After decades of leading high-stakes corporate turnarounds, Felipe Mendes is building a new kind of consultancy. His belief: before you can transform a company’s technology, you must first transform how its people think.
The year was 2008, and Felipe Mendes stood at a professional crossroads. At just thirty-four years old, he had built a successful career as an expatriate Marketing Director at Unilever, a global titan of consumer goods, a world of structured processes and established brands. He made the decision to leave it all behind. He accepted a role as President of a global market research company—a smaller, less structured professional services business that was bleeding money. His first task upon arrival was not to innovate, but to triage. He had to renegotiate the budget, make severe cuts to the cost base to stanch the P&L losses, and redesign the commercial strategy from the ground up.
The company he inherited was not just financially unstable; it was culturally broken. Employee engagement was low, and the most fundamental value in any service business—trust—was conspicuously absent. For a young executive accustomed to the robust frameworks of a multinational CPG giant, this was a trial by fire. He made the tough decisions, and slowly, the results followed. The financials stabilized, clients responded to the new strategy, and team morale began to recover. That experience, he now says, was the moment that ignited his passion for transformation. It was the first time he realized that turning a business around was less about spreadsheets and more about the complex, often messy, work of changing a human system. This journey would eventually lead him to establish his own firm, Brains&Bytes, where he now serves as founder and CEO.
The Making of a Transformation Specialist
Felipe is formally a business administrator with a specialization in Marketing, but he defines himself as a lifelong learner. Throughout his career, he has consistently invested in his own education, pursuing courses in management, leadership, and business stewardship at top-tier universities in the UK, US, and Brazil to stay current with the most advanced thinking. This commitment to learning provided the theoretical framework for the practical, high-stakes challenges that would define his professional life.
Nearly a decade after his first trial by fire, in 2017, Felipe faced his second great test, one that would cement the philosophy that now defines his work. He became the Latin America President of GfK, a data analytics powerhouse, just as the company was sailing into a perfect storm. The market was shifting beneath their feet. Externally, major clients were vertically integrating their own data analytics services. Some of GfK’s data providers were beginning to bypass them, selling directly to industry clients at more competitive prices. A few key retail data partners were actively working to “eliminate the middle man,” threatening a core part of their business model.
The internal situation was just as precarious. The company’s margins were compressed, a direct result of a high-touch, low-tech service model that was expensive to maintain. The sales process itself was inefficient, with the same people responsible for both sales and delivery, creating a constant bottleneck. To compound the pressure, GfK had been acquired by KKR, a venture capital fund. The arrival of private equity was viewed with deep reluctance by the team. The initial activities—selling off less profitable business units, closing offices in some countries, and making senior people redundant—unleashed a wave of anxiety. This led to what Felipe describes as regrettable losses of key talent across Latin America and pushed employee engagement to an all-time low. This was the business he was given to manage.
KKR provided a sound strategy and a “textbook” digital transformation plan. However, Felipe quickly realized the plan on paper was only a fraction of the real challenge. The most difficult work would be to change how everyone—his internal teams, his data providers, his strategic partners, and even his clients—thought about the business. It required a fundamental rewiring of perspectives, expectations, and behaviors. He calls this a Cognitive Transformation.
“It was a tough, but beautiful Cognitive Transformation, which I’m extremely proud of,” Felipe says. The process was arduous, involving difficult conversations and a relentless focus on rebuilding trust. But the outcome was a testament to the approach. The Latin American division emerged with much healthier margins, top-tier Net Promoter Score (NPS) results from clients, and a record level of team engagement. This experience—navigating a business through existential market threats and deep internal turmoil—became the crucible in which his own unique consulting philosophy was forged.
The Genesis of Brains&Bytes
After more than a decade of leading such high-stakes transformations from within, Felipe identified a critical gap in the external consulting space. He observed that when established consultancies manage large-scale digital transformations, they often add a layer of “change management” and culture as part of their offering, however, he contends that this human element is frequently treated as a secondary priority. “The most ‘sexy’ part are the tech-enabled activities and projects,” he explains. “As a consequence, most of the resources, either money or senior, talented people, are allocated in reviewing business processes and implementing the digital way of work.”
