Rafael Menezes spent eleven years inside manufacturing before he started Factory Fulcrum in 2019. The first eight of those years were at a corrugated packaging plant in Jundiaí, where he moved from process engineer to operations manager. The last three were at a food-processing company in Campinas, where he was brought in specifically to reduce waste on a high-speed filling line. He did reduce it, by about 34 percent over eighteen months, but the more interesting thing he learned there was why the waste had persisted for so long despite everyone knowing it was a problem. The answer, almost always, was that the people with the data and the people with the authority were not in the same room at the same time.

That observation became the foundation of Factory Fulcrum. The name comes from a simple mechanical idea: a fulcrum does not add force, it changes where the force is applied. Most industrial businesses Rafael has worked with since 2019 do not lack effort or investment. They lack a clear point of application. The diagnostic work is about finding that point. The redesign work is about moving the load. He opened the consultancy out of a small office in the Vila Madalena neighbourhood of São Paulo, with one laptop, a subscription to a process-mapping tool, and a list of six contacts from his years in the industry. The first client was a metal-stamping shop in Santo André that had been running a three-shift operation with a chronic bottleneck on its second press. The fix took nine weeks and cost less than one month of the scrap they had been generating.