that the cars arrived with smells of tobacco, food or pets, and with his childhood friend Rubén he developed hardware to purify the air inside the cabins.

During the pandemic, the business had a great reception, but it had an expiration date: after that moment, the need was going to disappear.

• What problem did you detect when you founded Bluetek and how has the company evolved until today?

“A client, a friend, told me: sell me anything that generates savings. There we connected with air conditioning, which in multi-branch retail is very cost-intensive: up to 60% of a building’s energy bill goes only to climate…

…It generates average savings of 35% monthly in the account, and that is what allowed us to scale in different countries”

Today Bluetek Cloud is a B2B platform that digitizes critical processes; climate, lighting, refrigeration, for chains with hundreds of branches, where a single location can have six or seven air conditioning units.

The proposal, says Patricio, is simple: provide traceability and savings to an operation that would otherwise be impossible to control remotely.

Patricio and Rubén have known each other since school, where they sat together in the living room. When it occurred to him to start a business, he was the first person he called. What you look for in a partner, he says, is capacity, but above all trust.

• Would you recommend starting with friends?

“Totally. It is a challenge, but to the extent that it is understood, it is very important to leave the ego aside. Discussions have to be focused on the task, never on disrespect. With Rubén we can agree or disagree with a decision, but that never affects the relationship.”

He applies that same discipline to leadership. He says that the transition from manager to founder is, above all, about becoming aware of what example you want to set each day, even if there is not always someone watching.

It does not separate the father, the husband and the founder into different people: it is the same person, executive at any level of his life, trying to never procrastinate.

“The most common mistake of leaders in Latin America is to lose sight of what example they are setting. This lack of perseverance and discipline, when important leadership positions are already occupied, does great damage.”

He describes himself as a fast-paced person, who likes to go fast. Learning to be patient, he says, is an exercise he does every day and one of the most important changes of his time as founder.

• If you met again with Patricio who was about to leave Ferrari, what advice would you give him?

“Above all, patience. Things don’t happen from one day to the next, no matter how much you want to. There is a phrase that I really like: patience with action. We live in a very successful world, where we only see the good news, but behind each achievement there is a lot of effort and sacrifice that is not counted.”

“There is no such thing as an easy business. Nothing sells itself, not even Ferraris.”

When asked to define entrepreneurship in one word, he corrects himself: more than a word, he says, it is a life project, one that involves everything. You have to give up the life you knew to take a new one.

Patricio says it without nostalgia for the world of luxury he left behind: what he rescues from those years is not the glamor of the cars, but the structure that today allows him to build, calmly, something that he has not yet fully molded.