This approach, he believes, is sufficient if the goal is merely to digitize a company. But if the goal is to truly transform how a company thinks, operates, and competes, a deeper, more integrated approach is necessary. He founded Brains & Bytes in 2025, headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, to address this gap. The name itself encapsulates his core philosophy. The company’s logo, a butterfly, further illustrates this concept, representing four distinct philosophical pillars:
First, the butterfly symbolizes metamorphosis. “Just as a caterpillar embarks on an unseen journey within its chrysalis only to emerge as something entirely new,” he explains, “we guide organizations through their own metamorphoses—nurturing growth, refining vision, and delivering stunning, tangible results.”
Second, it represents the “butterfly effect.” This is the idea that even a subtle disturbance—a shift in process, a new technology, a single strategic decision—can ripple outward to reshape markets or avert a crisis. Brains & Bytes aims to help companies anticipate change and harness the force of these incremental improvements.
Third, the logo draws on a linguistic insight. Felipe discovered that in Harari, an African tongue, the word for “butterfly” is rooted in the concept of a book—a vessel of knowledge and story. “It’s a poetic reminder,” he says, “that every transformation is both informed by wisdom and destined to write a new chapter.”
Fourth, and most central to his model, the butterfly represents synchronicity. The two wings must move in perfect harmony for the butterfly to fly. The Brains & Bytes logo places “Brains” on one wing and “Bytes” on the other, reflecting his core belief that only by leveraging both the cognitive, human element and the technological, digital element in perfect unison can a company achieve a sustainable transformation.
The Methodology of a Cognitive Transformation
So, what does a Cognitive Transformation, as envisioned by Brains & Bytes, actually look like? Felipe outlines a process that begins not with technology, but with culture.
The first step is a cultural diagnostic. The goal is to answer the most fundamental question: “Do we have the ‘tech mindset’ needed to support the business model we’ll build?” He assesses this by interviewing key leaders and middle managers about their view of the business and their vision for the future.
“If they just present an incremental thinking, if they don’t think about a couple of specific technology applications to enable either the business or their function, if they just consider traditional competitors… well, maybe they don’t have the right mindset,” he says.
The outcome of this diagnostic determines the ambition of the entire project. If significant time and resources must be invested in shifting the culture, the initial technological changes might need to be more modest in pace or scope. As the adage goes, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
After this initial exercise comes a detailed Value Chain Review, structured in three parts:
- Value Generation: This phase seeks to uncover the business’s unique contribution to its customers and society. For example, every retailer adds value by curating an assortment of products and reducing friction in the purchasing journey. The review aims to understand the specific value a particular business generates and how that is perceived by its clients. This involves interviewing client-facing staff, like store managers or client success teams, but also clients, who bring their actual perception of the company’s ability to truly add value to their business. Then we match internal and external perceptions, sharing it with the CEO and CFO, who are confronted by how their resource allocation translates into actual value generation for their clients’ .
- Value Capture: This is about how the company attracts customers and monetizes its business model. The review scrutinizes Sales, Marketing, and Pricing functions. A central task here is to identify the “ideal customer profile” (ICP)—the type of client that brings the highest margins or lifetime value. This is a crucial discussion, as all subsequent activities, from marketing channels to sales team structure and pricing models, should be aligned to attract and serve these ICPs effectively.
- Value Production: This is the most extensive part of the review, dealing with all the internal processes required to create and deliver the company’s offering. This is where the operating costs lie. For service companies, this often presents the greatest opportunity for systematization and productization, but it also involves moving senior professionals out of their comfort zones.
Felipe is adamant about his delivery approach. He rejects the traditional model of a consultancy that delivers a PowerPoint presentation outlining what a company should do. “I want them to develop proposals with me, with their clients, and not receive it from me,” he insists. His process is agile and collaborative, involving stakeholders from across the value chain—internal teams, partners, providers, and external clients.
