Topaz: Navigating Governance, Legacy, and Change

Since its founding in 2011, the Garza Sada brothers and their father positioned Topaz among leading family offices in Monterrey, Mexico, with several assets under management. Topaz aspired to have a transformative impact across multiple Mexican industries. An industry titan himself, founder Dionisio Garza Medina had previously forged a 30-year-plus career at Grupo Alfa, a publicly listed Mexican conglomerate, serving as its chairman and CEO, and positioning the group among global leaders in the auto parts and cooked food businesses. By the late 2010s, Topaz had multiple assets across the education, oil and gas, and real estate sectors, as well as investments in venture capital. In mid-2020, the group encountered unexpected challenges as Dionisio Garza Medina, the chairman and driving force behind Topaz´s decisions, suffered several strokes and took an extended leave of absence, leading his sons and wife, Balbina, to support the ailing Dionisio and to grow the business. After the strokes, the brothers adopted a previously designed yet untested governance structure, creating an executive committee whereby they agreed on business decisions and relying on an advisory board created earlier. Four years later, as the siblings reflected on the governance changes they had implemented, as well as Topaz’s structure and their respective roles, whereby Dionisio son was at the helm and brothers Luis and Pablo were respectively responsible for wealth management and real estate, they questioned: would it all work out? And how would they evaluate their success in advancing Topaz’s mission of generating transformation, impact, and leadership in the industries where it operated?