The next generation of a family business: Natalie Baumer
A student’s thoughts about joining the family business.
When you’re young, the future looks bright but also quite uncertain. There are many opportunities, and choosing one might mean deciding against alternatives. What will you study? Where? Will you travel next summer and enjoy life or do an internship and gain professional experience? As a member of a family that owns a business, you also have to make another decision: Will you take on an operative role in that company or go down an entirely different path?
I had the opportunity to talk to Natalie Baumer (20) about these questions. Natalie studies business administration at the University of St. Gallen. She is a member of the board of the Family Business Club at the university. Her father, Roger Baumer, who studied in St. Gallen as well, is the CEO of the Hälg Group. He owns and manages the company together with his brother, Marcel Baumer, who heads two of three divisions of the group, i.e. Consulting & Engineering and Facility Management.
Hälg, based in St. Gallen, was founded in 1922 by Natalie’s great-great-grandfather Ferdinand Hälg as a central-heating factory. Today, it is one of Switzerland’s leading providers of building technology and facility management, with over 1100 employees and sales of more than CHF 300 million.
The Family Business Club (FBC) is an association that has around 80 student members. It organizes company visits and events on topics such as company succession. Most of FBC’s members come from family businesses, but the family background is not a requirement to join. As a member of FBC’s board and the organization’s former president, Natalie is responsible for the association’s newsletter and social media presence. The reasons why she joined the club are the people and the topics that are discussed, she says.
Natalie, how much did you talk about business at home?
A lot. Not only is my father the CEO, but my mother used to be the head of marketing, so there was always a lot to discuss at the kitchen table. Also, with my uncle and grandparents, the business was always an important topic, and we kids constantly heard what was going on. Since then, I have done an internship, so now I know a few people inside the company.
Hearing about a business is one thing, but how much of it do you actually understand?
The Hälg Group does sanitary installations, heating installations, and ventilation systems. We have an engineering division that is planning big installations, and we have a third division that does facility management. I think that I have a good grasp of the main challenges the business faces.
And what are they?
First of all, the barriers to entry are low and many people start their own business in these professions. As a large organization, we can cover the whole life cycle— from planning to installation to maintenance. But especially for large-scale installations, there is a lot of competition from other companies, such as BKW or Bouygues, which weighs on the margins. But there are also growing opportunities, such as building automation.
An interesting fact about the Hälg Group is its dual leadership, with your father as the CEO and your uncle as the head of two divisions. That’s not a very common setup.
True, it is quite rare. I wrote a bachelor thesis about family companies led by siblings, and it was quite hard to find the contacts for the five interviews I did in the end. But despite being special, the model works quite well in practice. I suspected that there would be more controversies inside such firms. An important element of governance is to have an external board member in these cases.
A dual leadership has the apparent advantage of giving two family members leadership instead of just one. That can eliminate the tension that might otherwise appear inside the family when someone feels left out because one of their siblings takes the leading role. What about you? How interested are you in the family business?
I am quite interested in the firm, but at the moment, my biggest goal is to gain experience outside of Hälg. No matter what position you hold in a family business, you’re always the boss’s daughter and get treated differently, and I want to avoid that. I also want to be independent and see different work environments. If I decide to join the firm later, I will still have plenty of time. My sister is training to become a teacher; she went her own way. On my uncle’s side, his son did an apprenticeship as a heating engineer, and his daughter is still in high school. We haven’t explicitly talked about these things yet, but it’s also very early—our fathers are only around 50 years old.
Do you already have an idea of what kind of professional skills you want to gain over the next years that might be useful for the family business one day?
Yes, I have quite a clear idea. I’ll deepen my knowledge about finance, a topic I’m interested in. I would like to work in investment banking or private equity later and gain skills that are useful no matter if I join the family firm or not. At the moment, I’m doing an internship in a family office that mainly does real estate but also private equity transactions together with other family offices, and I find this part quite fascinating.
Are you generally interested in investing?
Yes, I am. I took a few courses at university, but I also like to read about the topic. I have an account at the online broker Swissquote, and I invest in well-diversified exchange-traded funds.
Women are still underrepresented in finance and investing and also in entrepreneurship. In the context of business succession, do you think it is more difficult for a daughter than for a son to get what they want?
In our family, women have always worked, and I think that this is a very good antidote against the misconception that women don’t understand business matters. But yes, in almost all succession cases I looked at, it was the sons that took over, not the daughters, even if the latter were very well educated. At least in our family, with my sister and me, that can’t happen (laughs).
In every family, there is a certain way of how financial matters are treated, and children pick up on what their parents say about the topic. What is a typical thing you have often heard?
I remember discussions about cars. In an SME like ours, there is no room for extravagance, and the opinions of the employees matter a lot. This is why you have to drive a regular car.