Family Business – The Daughter Also Rises
Growing up, Ana-Marie Codina Barlick remembers visiting her father’s real-estate projects on Sunday afternoons and working at his company summers during college. Today, she’s CEO of Codina Partners, joining her high-profile dad Armando to develop Downtown Doral and other ventures across South Florida.
The studious 45-year-old with a top MBA is shifting their business strategy. With land for new development becoming scarce, she’s switching from his build-and-sell model to a strategy of build-and-hold. She wants Codina Partners to be known for “creating, managing and operating great places for people to live and work,” and not just buildings but entire communities.
“As the second generation in the organization, I see my role more as steward than pure entrepreneur,” says Ana-Marie, a mother of three and patron of the arts. During Covid, for instance, her team organized outdoor events at Downtown Doral for residents to gather safely, helping restaurants and stores there as well. “We feel you can do good and do well,” she says.
Ana-Marie exemplifies a growing trend: daughters moving up to lead their family’s business or at least part of it, including their family foundations. In Coral Gables, that’s the case with Christina Pappas, who’s set to helm the Keyes Company real-estate brokerage built up by her father Mike; and with Melissa Medina, who runs eMerge Americas, the venture launched by her dad Manny to develop Miami as a tech hub for the Americas. It’s also the case with Adriana Cisneros, CEO since 2013 of e Cisneros Group, the international media and real-estate conglomerate begun by her grandfather in Venezuela, expanded by her dad Gustavo and based until recently in the Gables.
Research shows many hurdles for daughters following after well-known, successful dads. The biggest challenge is to build credibility, both with people inside the family business and with suppliers, customers and other stakeholders outside, says Marianna Makri, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University of Miami. That’s partly because women remain under-represented in leadership positions in business in general.
“Daughter successors need to over- come the ‘invisibility factor’ and work harder than sons to establish themselves as the new leader,” says Makri. “What helps build credibility is the daughter’s education and previous work experience outside the family business.”
Daughters do have one advantage over sons, however: less testosterone and hence less direct rivalry. “The father-son relationship is usually more competitive, which makes for more conflict and more abrupt change in control,” says Makri. “The power play is less likely with ‘Daddy’s little girl’ dynamics.” But harmony can have a downside. Dads may delay succession to daughters, “because the power struggle is not there,” she says.
Active planning helps ease the shift in control, says Adriana Cisneros, 42. She and her dad Gustavo spent five years preparing her to become CEO, even restructuring the business in line with her vision. Without that groundwork, “tough questions about decisions are not answered and … the new leader is not given the budget or space to decide what the direction for the company is,” she told a Yale University forum.
Codina Barlick: a Family Business or a Business Owned by a Family?
Codina Barlick never planned “to take over” her father Armando’s business. As a teen, she thought she might pursue a different field. She studied art history at Trinity College in Connecticut and tried a stint in fashion.
But real-estate called. She worked two years in leasing at Tisch Speyer Properties in New York, earned an MBA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then headed home to work in project management with her father’s company. “I love real estate. It’s concrete. You’re building something. You’re leaving something behind,” Ana-Marie says.
After her dad and his associates sold their business in 2006, she and Armando started a new venture together, Codina Partners. Their key project was Downtown Doral, a city within a city spanning 250 acres, with residences, retail and commercial space the family aims to manage long-term. Ana-Marie led master planning. She even forged a unique partnership with the Miami-Dade School Board to create dual-language schools that now rank among Florida’s best, drawing families to the area.
“Everything we do – the schools, public art – it’s about ‘How do we make this community really special?’ instead of ‘Here’s a checklist of what you need to do,” she says, underscoring her long-term vision.”
Research shows that father-daughter transitions work best when roles are well-needed. Ana-Marie says that part came easily. Each plays to their strengths. Armando tends to be more big-picture and people-oriented. She’s happy behind the scenes, building organizations and making operations run smoothly.
“There are certain things he doesn’t like to do and shouldn’t have to do at his age, so I let him cherry pick what he wants,” says Ana-Marie, the only one of Armando’s four daughters in the business.
Armando says Ana-Marie worked her way up to become CEO, as any top executive does in a serious company. “She earned it,” he tells Coral Gables Magazine. “We are not a family business. We are a business owned by a family. We are a meritocracy, and she had the passion.. the intellect.. and learned the business. She can operate it better than me. I don’t even go to staff meetings anymore.”
The duo come from very different backgrounds. Armando arrived in the US alone as a child, one of some 14,000 Cuban “Pedro Pan” children sent away for their safety by their parents after the island’s 1959 revolution. He’s self-educated and self-made, making his first fortune selling a medical data company. Starting in 1972, he bought land and developed industrial parks around Miami International Airport. More recently, in Coral Gables, he’s developed such iconic buildings as Bacardi’s regional headquarters on Le Jeune Road – not to mention the mixed use complex on Salzedo Street that houses the corporate headquarters along with apartment residents and the restaurant Bachour. Ana-Marie in contrast was born into a more comfortable life in Florida, and into a family business she cherishes and seeks to steward for future generations.
