Moreover, many families have grown internationally and have attracted external management to head daily operations, which results in less family members being involved and therefore a greater need for a transparent and effective communication channel.
The internet is the ideal tool to keep family members informed about business, investment and family news on a continuous basis, wherever and whenever they want.
How it began
About three years ago, in November 2006, I attended my first Family Business event, along with 60 other next generation owners from North-Western European families. I’m a next generation member of Aliaxis and Etex Group, two Belgium-based family businesses active in plastics and building materials respectively. A professor from the INSEAD Family Business Center chaired the seminar and Edouard Janssen, a 6th generation member of the Solvay family, gave a case study about the challenges he faced when he left Morgan Stanley to join his family business, Solvay.
Throughout the day, I was struck to hear the following things from Janssen and from the audience:
• Good communication is at the heart of successful families
• As time passes, a growing number of families, including mine, find themselves facing a larger number of family members, as they go from Generation two to three, three to four, and sometimes to five or even six and so on.
Janssen was puzzled by the contradiction between the importance of communication to keep a family’s entrepreneurial spirit alive and the strong will to be discrete that characterised his family (“pour vivre heureux, vivons caché”). He was curious to understand the tension between generations within a family business: different lifestyles (20th vs 21st century), diverse interests (mature businesses vs innovation), a change in geographical focus (the West vs emerging markets), etc.
Janssen and I exchanged our business cards and over the next six months conducted intense brainstorming and exploration.
Our discussions made us realize our use of the internet enabled us to keep in touch with friends and to work with colleagues from all over the world. We felt the same tools could be used, although differently, within our own families.
We looked actively for a solution we could use but finally realized no single offering would combine all the tools we needed in one place. In addition, our families had some very specific needs:
• the platform had to provide bank- level security
• it had to be easy-to-use for all generations
• the solution had to be customisable, to meet the changing needs of our families over time (i.e. if the goal was to do archiving, the time horizon was 20 or 40 years rather than one or two years, which in the web industry is already a lot)
• any web platform had to be managed by a trusted party, so we could keep control over the data and guarantee its absolute confidentiality
By meeting with some other European families in business, we realised most families in business shared similar needs. Some of them had developed their own web solution internally but most did not work in the long run as they didn’t have the technical know-how or financial resources to make it evolve professionally over time.
We decided to set up a company in order to build a very specific solution, combining the best aspects of applications such as online banks, social networks, collaborative applications and wiki’s, where costs could be shared over multiple families.
To make sure we would build the right solution, we worked closely with various family executives to define the features that would make the platform really useful.
The company is called Younited S.A., as we are aiming to unite families, and the platform we have developed is called TrustedFamily.net
Since our launch in September 2008, we have various families from all over the world (USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium) using our platform. The families using TrustedFamily. net control operational businesses with more than US$70bn in combined sales.
Practically, what is younited?
Younited has built the TrustedFamily application around important pillars for wealthy families:
Family governance:
Every family in business works like a mini-organisation. Family leaders or family executives need to:
• manage data about their members (contact information, financial information, reports)
• organise events (board meetings, shareholder meetings, conferences, training sessions)
• organise and preserve the family archive (business and investment reports, presentations, press releases, minutes of meetings, videos, photos)
Information technology is now used all over the world to automate recurrent procedures and to better manage data or content over a long period of time. Families in business should also be able to leverage those tools to increase productivity and efficiency in their various activities.
Family training & education
With today’s business operations becoming more complex and more global, it is more important than ever to commit the necessary resources to train and educate next generation members to become responsible owners.
Many wealthy families encourage their members to get involved in entrepreneurial activities or philanthropic activities that are supported by the family’s emotional capital, financial capital and strong network.
Online video is a great e-learning tool, and can be used to train and encourage owners and next generation members to get involved and better prepared for their future.
Family collaboration
It’s crucial to give opportunities to family members to get involved. By doing so, you make sure the next generation remains interested and close to the family’s operations. Some operational businesses have grown to become truly global corporations and family management has sometimes been replaced by external management. As a result, the link between the family and the business can become weaker. In the same way, some family businesses that have been sold have been converted to purely financial and legal family offices. For next generation owners, the emotional link to financial investments that are traditionally managed through a family office is often weaker than with operational businesses with a long-standing family history.
Online wiki’s and web-based collaboration platforms have introduced new ways to exchange ideas, gather feedback and work together on projects. Family members that are involved in the family council, the philanthropy group, the investment council or the next generation group can use them to be more productive and better organised, to make sure that everything they do is archived and to make sure that all participants are always up-to-date.
Family networking
Some of the most powerful assets of every family are often its network, brand name and values. Information technology is a great tool to leverage your family network: thousands of people now use forums to get quick answers on their questions from their peers and social networks to find and connect with people that have the same interests. Just imagine what could happen when if you could leverage the collective knowledge of all your cousins without having to call them separately?
TrustedFamily allows families to respond to the needs of next generation members, who in turn feel they are being listened to as they already use similar web 2.0 tools on a daily basis. Family offices or family managers appreciate how it simplifies many administrative tasks, such as event organization, database management and archiving, in a secure way.
