Carlos Martins was born in Brazil. Carlos 'Wizard' Martins initially stumbled into teaching English before turning it into a blockbuster business. The oldest son of a truck driver and an Italian immigrant, Martins, a Mormon, started learning English through his church when he was 12, and vastly improved his language skills when he moved to the U. S. to attend Brigham Young University in Utah. Upon graduation, Martins returned to Brazil to work for a multinational paper company in a tiny city 200 miles from Sao Paulo. Coworkers started asking him to teach them English. Eventually, he was making more money teaching from his dining room table than at his full time job. He used all his savings to rent space for an English school. He expanded his Grupo Multi through franchises and turned it into the market leader in Brazil's booming language teaching industry, with over 2,600 franchised schools and more than 800,000 students. In 2010 he sold a 15% stake for $125 million to an arm of Brazilian bank Banco Itau. Then in December 2012 he sold his remaining stake in Grupo Multi to UK media and education company Pearson for $720 million in cash. He also owns real estate assets and a majority stake of Vale Presente, the only Brazilian non-bank institution authorized to issue Mastercard branded cards, plus has accumulated an estimated $200 million in dividends from Grupo Multi over the years.
Carlos Martins is a member of Service
