The world’s only case competition focused exclusively on family business, the sixth FECC (Family Enterprise Case Competition) returned to its home earlier this month, the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. 98 competitors and coaches organised into 25 teams travelled from 26 countries around the world to compete over four days, from the 9th to the 12th of January 2019.
Judge Adam Ifshin, Founder and CEO of DLC Management Corp., spoke of the FECC as an invaluable platform for both students and family businesses:
“I think the more young people who begin to understand family business dynamic, the more willing they are going to be to go into this incredibly huge and rich world that most young people don’t know about. And I think it’s a great way for all of us who are family businesses to expose the next generation of people who may not have grown up in them into what the opportunity and the value proposition is.”
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Bram Kleppner, another adjudicator and the CEO of Danforth Pewter described the extraordinary environment at the competition:
“The family enterprise case competition is really remarkable. In my point of view, the opportunity to spend two or three days immersed in students who are studying family business and have thought a lot about it, professors whose career is built around the study of and contributions to family business and management of family businesses and family transitions is tremendously educational and energising.”
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Judge James R Keller, President of Green Mountain Business Consultants and Chairman of the Board of the Newark Group, commented on the student participant’s impressive ability to defend their positions in front of the judging panel:
“These students are getting experience, and really doing the work that I do over a long period of time they’re doing it in a four hour period of time and making a presentation to management, and so not only do they have to have a good analytical approach to what they’ve done, but also to be able to on their feet answer some of these (the judge’s) questions.”
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Richard Owens, Chairman of Shoey’s Pty Ltd, and one of the judges on the panel described the trajectory of the winning graduate team from Adelaide:
“In the first round they came last, and they weren’t much better in the second round but they scraped into the final. Then they got the message — they worked out how you have to perform in this thing. Anyway, when they announced the winner I couldn’t help crying with pride.”
