The Strüngmann brothers have made many Family Office headlines over the past two years, mostly in regard to their controlling stake in BioNtech, the pharmaceutical company that created the world’s first and most-effective coronavirus vaccine.
Through their devotion to making an impact in the world of pharma technology over the last three decades, the Strüngmann brothers are now worth over $30BN and aside from offering an example of how Impact Investing can work for everyone involved, they offered an incredible insight into the pivotal role Family Offices can play in early-stage science ventures and inspired a wave of investments in the space.
They continue to inspire through the headlines today, only this time they offer an insight into how recruiting and retaining the right talent is key to Family Office success.
Helmut Jeggle, pictured above, spent more than a decade running Athos Service, the Single Family Office in Munich managing the assets of the Strüngmann brothers. After 14 years of managing their assets, sourcing the best opportunities on their behalf and investing alongside them, he has enough wealth to create a Family Office of his own and that is exactly what he recently did.
According to Bloomberg, Jeggle founded his own Family Office, Salvia which, since 2021, has invested in six companies, mostly start-ups. Jeggle plans to focus on Direct Investments for his own company but with half of the Athos team under his new arm, he also oversees the wealth of his former Principals.
In just over a decade he has evolved from being a Managing Director for a Family Office to being a Family Office Principal charged with managing not just his own wealth in the millions but that of his former employers who remain friends today.
His wealth began when he co-invested in BioNTech alongside the Strüngmann brothers in 2008 which at the time was $281,000, more than his yearly salary. In 2020 it amounted to millions which is when he sold shares, at the time worth $49.2M, to fund Salvia’s activities which are thought to include a range of asset classes, including Crypto.
It once again serves as an incredible lesson to the rest of the Family Office world, one that in short means offering long-term incentive plans for your employees cannot only retain them as loyal staff and incentivise them to reach your objectives but it also benefits them. By offering them a life after your Family Office through the wealth you gave them an opportunity to create can more than motivate them to manage your wealth in the interim.
According to our recent Bonus Benchmark report, 53% of Family Office Executives – classified as C-Level Leaders within the Family Office – are offered co-investing opportunities like these alongside 75% of Accounting and Finance professionals with an LTIP in place and it motivates them more than any salary ever could. In fact, as part of the same report, Family Office professionals told us that having an LTIP was far more important than any monetary annual compensation as it helped them to feel valued.
So long as you embed LTIPs with clear and correlating key performance indicators, you can use this reward structure to engage your staff, align your interests and incentivise them to stay within your Family Office for as long as they can – something Family Offices require to survive. In turn, your professionals are given not just a clear career path but an incredible opportunity to generate wealth that simply wouldn’t exist elsewhere.
By following in the footsteps of the Strüngmann brothers, you can not only generate wealth and attract fantastic talent, but you can also create a successful and meritocratic organisational culture which is inherently more competitive and together you can guarantee you are striving to reach the same goal.