I Took Over the Family Business at 26 When My Dad Died

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Camilla Kodsi, 27, the principal of Ark Capital Group, a Florida-based real estate investment firm founded by her father, Isaac Kodsi. When her father died unexpectedly in August 2025 in the middle of developing Arbor Residences, a residential building in Coconut Grove, Florida, Camilla took over the company and his projects. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My dad started Ark Capital. He used to focus on debt and equity, but right now we’re focusing on development. We’re acquiring properties, like Arbor Residences, a boutique condominium, and revitalizing them.

When I was 24, my dad was like, “Hey, I have this project down the street. You need to get your sales license and I’m going to put you on my sales team.” That was my first introduction to real estate. I did sales for about a year, and then I became fully involved in the project.

I kept sitting in on construction meetings, got involved with some subcontractors here and there, and I just loved it. My dad needed help with permitting and pointed to me in one of the meetings, like, “This girl’s got nothing but time,” and threw me in. That’s pretty much how it started.

I definitely fell into this career — it’s a passion that found me before I found it.

When my dad passed, I had already been working with him for a year and a half.

I don’t think this should have been my first thought, but the only thing that got me through was that I wanted to be given Arbor.

Arbor is the last building of my dad’s career, and I wasn’t going to let it just slip away. It had to be completed.

I needed to finish it. I felt like I didn’t have a choice — I had to get him there and I knew I was the only one who was going to be able to do that.

I quickly had to take on a lot more responsibility

When I first started working for my dad, I didn’t really know what my role was.

I kept trying to get my dad to give me a title, and I guess we both didn’t know — whatever I felt like that day is what I would tell people that I was. It went from project engineer, to project manager, to owner’s rep — I was everything.

Then, the second my father passed, my role became developer. I took on basically everything that I was already doing and everything that he was doing. I became the boss.

Every conversation that was like, “Yo, dad, we have this issue, I need you to handle it” — now I had to handle it.

I didn’t do it alone — I had a lot of direction and my team was great. But there definitely were situations where I had to be in front of building officials or I had to go to the council.

We had a lien on the property for a tree violation with the previous developer and it was me that had to go speak at city hall. I was shaking when I walked out of there, but it went great. That’s something that definitely would have been him instead of me. I probably would have been sitting next to him, but it would have been him talking to the council.

The project has always been personal to me.

When my dad passed, it became personal in a different way.

The building is a place where I felt like he was very much still present, and very much alive, and everybody there made it feel that way.

That project saved me on my worst days. It gave me a purpose, it gave me a place to go, it gave me a different kind of family. And everybody there working on it was there because they cared about my father, too. They kept showing up.

And if the team kept seeing me show up, I knew they would, too.

Eight months to the day my dad passed, we got our Temporary Certificate of Occupancy on March 3. We started our closings at the end of March, and that’s technically when everybody started moving in.

I don’t think his passing truly hit me until that moment. It was just so surreal.

Taking over my dad’s company at 26 was intimidating, but I used my age to my advantage

To me, to be good at any job, be a part of any team, or any business, you can’t have an ego.

I am not a know-it-all kind of person — I never have been — but to walk into a room and just acknowledge the fact that I’m learning and that I was 26 at the time I took over helped me. Ultimately, if people know you’re passionate and you care, they’ll match that and they’ll help you.

I was just starting out, and people respected how much I cared. They could see how much I wanted to learn, and they could see how much I wanted to move the project.

I would never say that my age, to me, was a problem. I’m sure there were people who were like, “She’s young, she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” but I never really heard that.

I am now 27, and I did start with a heavy hitter of a project as my first one — typically, this isn’t where people start their careers. I hope that in the next five years, I will have set myself up for another Arbor by the time I’m 33 or 34.

Seeing it come together has been crazy. I think that’s why I fell in love with it.

The hardest job was finishing it without him. It’s seeing it today knowing that he will never see it.

This is an understatement to say it this way, but he was my favorite person. So to work with him was amazing. It was probably one of the best experiences I ever could have had, and I was so grateful to the building that it gave me that.

I think this is something I’ll do forever.