With diversified performance and revenues that totaled R $ 1.5 billion in 2024, the Eagle Group, founded in Rio Grande do Sul, has been betting on innovation and industrialization to boost its growth. Rogerio Scheffer, president of the holding company, was the guest of the program From zero to top and shared the trajectory of the family company that grew up with iron as the main input and today reinvents itself through industrialized construction.
Eagles Sistemas, the group’s industrial arm, earned R $ 606 million by 2023, below the R $ 800 million recorded in 2022. The fall, according to Scheffer, is explained by the devaluation of iron ore, the company’s main input. “We have already had a higher yield because our main material is iron. During the pandemic, it doubled in value,” he explained. Still, the segment represents about 50% of the group’s total revenue.
Areas
In addition to the industrial sector, the group operates in the forest (with the forest eagle) and construction areas, through Smart space, its latest bet – and one of the most promising. In 2023 alone, the construction unit earned R $ 517 million and, for 2024, the expectation is to reach R $ 720 million. “It will probably overcome Eagles Sistemas. Our goal is to reach $ 1 billion by 2027,” said Scheffer.
The idea of Smart Space was born of an old frustration of Scheffer with the low productivity of traditional construction sites. After observing practices in the United States and Europe, the businessman decided to bet on a dry construction model, based on light metal profiles – the so -called light steel framing. “I always found it very difficult to continually improve a work. Each site seemed to start from scratch,” he recalled.
The solution was to industrialize the process, adopting technologies that allow you to design a software home, transfer data to machines and produce the entire metal structure already cut and identified, ready for assembly. “I always play it’s like setting up a lego,” he said.
Innovation in Sale
With this proposal, the company also had to innovate in the way of selling. Scheffer brought an executive with multinational tickets like Saint-Gobain, to lead the commercial front, and also joined his son Fernando with the operation. Inspired by benchmarks from Japan and the US, the group has structured a sales ecosystem that today has 44 stores (43 in Brazil and one in Paraguay) and four industries: one of PVC panels, one of metal profiles, one of synthetic stones and the largest metal panel factory in Latin America.
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The model offers the customer the full house: architectural design, structure, hydraulic and electric installations, materials, labor, work management and even financing. “You can finance everything, including the terrain, within 240 months. And then convert to traditional housing financing,” said the businessman.
Scheffer recognizes that there were difficult times. “In the late 1990s, it was a very hard time. It was not only lack of money, it was a feeling that we were lacking competence to continue in the business,” he said. He credits the turn to the adoption of good governance practices, which still guide the company’s decisions today.
Son of entrepreneurs, Rogerio grew around the company’s machines. “I lived my childhood inside the factory, the family business was built with us together,” he recalled. This experience helped shape the innovative look that, decades later, would lead him to transform a personal frustration into one of the pillars of the future of the Eagle group.
