We meet in a panelled office above the Quai du Mont-Blanc. H. Stutz is the third principal of a Geneva family office founded in 1949; it manages assets across four jurisdictions and has been an active acquirer of Swiss SMEs for nearly twenty years. He has agreed to speak on condition that the office is not named.
"We tell sellers the same thing every time," he says. "We do not need an exit. If we buy your company, we buy it for our children — and if we are very lucky, for theirs."
This patience is not unusual among Geneva family offices, but it is rarely communicated well. Founders who have spent thirty years building a company are wary of buyers who speak in five-year holds.
Pull quote"We do not need an exit. If we buy your company, we buy it for our children."§ H. Stutz, Geneva
"Price matters less than people imagine," Stutz says. "We have been outbid many times by funds. We have rarely been the highest bidder. And yet we close more deals than we lose — because the seller, in the end, asks themselves: who do I want to hand the keys to?"
He is careful here: he is not arguing that price is unimportant. He is arguing that, above a fair threshold, the marginal franc is a poor predictor of which buyer will steward a company well. Sellers who have lived with this question know it instinctively.
A recurring theme in our conversation is succession. Many of the companies Stutz acquires come from third-generation owners — the grandchildren of founders.
"The third generation is the hardest," he observes. "The first generation built the thing. The second generation grew up inside it; they understand it without being told. The third generation often went to INSEAD or the LSE, has been working in Zurich or London, and is being asked to come back to a small town in Aargau and run a metalworks. Most of them say no — politely, painfully, but no."
This is, he says, the principal driver of mid-market sale activity in Switzerland today. It is not industry decline; it is demography.
I ask, finally, what he wishes more sellers understood about buyers like him.
"That we want them to stay," he says. "Not always as CEO. But on the board. As a consultant. As a name on the wall in reception. The first thing we lose when an owner leaves is not strategy. It is the institutional memory of every decision they ever made. Sellers think they are being asked to disappear. We are asking them not to."