By: Samira Batalha, Head of Communications at PTX Group
In 2022, Darley Tomaz opened an insurance office in Everett, Washington, with no investors and no established network. His value proposition was one most of the industry had overlooked: serve immigrant entrepreneurs in their own language, with people who understood the journey firsthand. Four years later, PTX Group operates in 15 states and serves more than 2,000 active clients. The expansion taught Tomaz a few things about scaling a service business in the United States that he believes apply to any founder, immigrant or not.
Regulation came first. Insurance is licensed state by state, and each new market meant new filings and new operational discipline. Many small agencies treat that as a reason to stay local. Tomaz, drawing on years leading fraud prevention projects in Brazil’s financial sector, treated it as protection. “Every requirement you master becomes something your competitor has to catch up on,” he says. “Complexity filters out the companies that are not serious. If you build that muscle early, expansion stops being frightening.”
Growth into new states rarely began with marketing. It began with existing clients. Contractors, cleaning company owners, and truckers who moved or expanded referred relatives and colleagues in other states, and Tomaz structured the company to reward that dynamic. He hires from within the community the group serves, keeps service available in Portuguese and Spanish alongside English, and measures the team on client retention before new sales. By the time the group reached its tenth state, referrals from existing clients were driving most of the new business, at an acquisition cost no advertising campaign could match.
Focus was harder to maintain. As the group grew, opportunities multiplied: adjacent products, new demographics, partnership offers. Tomaz declined most of them. He expanded only along what he calls the natural financial lifecycle of his core client, from protecting the business through insurance to moving its results across borders. That last step became PTX Exchange, the group’s international transfer platform, now operating corridors to Brazil and Mexico. “We only build what our existing clients are already asking for,” he explains. “Growth that ignores your base is distraction with better branding.”
The American market itself forced adjustments. Tomaz is candid that he arrived with assumptions shaped by Brazilian business culture, and some had to be discarded fast. The main one was the belief that relationships alone close deals. In his experience, the American market rewards relationships when execution backs them up. A warm referral opens the door. Documentation and responsiveness keep it open. “In the United States, your reputation is your last hundred interactions,” he says. “Nobody cares how good you were last year.”
The most counterintuitive discovery was that depth beats breadth. The group’s concentration on Latin American immigrant entrepreneurs, a segment many financial companies treat as marginal, proved to be its main structural advantage. The community’s needs are specific, underserved, and interconnected, so every solved problem deepens the relationship and reveals the next one. Larger competitors struggle to replicate that depth with any budget. It cannot be bought. It has to be lived.
Tomaz’s own story remains the clearest proof point. He immigrated after calculating, during his honeymoon, that the American financial sector alone represented two and a half times Brazil’s entire GDP, then deciding that if he was going to work exhausting hours anyway, he would do it in the world’s most competitive market. The bet was that his particular outsider’s perspective was precisely the asset the market was missing.
“Fifteen states was never the goal,” Tomaz says. “The goal was to build something our community could rely on completely. The geography is what happens when you get that part right.”
