Jayme Garfinkel: “Success is until yesterday”

For 47 years at the helm of Porto Seguro, Jayme Brasil Garfinkel helped transform a small, crisis-hit insurer into one of the sector's biggest success stories in the country. But in The Business of Life, presented by Nilton Bonder, he speaks less like an entrepreneur and more like the son who had to take on a mission before he felt ready.

Porto already existed since 1945, but was bought by his father, Abrahão Garfinkel, in 1972. “My father's dream was to be president of an insurance company,” he says. Six years later, Abrahão was hospitalized with intestinal cancer. “He could have survived,” he says. A complication led to sepsis, and he died about a month later. With his father's death, Rosa Garfinkel, Jayme's mother, took over as president of Porto.

Jayme became, in his words, the company's “jack-of-all-trades”. The succession came with a severe crisis: between 1978 and 1983, Porto nearly went bankrupt. “We often talk about my parents' dream, Rosa and Abrahão's, of having a professional, serious company,” he says. At that moment, a friend of his father suggested two options: sell to a bank or hire a general - it was Brazil under dictatorship.

Jayme rejected both. It was, according to him, the most important decision of his life. The family sold properties and put personal assets on the line to sustain the company. Over the years, Jayme turned an idea into culture. He encouraged people to make decisions, protected those who made mistakes in good faith, and set an example as a lesson.

Inspired by Bradesco, he created a daily meeting at 8 am - he wanted employees to arrive and see the directors' cars already parked. When Porto went public in 2004, Jayme had doubts about how to behave in the market. He decided to stick to his usual logic: do what was best for the company, even if it meant sacrificing a year's profit.

“The shareholder will do well if the company does well,” he says. The image he uses for himself is not that of a big executive, but that of a farmer. “I like to water and watch the little plant grow,” he says. For him, success is always provisional. “Success is until yesterday,” he says. “Risk is today.” Also available on Spotify .