When both a family business and the family that owns it are expanding, governance becomes more important — and more complex. Maya Lobo, a third-generation member of the family owners of Grupo Protexa, based in Monterrey, Mexico, has seen this firsthand. She has been involved in the family’s governance work and the evolution of its family office. She serves as the family liaison between the shareholders, board and management. She also chairs the Protexa Foundation and is a member of the family council. She discusses the decisions the family has made — and those it will face in the future:
Origins of the family office
We officially formed our family office, PTX Capital, in 2016, but it is older than that. For a long time, we had a department embedded in our business called the patrimony office, which took care of our second-generation shareholders: my father and his three brothers.
The family has different divisions and holdings. We wanted to be sure that business decisions by our operators would not affect the owners. So that’s how it started: The patrimony office took care of the owners’ tax returns, their company holdings and personal companies.
Around 2013, we started on a path of putting better corporate governance in place. At the same time, the issue of spinning out the family office came up — we needed to separate it from the operating companies. We knew that sooner or later the family office needed to be not only a service office but also an investment office. That’s why we named it PTX Capital.
Expanding horizons
With the family growing, we decided we needed to expand our horizons regarding our family enterprise to make sure we were planning for the long term. We have about 65 family members at the moment, and the third generation has 13 households. Although most of the family lives in Monterrey, some are in the U.S.
We have looked at other families and understand that investing together is important for continuity and longevity. But coming from an operational family, getting to that moment has taken a while. Families move slowly — you have to coordinate everybody’s intention at the same time for the whole bunch to be willing to move forward.
In 2022, the family agreed to pursue investing together in the future.
Improving governance
The reason we were finally able to get to this point in 2022 was that we had worked on our governance from 2016 on, strengthening our family decision-making process.
We’ve set up our family governance alongside our family office, and it has helped our family dynamic. Now we’ve got a family council, an owners council and an investment committee.
We have heavily invested in just being together, as well as shareholder meetings and retreats. These are all important. All of that will lead into being able to plan for the future, because we have set up a good base.
Future tradeoffs
We are also looking at whether and how we can continue to be a service-oriented family office.
We keep looking at the scope of what the family office provides: some legal services, all of the tax returns, some concierge services, though not a lot.
This is one of our questions: Where do we draw the line? As the family grows, do we just keep adding capacity to the family office? At what point would we need to charge for these services? Are we just going to take care of everybody, no matter how many kids anybody has? Do we provide tax services to anybody who is over 18 and is economically active and is a shareholder or a future shareholder? It’s something that we have not yet tackled completely.
Another challenge as the family grows: We’ve got the fourth generation coming, with more family members. How are we preparing them? How do we make sure the education piece is in place so we have members in the future who are willing to participate in our governance and our board and have been through the right schooling and career experience?
If we’re going to be a more professional family, that means fewer family members in the business. We’ve already got a professional CEO and professional boards. But how do we balance that with keeping the family close to the business so they will want to care for it?
