Xavier Godoy
Xavier has an electrical engineering degree collecting dust somewhere, because sales grabbed him early and never let go. His career with CB&I kicked off with a one way ticket from Texas to Chile, then Trinidad, then Mexico, chasing project assignments through the late 2000s and mid 2010s that had nothing to do with sitting behind a desk. That is where he got his real education, unfamiliar contracts, unfamiliar rooms and unfamiliar everything, and it taught him the lesson that has carried him since.
Trust is something you earn, one market at a time, through the work itself.’
Then came a chance to step even further outside his comfort zone. He walked away from corporate entirely to run restaurants with his wife, full send into entrepreneurship, no safety net.
His wife still lives in that world today, growing it further, while Xavier found his way back to something big in a different lane. Years later, CB&I came calling with an opportunity too good to pass up, the timing, the role, the momentum all lined up. He came back in 2025 as Commercial Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean. Different chapter, same lesson, bigger scale. Maybe it helps that he is Venezuelan, Spanish and American all at once, three passports worth of perspective on trust.
Adapting To Win
The best lesson international business taught him is that a great strategy adapts, it does not just travel. What closes a deal in Santiago earns you extra time in Port of Spain, what works in Trinidad becomes something new in Panama City. Houston prepared him for this more than he realized. Running restaurants in one of the most diverse cities in the country, he sat across from regulars from every corner of the world, each bringing a different rhythm, a different way of building trust. That instinct carries into every market he works today. Arrive with questions, listen more than you talk, let each culture teach you its own language first.
‘Business development across borders is about having the patience to earn trust on someone else's timeline, not yours.’
Reading the Region before the Deal
Clients keep getting smarter and more disciplined about how they evaluate bids, sharper numbers, cleaner comparisons, less room for a good pitch to paper over a weak one.
Xavier respects that shift.
His role is to add the layer that sits alongside the number, whether the relationship holds up three years in, through a permitting delay or a cost overrun. CB&I builds storage tanks that sit on the ground for more than five decades at times, so he sees his job as bringing that long view into the room, right next to their sharp math, not instead of it.
Business development across borders is about having the patience to earn trust on someone else's timeline, not yours.
Coming back to corporate life sharpened this for him too. Running restaurants, he and his wife made real financial calls over family dinner, decided in twenty minutes over pasta. Corporate moves differently, for good reason. CB&I is the largest and most elite EPC contractor in the world for storage tanks, and the scale of the risk on these contracts earns every bit of process behind it. It has been a genuinely useful challenge learning a new language, where how you say something carries real weight alongside why you're saying it.
What the Kitchen Taught Him about Leadership
The lessons Xavier learned running a restaurant kitchen turned out to be some of the best training he could have gotten for the boardroom, and not in an abstract way. That kitchen opened right before COVID hit. They finally opened the doors, got named a top 10 new restaurant in the city, and weeks later the entire city shut down around them. No consultant, no committee, no time to build consensus before acting. They built the playbook themselves in real time and pivoted fast to keep what they built alive.
That is the muscle must boardrooms cannot teach you, reading a situation with incomplete information and moving before it is comfortable to move.
That is where the motto was born too. If they were going to fail, they'd fail quick. Shoot little bullets before you shoot the big cannon. They tested small changes constantly, moved on quickly from what did not work and doubled down on what did.
Some of their regulars turned out to be CEOs, politicians, people leading enormous organizations. Every one of them, sitting there with a glass of wine, was just a person, same worries, same hope of leaving some kind of mark. Meeting people outside their title changed how he walks into any negotiation now. The person across the table is human first.
He also plays elite competitive tennis, and yes, he is fully a tennis junkie, a habit he's passed down since all three of his kids now compete at an elite level too. No teammates, no timeouts once the match starts, just you and whatever mess is in your head that day. It is his yoga, his therapy, his medicine. He zones in, the noise disappears and he comes out the other side reset.
Advice for the Next Generation
Say yes to the assignment nobody else wants, especially the one that means packing a bag and stepping out of your comfort zone. The instincts Xavier built in Trinidad and Mexico did more for his career than any deal closed at a desk. Resist specializing too early too, the best people in this business speak fluently across engineering, finance and people, because every real deal lives at the intersection of the three.
But if he had to pick the one belief that has carried him further than any of that, it is simpler still. Showing up, consistently, for a long time, beats almost everything else. When things go wrong, and they will, the ones who keep working the problem are the ones still standing at the end.
Build breadth first, keep rowing and depth will find you.
Today that means being the person closing deals across a dozen countries. Tomorrow it might mean building the kind of organization where a hundred people get to do the same thing. Either way, the through line has always been “the people behind every deal.”
