During school holidays, anyone with kids knows how hard it is to keep up a work routine on one hand and keep the children entertained on the other. With that in mind, as in previous years, my family and I decided to head to Florianópolis and extend the trip to Beto Carrero World.
It had been at least ten (10) years since I'd last visited Beto Carrero World, and clearly a lot had changed at the park! Starting with the park's own app (“BCW”), which is very reminiscent of the Disney and Universal parks. Another thing that really caught my attention was the level of care, cleanliness and variety of new attractions, blended, of course, with the traditional shows and rides that made BCW the largest theme park in Latin America.
As I walked through the park, one thing that stood out prominently was the tribute to its founder, Beto Carrero — or, more precisely, João Batista Sérgio Murad, an advertising executive, TV host, country singer and circus performer born in São José do Rio Preto (SP) in 1937. In fact, BCW — or, more specifically, J.B. WORLD ENTRETENIMENTOS S/A, with share capital of R$ 507,142,655.46 (five hundred and seven million, one hundred and forty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-five reais) — had pulled off two remarkable feats in the business world: first, overcoming a crisis rooted in management and governance centred entirely on the founding partner; and second, after the founding partner/shareholder passed away, successfully carrying out a family succession and charting a new course that went beyond the persona of Beto Carrero himself.
As the story goes, even before Beto Carrero's death, the company faced serious legal and accounting problems. In a case brought by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, the Federal Court in Itajaí (SC) convicted João Batista Sérgio Murad of tax evasion involving approximately R$ 20 million (with the original charge pointing to R$ 63.6 million evaded between 1994 and 1996), resulting in a fine equivalent to 18,000 times the minimum wage and a nearly four-year prison sentence, later commuted to community service.
These debts and accounting problems led Murad to rethink how the business was run. In 2001, amid these difficulties, he chose to professionalise management, handing operations over to executives trained by the Fundação Dom Cabral business school in Belo Horizonte, and scaling back his own involvement in decisions to a daily lunch with the management team. That was the park's first major corporate turning point: the shift from a personalist, founder-centred style of management to a collegial model, while still keeping the capital under family control.
I remember when Beto Carrero's death was announced, on February 1, 2008, at the age of 70, at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital in São Paulo. As one might expect, his death marked the most delicate moment in the company's history: the park had to prove it could keep growing and hold on to its identity without the founder-character who had started it all.
First, it successfully carried out the family succession. The role passed to one of his sons, Alexandre “Alex” Murad, who took over as president at just 28 or 29 years old. Just months after his father's death, Alex was already publicly stating that management would keep the administrative routine already in place, and that he would not take on the cowboy persona his father had created, choosing instead to focus on running the business. From a corporate standpoint, the park remained a closely held corporation (sociedade anônima de capital fechado), with Alexandre as its main shareholder — a textbook family business.
Second, it diversified the park's sources of appeal, moving away from its reliance on the cowboy character and betting heavily on licensing global family and children's entertainment brands. This is how new areas of the park came to life through partnerships with DreamWorks Animation, bringing in characters like Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda, followed by deals with Universal Studios (Fast & Furious), Mattel (Hot Wheels) and, more recently, Hasbro (Nerf Mania, 2023).
I made a point of researching and sharing a bit of BCW's history, because, to a large extent, in our day-to-day work at the firm we come across companies facing crises stemming from tax liabilities, for example. Others face enormous corporate difficulties when the founding partner passes away. In other words, BCW's story is the story of how a company deals with successive crises and, even so, with great resilience, manages to remain a standout on the national stage!
My short trip to BCW, besides entertaining my daughters, once again served as inspiration to keep helping our clients get through whatever crises come their way.
Ricardo Petereit
August 4, 2026
