Pymes Exports are Down, Family-Owned Dynamics Likely Why

Puerto Rico pymes should, by most expectations, be exporting more. A younger generation is stepping into ownership of the island’s family businesses, digital tools have lowered the cost of reaching customers abroad, and government incentives reward companies that sell beyond the island.

Instead, the number of local businesses that export is moving in the opposite direction.

Pymes is Spanish for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), and only 4,490 of them exported goods or services in 2024, down 7.1% from 4,831 the year before, according to the Department of Economic Development and Commerce’s (DDEC) 2024 Annual SME Report.

Against a base of roughly 53,000 private establishments on the island, that means only 8.5% of Puerto Rico businesses sells beyond the island’s shores, a small share compared to the rest of the United States.

According to data from the U.S. Small Business Administration, some 2.6 million SMEs export, or about 42% the total. Puerto Rico’s single-digit export rate sits at the low end of that range, and unlike the national trend, it is moving down rather than up.

Part of the explanation, one business adviser says, lies not in tariffs or logistics but in how the island’s companies are owned and run. Most local pymes are family enterprises, a structure that carries a peculiar set of instincts about growth.

Socioemotional wealth vs. export growth

“When business owners treat their companies like mom-and-pop shops, where the owner needs to be there all the time, they don’t realize they’re closing the door to having a bigger vision for the business,” said Suz Amaro, a business coach who has spent nearly two decades advising family-owned companies across the Caribbean and Latin America, including Puerto Rican pymes, on how to professionalize and scale.

Asked what she considers the biggest misconception local companies hold about exporting and internationalization, Amaro reframed the question. It is less a misconception, she said, than a handicap, an “everything goes through me” mentality, in which every sale, decision and plan must go through the founder.

That instinct has a name in the academic literature. A 2017 study in the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development found that family-controlled firms tend to export less than their non-family counterparts, linking the behavior to a desire to preserve what researchers call “socioemotional wealth”: family control, identity, continuity and independence.

Exporting means ceding some of that, bringing in outside capital, outside executives, outside partners, and many families would rather stay smaller and stay in charge.

A heavy lid on local growth

The stakes are large because family businesses are not a niche. There is no official count of how many of Puerto Rico’s businesses are family-owned, a data gap that itself complicates matters, but regional benchmarks suggest the share is high.

In the neighboring Dominican Republic, various estimates put family firms at around 80% of the private market, and studies place family enterprises at 80% to 90% of all businesses across North America. If Puerto Rico tracks anywhere near those figures, the export reflex of family companies is, in effect, the export reflex of the island’s economy.

The question may not be simply whether they are ready to export, but whether they have built an organization capable of growing beyond its founder.

Amaro says one of the most common pain points she sees is that family-owned businesses rarely draw a clear line between family dynamics and professional relationships from the outset. That blurring, she notes, is what keeps owners prioritizing family control, identity and continuity, and makes them more cautious about the decisions, outside capital, professional management, and international expansion that scaling requires.

The generational handoff now underway might have been expected to loosen that grip, but in practice, a successor who inherits a founder-dependent company inherits the dependency along with it, unless the underlying structure changes. Passing the business to a daughter or son does not, by itself, make it exportable.

Set up a structure beyond the founder

The fix, Amaro argues, is building a company culture and identity strong enough that the business does not depend on any one person. That means every team member understanding the company’s vision, knowing their role in it, and being empowered to make decisions that move the business forward.

By standardizing processes and installing structure, she says, founders can focus on what comes next instead of micromanaging every decision. Before a company can replicate its operations in another market, its leaders have to ensure its culture, processes and identity are strong enough to function without the founder in the room.

Ultimately, Amaro’s message is less about expansion for its own sake than about building businesses meant to last. For Puerto Rico’s family-owned companies, she suggests, the question may not be simply whether they are ready to export, but whether they have built an organization capable of growing beyond its founder, its current generation and, eventually, the island itself.

Amaro is co-founder and creator of the philosophy behind ViveSmart, a firm founded in the Dominican Republic in 2008 by Amaro and Mario Vitiello that brought international management expertise into the Dominican executive market before expanding to Miami in 2014 to reach the broader U.S. Latino and Latin American market. The firm will hold its Negocio por Diseño Super Day on Friday, September 18, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Hotel Royal Sonesta in San Juan. In Puerto Rico,

Amaro says 150 local companies have passed through its entrepreneurial development programs in the past five years. Its work centers on helping businesses preserve a family company’s identity while professionalizing it enough to survive and grow.