25 March 2021: Family subscribers to The European Family Investment Company Report plus a few invited guests and experts, including heads of family business associations, from across 11 countries, met online for the fifth time.

Live Case: Reinventing the FIC post-liquidity event: ‘What do we invest in now and how do we do it?’’

The live case was presented by three representatives, two family members and a non-family senior executive, from a private FIC. They had recently gone through both a generational change and a liquidity event, selling a major portfolio business. The new family leader outlined their history, a family-in-business for more than 100 years, the process they had been through, current structure, their new target investment sector and access strategy. The other family member and senior executive offered their comments before discussion was opened-up to attendees.

Breakouts: What is best practice in working with external professionals to help deliver a direct investing strategy?’

The FIC’s new investment strategy meant that it would be working with an external, professional investment manager. The family was keen to obtain advice from their peers at the Virtual Conversation about this and we split into breakout groups to debate the question they wanted answered.

Takeaways

At the conclusion of the meeting, based upon what our guest speakers had said and combined with the experiences and ‘war stories’ shared by our attendees in plenary and breakout sessions, we identified, condensed and distributed our Takeaways. Those from the Live Case session were under the headings of: Big picture, It’s a process, Purpose first, Return is not everything, Consensus, The Leader. Those from the Breakouts were under the headings of: What does ‘fantastic’ look like in ten years’ time, Exclusivity, Shadow equity, Bridging the knowledge gap into a new sector, Alignment of values, Internal vs. external, NextGen entrepreneurs.

After the ‘formal’ Virtual Conversation had closed we invited attendees to join the guest speaker, our team and fellow attendees for a Virtual Coffee in the Cyber Foyer, when we had a very open and wide-ranging discussion of family business and investment issues.

NOTE: to enquire how to receive the full text of the Takeaways from this EFIC Virtual Conversation or how to join our community of family investment companies please email: info @ deanbridgeinternational.com