In his first week as a new CEO, Manuel Moreno received an assessment that would have been difficult to put on a welcome card. A senior executive told him he would fail. According to Moreno’s account, the executive said the leadership team agreed. The appointment had given him a job. It had plainly left persuasion unfinished.
He describes the encounter without supplying a triumphant comeback. Instead, it changed his priorities. Building credibility with the people around him became the work immediately in front of him. Anyone who has ever presented an immaculate plan to a distinctly unimpressed room will recognise the predicament. The spreadsheet has no column for crossed arms.
Moreno now leads ETHOSystems, a construction and real estate software business in the Evergreen ecosystem. He also founded Alta Homes and Grupo Santa Marta. These roles give him several vantage points on ownership: running a company with an established history, serving guests in Spanish apartments, and backing entrepreneurs who want to acquire businesses. Across them, he pays close attention to what happens after someone says yes.
The chair comes with a history
The difficult first-week encounter appears in Moreno’s writing about emerging CEOs. He does not name the executive or date the exchange. He does explain the adjustment it demanded: more conversations, more attention to stability, less confidence that a prepared growth plan would carry the room. The experience matters because it reveals a leader willing to record an unflattering beginning.
His advice to successors is practical. Meet people and customers. Choose early changes carefully. Make usable decisions without turning every report into a design project. Be candid about change. An incoming executive inherits relationships as well as responsibilities, and employees have their own reasons to be cautious. A founder’s long tenure cannot be transferred with the office keys.
“Focus on people before plans.”
Manuel Moreno, on the early work of a new CEO
There is an everyday fairness in taking that caution seriously. A team can have seen several promising plans already. People remember who followed through, who listened, and who made their jobs harder. A successor arrives with intentions; colleagues have a history against which to measure them. Credibility begins when those two accounts can share a table.
An education with olives in it
Moreno’s formal preparation includes an MBA at UCLA Anderson, where his listed study dates are 2021 to 2023. He received a merit scholarship and participated in the Entrepreneurial Leadership Development Program. His public education record also includes negotiation and decision-making training at the London School of Economics, issued in June 2017.
Then there is the qualification that makes a reader look twice: a master’s credential in olive grove techniques and management from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, issued in December 2018. The business-school vocabulary shares space with agriculture. It is a useful reminder that an operator’s education can concern land and crops as readily as capital and presentations.
London School of Economics
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
UCLA Anderson
He lists both Spanish and English at native or bilingual proficiency. His professional geography crosses the Atlantic, too: California hospitality experience included work at Kasa, while his present public profile places him in New York. The combination is less a tidy origin story than a collection of settings in which the customer, the employee, and the owner see different parts of the same operation.
The software behind the building
At ETHOSystems, Moreno’s remit includes strategy and team development. Pine Services Group describes his priorities as specialist industry knowledge, client service, empowerment, and better processes. It is a specific kind of leadership challenge: helping a team apply its expertise consistently while keeping that expertise close to the customers who need it.
The company implements and supports Sage software for construction and real estate. Its work covers accounting, estimating, payroll, project management, and related systems. It serves clients across the United States and Canada, with specialists in both countries. Training and ongoing support sit alongside implementation, so the relationship continues after a system goes live.
These are the backstage functions of a highly visible industry. People can admire a finished building without considering the work involved in tracking its costs. Software earns its place by helping the people responsible for those details. An elegant demonstration is only the beginning; the useful question comes when someone needs to do the job again tomorrow.
That setting makes Moreno’s interest in process tangible. A process has to make sense to the person using it. The distance between a board-level intention and an employee’s working day is where much of management happens. Closing that distance requires knowledge of the business, and the willingness to ask a question before proposing an answer.
A mentor who made the leap imaginable
Moreno connects his decision to become an operator with Brad Wittwer, Evergreen’s co-founder and former president and chief operating officer. In a public testimonial, he recalls hearing Wittwer address a room of MBAs. The vision and approach gave him confidence to step into an operating role. He describes that choice as changing the trajectory of his life.
What he remembers about the relationship is availability: time to advise, solve problems, and support people while carrying substantial responsibilities. His account puts mentorship inside the working week. Advice becomes valuable when a leader can use it at the moment a decision needs making.
Moreno also points to Evergreen’s combination of autonomy and support. Peer operators, coaching, and a board structure offered a way to lead with meaningful responsibility while drawing on other people’s experience. Its long-term orientation appealed to him. This helps explain why an executive with entrepreneurial interests chose a role inside a wider group.
“It felt like the closest thing to owner-level leadership”
A consideration Moreno identifies in choosing Evergreen
The apartment has a departure time
Alta Homes gives the same interest in coordination a different setting. Moreno founded the hospitality business and describes a mix of owned apartments, properties managed for owners, leased accommodation, and development. In his October 2025 interview about Málaga, he estimated occupancy at roughly six nights out of seven. Maintenance has to fit between guests.
He talks about forecasting, pricing, cleaning, upkeep, guest relations, and data as connected responsibilities. He also names Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table and Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality as influences. His concern extends to neighbours: clear rules, communication, and responsive oversight are part of how he wants the operation to work.
The apartment is a useful antidote to abstract management language. A room must be ready at a particular time for a particular person. An owner expects care; a neighbour expects consideration. Those expectations can be expressed on a dashboard, but somebody still has to act on them. Hospitality gives operational discipline a doorbell.
Patient ownership still needs a decision
Grupo Santa Marta, where Moreno is managing partner, invests in Spain and the United States. Its portfolio spans agriculture, hospitality and real estate, audiovisual production, packaging, and other businesses. Its team includes M&A adviser Santiago Prieto and operations and finance lead Inmaculada Hernández. The firm’s stated approach combines permanent capital with active operational involvement.
Moreno’s September 2026 writing examines what an investment structure without a required exit date permits. Reinvestment can follow a longer horizon. Selling remains possible. He also identifies the costs: owners can mistake inertia for patience, and other investors or operators may have legitimate needs for liquidity. Governance must specify when an investment gets reconsidered.
That qualification makes the argument more interesting. Keeping a business for years cannot excuse refusing to evaluate it. A long horizon gives an owner room to make decisions whose results take time; it also makes honest review necessary. Otherwise, a commitment to permanence can become a comfortable way to postpone an uncomfortable conversation.
Confianza, before the paperwork
In his writing about Spanish business succession, Moreno emphasises the seller’s attachment to employees, customers, and the company’s past. He advises prospective buyers to build relationships before asking for exclusivity, respect longstanding advisers, explain ownership clearly, and protect confidentiality. He uses confianza to describe trust earned through presence and follow-through.
His comparison of Spain and the United States argues that operating habits can travel more easily than assumptions about financing or how sellers decide. Local relationships and context matter. It is a perspective suited to someone whose work takes place in both markets: learning a method does not remove the obligation to understand the person across the table.
Moreno’s October 2026 essay on business consolidation brings those concerns back to growth. He warns about acquiring faster than an organisation can integrate, losing the people who carry customer relationships, and designing financing that requires everything to go well. He treats the ability to absorb another company as a constraint worth respecting.
Read together, these arguments suggest a developing view of ownership: promises need a workable structure, and structures need people who will keep the promises. The first-week warning remains a fitting beginning. Moreno had been given responsibility before he had earned belief. Much of his subsequent thinking concerns the patient, specific work of bringing the two together.