He sold lettuce at age 9 and today earns 60 million with mattresses

Abandoned by his mother and expelled from home by his father as a child, Ricardo Eloi had everything to go wrong. He ended up in an orphanage until he was welcomed by his aunt. He started working at age 9 selling lettuce and hasn’t stopped since. Today, he is the one who employs more than 500 people.

O awesome.club shows you how he managed to found the largest company selling premium mattresses in Brazil and which earns close to R$ 60 million per year.

Ricardo Eloi was born in 1980 in the small town of Espirito Santo do Pinhal, in the interior of the State of São Paulo. The family was very humble. His father was a metallurgist and his mother a maid. His father’s alcoholism was interspersed with episodes of violence against his mother. Tired of being beaten, she ran away from home. At that time, Eloi was 9 years old and was already working on the streets selling lettuce from a cart. His mother’s abandonment led Eloi’s father to drink even more and become more violent, this time unleashing his aggression against his son. Two years later, when he was 11 years old, Eloi’s father kicked him out of the house and the boy went to an orphanage, where he stayed for eight months.

Taken in by a paternal aunt, he went on to study and continued to work. At the age of 16, already living alone, he met his first girlfriend and found in her family all the affection and welcome that he had not had in his own family when he was a child. When he was 19 years old, a relative of his girlfriend invited him to work at a company that slaughtered chickens, in Santo André, in Greater São Paulo. Ambitious, he gathered his bags and left the interior towards the metropolitan region of São Paulo. Eloi came to work as a driver and delivered chickens to commercial establishments in the city.

After spending 5 years working at the chicken company and doing different jobs, he decided to look for another job to earn more. He went back to being a driver, only for a home-care company, transporting health professionals for treatment at patients’ homes. After that he went on to sell sneakers and then beer at a large liquor company. He got a taste for sales, saw that he had talent for the business and never went back to driving vehicles to earn a living.

In 2007 he found out that his girlfriend was pregnant. This motivated him to look for other professional opportunities to support his son. It was then that Eloi started selling mattresses. Over time, he stood out and decided to set up his own company with the help of a salesman who worked with him, Luciano Moura. They borrowed money to advertise on a local radio station to advertise the mattresses they would sell. And the idea worked really well.

From selling mattresses, he started producing his own products. Today Sono Quality, which focuses on therapeutic mattresses, employs around 500 direct employees and 2,000 indirectly. Every month, it invests BRL 2.5 million in advertisements for different TV programs, with names like presenter Celso Zucatelli among others. The company earns close to R$ 60 million a year and registers annual growth of 150%. Eloi is the company’s president, and the friend who believed in his dream, Luciano, is vice-president of Sono Quality.

In addition to being a successful businessman, Eloi is a judge on a program that reveals new country music talents and is also a corporate speaker. He claims that everything he achieved was the result of focus and discipline concentrated on what he wanted. In addition, he points out that “regardless of race, where you come from, Brazil is a country of opportunities”.

Before his father was killed by a car, when Eloi was 24 years old and already a businessman, the two had already reconciled. However, unlike what he lived with his father, Eloi says he seeks to be an example for his son, with whom he shares several moments, whether at football games, dressing up together or taking his son to meet the artists who are sponsored by the father’s company.

It’s not always easy to recover from trauma, especially in childhood. However, the life and success story of businessman Ricardo Elói is not unique. If you go through any difficulties, be inspired by stories of people who have overcome even in adversity. And tell us the result, of course!