Changes in Ownership Roles

Listen to Eva Wathén tell us about moving from working IN to ON her family business. In a family business, as family members take on an ownership role, they are required to concentrate on long-term decisions to help better the business' future.

Basically, it was our father; he was the one man, one voice running the company. I was working operatively, but the main idea which came up with my father, I think it was one of the wisest things to do, he said like this, ‘that from now on, you should be concentrating ninety percent on ownership and board issues and only ten percent in the operative issues.’ What that meant was we would have to go higher up in the helicopter, so to say, to actually see how the ownership should be developing in the coming years, because father was actually the last man, it was one man, one voice. That was the ownership. So, going up to the ninety percent in the ownership issues would mean that, ok, we would really have to participate and work as a team when it comes to investment decisions, find out the best people to do the operative work, and really trust them to do the work and concentrate on long term development and value creation of the business. And that was father’s idea and that is exactly what we tried to do when we set up the succession plan for the next generation.