Those backgrounds – plus South Florida’s evolving market with less land for development, rising prices and tighter regulation – shape their different approaches: Armando the risk-taker, Ana-Marie the more cautious. “There’s an expression in entrepreneurial families. You don’t want to gamble money you already have to make money you don’t need. We’re trying to have that perspective,” she says.
Build-and-hold is the business model for Codina Partners’ proposed Regency Tower in downtown Gables, for example, luxury apartments where Armando plans to live, and for their Beacon Logistics Park, a warehouse-industrial complex underway in Hialeah. Their company currently employs some 60 people.
Outside of work, Ana-Marie says her dad respects her private life, leaving her time to pursue her interests. She’s devoted to the Miami City Ballet, led its board of trustees and keeps a signed poster from its ballet director on her office wall. “I was a terrible dancer,” she concedes. “The closest I could get to being a ballerina is supporting the ballet.”
Pappas: “You Have to Work Harder to Prove Yourself”
For Christina Pappas, the spark to join the family business was her grandfather’s death. It was 2011, and Christina was working in sales for hotels in Los Angeles. She realized she no longer wanted to be so far from her loved ones. She didn’t want to regret not spending more time together.
Her grandfather Ted – a gifted negotiator – had built up the real-estate brokerage that Kenneth Keyes founded in Miami in 1926. He’d bought out Keyes in the early 1960s. Her father Mike took over the business in the 1990s, further growing its agent network and also buying properties, managing them and renting them. As Christians, the Pappas had been tithing 10 percent of company profits for decades and also giving time and cash to many community groups. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” says Pappas, quoting the New Testament.
Then 26, new to the Keyes’ Gables office, Pappas knew she’d have to prove herself, especially to peers. It wasn’t enough to have spent Decembers helping her mom bake baklava and other treats for company employees, Sundays playing real-estate sales with her siblings at dad’s office, or summers working at the rm. She’d studied hospitality at Cornell University and spent four years in sales for hotels in L.A. But her dad had warned her about the challenges in taking over a business from a parent, that she would have to work harder than others to earn her stripes. “Once you’re leading, if you do really great, they’ll say, ‘It’s because of what your predecessor did.’ If you do really horribly, they’ll say, ‘Oh look, she couldn’t handle it,’” she says.
Pappas opted to build credibility through professional groups. She started NextGen within Keyes for young professionals, joined the Women’s Council of Realtors and eventually became active with the Miami Association of Realtors, working her way up. This year, at age 36, she becomes president of Florida Realtors, the nation’s largest state realtor group, the 13th woman to lead the group and the youngest president in the organization ‘s 105-year history. She’s also volunteered with many civic groups, from the Junior League to United Way, chairing key committees. “That [professional and community work] has helped earn peer respect and confidence in my own skills as a leader outside of the company,” says self-driven Christina, now a mom raising two children.
As vice president at Keyes, Christina is planning to shift strategy. She takes to heart the teaching of her granddad and dad that “We’re here to be good stewards and take care of the people who work with us,” but she aims to extend that credo beyond commissions, training, and other longtime benefits for independent agents and employees. She wants to offer them a stake in real-estate itself, creating investment funds they can participate in and profit from, as property values increase. “We’re looking to purchase multi-family and retail properties with a buy and hold idea, and once we pay off debt, start to pay dividends to realtors, and at the right time, sell and buy more,” says Christina.
Today, Keyes operates with some 3,600 agents from Volusia County south to Miami-Dade, and is ranked as the largest independent brokerage in Florida. It also runs a title company, mortgage firm and management company. Together, the group handled more than $8 billion in real-estate sales and other transactions in 2020, the last full-year data available.
Christina says her father is helping prepare her to make bigger decisions for the hefty group. The two discuss their decision-making process, analyzing each step and the consequences of decisions. By now, Christina says, she’s internalized their discussions, even joking to herself: “What would Mike ask?”
Medina: Heading Up Some of the Family Enterprise, Not All
Daughters usually don’t want to “fill Daddy’s shoes,” but rather stake out their own path, building on contributions before them, studies show. Some choose to lead just part of their family enterprise.
Melissa Medina, for example, isn’t active with two big companies her dad Manny founded, software maker AppGate and data-center network Cyxtera, both publicly traded and based in the Gables. The mother of five with an MBA from the University of Florida instead runs the two civic-minded ventures he launched: eMerge Americas and the Medina Family Foundation. With both, she champions women and children, donating family funds to such groups as Women in Innovation (WIN) Lab.
“My drive comes from my parents and their journey to the U.S.,” says Medina, 42, recalling, for instance, her dad’s arrival by boat from Cuba in the middle of the night. “I want to make sure I continue their legacy and the passion they have” to give back to the South Florida community that nurtured them. Today, the children of Medina and her peers are growing up in their mom’s offices. As barriers to women erode in the work- place, a younger generation of daughters may soon also rise.