by Joel Rubin | Photos by Beth Hester
Thank goodness Natalia turned the car around. The Wilmington, Delaware native was at a bar in Virginia Beach back in 2008 and noticed a cute guy across the room. They talked, they danced, and she left, lamenting to her older sister, “I’m never going to see that guy again.” They drove back to the bar and she handed Juan “Rafa” Famania her phone number. The rest, as they say, is history.
Turns out they both were in Hampton Roads living with their sisters. Natalia was a hostess at P.F. Chang’s and Rafa had come from Puerto Rico at his mother’s insistence, first finding unfulfilling work as a low-level sandblaster’s helper. But that job helped to spark Rafa’s interest in the trades. The couple briefly moved to Puerto Rico in 2010, but Rafa returned to the U.S. a year later to reestablish himself, while Natalia, pregnant with their son, remained for a time before following him back to the States.
Natalia, who has a B.A. in criminal justice, became a legal assistant, and Rafa went to work at BAE Shipyard as an apprentice, this time focusing on aluminum welding, a highly desirable skill because of its prevalence on Navy cruisers. “Not many people knew how to work on that metal, but Rafa had a real knack for it,” she says.
Rafa became so proficient that the bosses took notice, and at age 24, observing that the shipyard owners were millionaires, Rafa conferred with his equally ambitious wife, and they decided to strike out on their own. “We founded JRF Ship Repair in 2015, and I learned how to do all the back-office duties while he was out bidding on contracts at BAE and Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY),” recalls Natalia, who by then was raising their second child (they now have four) while doing the books at their kitchen table.
Natalia and Rafa Famania planning their daily schedule
“I blew them away at BAE, completing my first job in four days, one that was supposed to take three weeks,” says Rafa. His reputation grew as did his staff, which today includes one of his former supervisors.
JRF is doing much more than aluminum welding today, which is why the walls in the lobby of its new spacious headquarters on George Washington Highway, adjacent to NNSY, feature more than a dozen naval vessels that they have helped repair from the Cole to the Bataan, to the Gettysburg and the Normandy. “I still have the bolt from a door on the Normandy,” Rafa explains. “That’s the three-week job we finished in four days.” BAE has named JRF their Gold Medalist in ship repair three times.
Between permanent and contracted employees, JRF has a million-dollar-a-month payroll. “We are also very active in the community,” says Natalia of their involvement in the Virginia Ship Repair and Virginia Maritime Associations. “We were asked to sit at the Mayor’s table at the State of the City speech recently and got a shout out from the podium about how proud Shannon Glover was of our growth.”
Tools of the trade
Family members, including a brother, brother-in-law, sister and a handful of cousins are now working for charming a husband-wife team Natalia and Rafa. Because she is from Delaware and he from a U.S. territory, this isn’t technically an immigrant success story. But given where the Famania family started and how far they’ve come—owning a thriving business in Portsmouth and a home in Smithfield—it sure sounds like one.
