The Miami-based Maldonado family emigrated in part to the United States after political instability forced them to leave Venezuela over a decade ago. Alexander Degwitz, family council chair who heads the family office, GEMIS, talks about how the family chose Miami as its new home base, and how they have stayed unified:
Choosing to stay in business together
We hired a consultant to help us when we left Venezuela. They did a survey to seek consensus and make a plan: What do people want? Do we want to stay in business as a family business, or do we want to be a family that shared financial assets? Or do we believe that we shouldn’t stay together in business at all? For us, unity has been a very strong family value, handed down over generations.
My generation consists of 17 first cousins. Although the original asset was purchased by my great-grandfather, we are more like a third generation — a cousin consortium — than a fourth. Of the 17 in my generation, primarily four have worked actively for the family business, and the rest are mostly independent from the family.
In the survey, we considered setting up shop in one of many countries. We wanted to make our home base a place where the rule of law prevailed, where we could develop roots and be there for the next 10 generations. We analyzed all the countries where it made sense, and the U.S. was by far the winner in our survey. We decided that we want to make this our new home base.
South Florida was a natural fit. We had been coming here all our lives, and many of us felt quite at home here. Today, less than half of us have moved to Florida, but this is where we have the strongest concentration of family members, and this is where we chose to build the new backbone.
We bought our company here, and we’ve been doing investments here. Many of us have bought houses, and our kids have been born and brought up here. It was a soft landing — we truly feel like we’ve been Miami people all along. If we were to invest again in Venezuela, it wouldn’t be the way we did it in the past, where that’s where we had everything. We would keep our backbone here in the U.S.
The importance of family unity
For people who have lost their nation, it’s really tough as one may even lose the sense of purpose. But it was a great thing that in the context of so much change surrounding us, to have the stability, the cohesion and the structure of our family.
My generation has members ranging in age from 21 to 60. We’re very different, with very diverse needs. We have been very united as cousins, partly because we have gone through struggles together. There have been times when we have felt that we could lose everything, and there have been times when we’re sitting on top of the world. To go through this roller coaster together complemented by sharing learning experiences has made us quite a united group of cousins.
Our kids gravitate toward family connections – there is a form of bond, I can’t really explain it. There is a natural attraction among family members. They do seek each other and are naturally inclined to spend time with each other. Is it strong enough for them to want to be family business members together?