Piacini is a business advisory firm shaped by more than a decade of practical experience building, operating, expanding and advising businesses in the United States.
Its work combines market intelligence, business strategy and an operator's perspective to help leadership make better decisions in the American market.
The firm
Piacini is a boutique business advisory firm built around consequential business decisions involving the United States.
Established companies considering the American market that need to understand the opportunity before capital is committed.
Companies already in the market, facing an important decision about strategy, structure, operations, performance or expansion.
The work starts before the recommendation, with defining the problem precisely. From there it moves through investigation, analysis, decision and — where it makes sense — implementation advisory.
The goal isn't to produce recommendations detached from reality. It's to improve the quality of the decision and make its implications executable.
The experience behind the advisory
Advising a company on the American market takes more than knowing data about it. It takes having faced, inside it, the kind of decision the client is about to make: hiring, pricing, selling, expanding, correcting course and, at times, stopping.
The experience behind Piacini wasn't built by observing the American market from the outside.
It was built operating inside it.
Operating record
Not a full chronology — the points where a business decision changed the direction of the company.
2015
Paulista Construction founded in Massachusetts. The operation reached approximately 20 people at peak structure, with commercial project experience across seven U.S. states and individual projects of up to approximately $1.2 million.
—
Moving the base from Massachusetts to Florida was a business expansion decision driven by market and opportunity — not a personal relocation.
≈2020
The construction company depended too heavily on the founder's direct involvement. The objective became building a more replicable model with greater organizational leverage. Franchising was the path explored.
≈2020
A recurring operating problem in construction: affordable software was too limited, while robust systems were too complex and too expensive for the segment. That diagnosis led to the development of Trufields, now a construction management SaaS product where the founder serves as CEO.
2025
The first attempt to franchise the traditional construction model did not draw the market response expected. The hypothesis was revisited: the operating concept was simplified toward a more replicable handyman model, and the brand was repositioned for the American consumer. Franchise sales began in 2025.
Good strategy includes the willingness to modify or abandon a hypothesis when the evidence doesn't support it. That is what happened between the original franchise model and the concept that became CraftWise.
Other fronts
Work that widened the read on operations, growth and structure in different contexts.
Work on the business side of a high-performance sports academy, which grew from roughly 10–15 to about 60 students in some two to three months. Responsibilities spanned management, operations, coordination, marketing, customer acquisition and public relations. The operation later closed because the infrastructure could not support the demand and no viable expansion alternative was secured.
CEO-level involvement in a printing and customization business, with responsibility for compliance, finance, growth planning, business development and organizational structure.
Administrative and operational compliance coordination for goods purchased in the United States and resold in Brazil, including the import and export routines involved.
None of these operations was a case study. Each one required deciding on incomplete information and then living with the result. Time after time, the sequence was the same:
Build • Operate • Diagnose • Adapt • Allocate capital • Expand • Stop • Restructure • Negotiate • Execute
Over time, the judgment formed by running companies started to apply to other owners' decisions and other leadership teams. That is the point where operating experience became advisory work — and the foundation Piacini was built on.
Diagnostic and recommendation
Deep diagnostic of a product developed over roughly five years without meaningful traction, with an assessment of the alternatives available. After approximately three months, the recommendation was that the project did not hold up as a business. The client chose to shut it down.
Business and commercial advisory
Support to a construction company through a significant project dispute: audit of the commercial documentation, commercial strategy and negotiation support.
Feasibility analysis
Participation in the assessment of a development project. Architecture and engineering work did get underway, but environmental constraints made execution unviable and the project did not proceed.
In more than one of these situations, the most valuable contribution was not a growth plan — it was keeping capital, time and organizational capacity out of a path the evidence did not support.
How that shapes Piacini
A recommendation is only worth something if it survives the operating reality of the people who have to carry it out. That is the difference between a well-argued plan and a plan that works.
In practice it changes the questions we ask. Not just whether the market is large, but whether the operation closes, whether the price holds, whether the channel exists and whether the company can execute with the structure it has.
That way of working was formalized into the framework behind every engagement — understand, investigate, evaluate, decide and execute — so the same discipline applies to any decision, not only the ones where the answer already seems obvious.
Principles
Ivan Leite is an entrepreneur and business advisor based in the United States, with more than a decade of practical experience building, operating, expanding and advising businesses in the American market.
His experience spans construction, franchising, technology, operations, business development, market-entry assessments and special situations.
His read on the U.S. market was formed primarily by operating businesses inside it — serving American customers, building teams and making decisions under real conditions.
A continuous student of economics, business administration, management, leadership, people and business strategy, his grounding in those subjects is largely self-taught: sustained reading alongside practice.
“Before advising companies on entering, operating and growing in the U.S., I had to learn how to build businesses inside it.”
10+
Years operating in the U.S. market
7
States with operating or project experience
≈20
People at peak organization
≈ $1.2M
Largest single project as an operator
These figures reflect the founder's operating experience and should not be interpreted as client performance or expected results.
What we do today
U.S. market entry
Business advisory
If your company is evaluating the United States or facing an important decision inside the American market, tell us what is at stake.