After a varied and highly successful business career IFB guest speaker, Javier Ferran, offered some valuable advice to a gathering of Next Generation members in June, on the importance of building and maintaining family values. Javier spent 20 years in the wine and spirits industry with family firm Martini and Rossi which was acquired by Bacardi Group, where he was President and CEO and is now at private equity firm Lion Capital.
He described the best-run family businesses as a ‘superior model’ because they gave the opportunity for long-term planning and the owners and employees could work in alignment. The complications for family firms tend to start in the transition from a single controlling shareholder to several owners when family emotions can get entangled with the business.
He believed that the most important thing a family business needs to do is define its values. The main role of the family should be to safeguard the values and lead by example. Family councils and advisors are only tools they are not solutions to family business issues. Javier observed: “It’s important to talk about these values all the time and to preach them. So that if someone in the business talks against the values it is immediately obvious and they will be embarrassed at what they have said.”
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