This co-design approach, he argues, is essential for accelerating adoption and ensuring the transformation is enduring. Felipe acknowledges the challenge of pushing clients beyond incremental improvements, referencing the joke that “the best alternative for a horse-drawn cart wasn’t more horses, but a car.” He sees his role as challenging the status quo, even if the first step is simply a digitization of key processes to build trust and momentum.
The Human Element: People, Industries, and Balance
Felipe believes his “Brains-meets-Bytes” model is most impactful in industries where people are truly essential for long-term success. While CPG and Durables companies rely heavily on processes and systems, other sectors are far more people-dependent. “Retail is a sector which is highly people dependent,” he notes. “They sell to people, they are run by people, and the overall focus of the company is in how people work.” Because retail margins are often compressed, these companies tend to invest less in back-office functions, making a transformation plan that prioritizes people and culture particularly effective.
But the sector where he is most enthusiastic is Professional Services. These companies are as people-dependent as retailers, but their culture of “only people matter” is even more deeply ingrained.
“The senior professionals are so proud of their own work and of their individual cumulative knowledge that it is extremely hard for them to accept a digital transformation proposal, where a ‘low touch, high tech’ model takes place,” he explains.
His seventeen years of experience leading transformations in this exact environment give him a unique advantage. He has both the formal training and the hard-won experience of implementing these changes as a regional president. He also notes how cultural realities can affect this work, observing that crises often lead to greater flexibility. “Executives in Brazil and Argentina are more open to question the status quo than in Chile, which has been a more stable country to make business in the last 20 years,” Felipe says.
Leading people through the discomfort of transformation is, he acknowledges, incredibly difficult. Felipe identifies his number one imperative as communication: frequent, transparent, and specific. “As there are so many unknowns in these processes, people become anxious and defensive,” he says. He believes leadership must acknowledge this, provide clear responses, and be honest about what they don’t yet know. “Sharing their own vulnerability brings people closer,” he adds, “triggering their willingness to collaborate.”
This focus on the human element extends to his personal philosophy. Felipe dislikes the term “work-life balance,” as it implies work is the opposite of life. He prefers to think of it as a balance between where one puts energy and where one recovers energy. “Life is all about where you put your best energy,” he says. “It’s not just time allocation, it is about intentionality.”
He acknowledges that at different times, work itself can be a source of both expenditure and recovery. There were times, he notes, when a rewarding job was not the primary place he recovered energy, so he found it elsewhere, through more exercise, writing about business trends, or even binge-watching series. Now, as he builds his new company, he finds that he both gives and takes back energy from the passionate work of finishing his book and “coding” his knowledge. To counterbalance the mental drain of this intense focus, he is playing more basketball and watching more football matches than ever. “And I feel perfectly balanced,” he says.
The Vision and the Legacy
Looking ahead, Felipe’s goals for Brains&Bytes are clear and strategic. He is finalizing a book that will document his Cognitive Transformation process, with a specific focus on Professional Services firms, a sector he believes is the most underserved in Latin America. “There are many consultancies which have Industry and Retail experts, but transformation projects for Professional Services is still a blue ocean, luckily for me,” he says.
Felipe intends to dedicate his business development efforts to helping mid-sized companies, those with 40-50 or more employees, which are large enough to have significant challenges but may not be served by the largest consulting firms. For the numerous smaller professional services firms, those with 5 to 10 employees that cannot afford a formal consultancy, his mission is different. He plans to develop inspiring content—trainings, whitepapers, podcasts, and consulting guides—so they can improve their businesses in a “try and learn” environment. “This is how I intend to give back to this amazing Sector, which was so important in my professional and personal life,” he says.
His advice for emerging leaders reflects his own journey. He urges them to focus on adding value to others, as this is what customers pay for and what brings deep professional satisfaction. And he stresses the importance of continuous learning.
“As a consultant, you need to be at the edge of your domain, once people will hire you to hear fresh perspectives, innovative thinking, and profound knowledge. So keep studying and keep talking to potential clients, to develop your skills, so you’ll serve the world with confidence” Felipe concludes.
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