ACG Connections At Work in Europe

I was just taking my seat for lunch at my local ACG chapter. It was an assigned seating deal, with a pretty even distribution around the table of corporate types, private equity guys and service people like myself. Across from me sat the corporate development individual from Vinci, a leading French services group. I knew they were in parking lots, toll highways, and construction. To my left I saw the place card for someone I knew from 3i, Europe’s biggest private equity and venture capital group. As my local chapter is located in Paris, the setting for our meetings is a little more than run-of-the-mill. We sat in 18th Century splendor: Gilt-framed mirrors and Aubusson tapestries lining the walls, elaborate cornice-wrought ceilings, white tablecloths, crystal glasses, and heavy silver settings. We were awaiting the day’s speaker, Eric Licoys. Up until two weeks before, Licoys had been the number two person at the famous (and then infamous) Vivendi Universal Group. This was his first public speaking engagement since leaving the company, and people were anxious to hear what he would have to say about it. My tablemates, one from Vinci and the other from 3i, got into an involved conversation about a division that Vinci was thinking of spinning out – 3i was immediately interested. After the Q&A, I went up to thank the speaker. Several members of the board of directors who knew him were kind enough to introduce me. That was that, and I thought nothing more of it until… Two weeks later I walked into a pitch we were preparing for Bridgepoint, one of Europe’s most active private equity groups, and there was Eric Licoys again! It turns out that the largest shareholders of this business had asked Licoys, as a kind of trusted senior adviser, to choose an investment bank to handle the sale. Licoys listened attentively to our pitch and remembered me well from the ACG meeting. The rest, as they say, is history. We went on to win the mandate, the sale of Europe’s largest store fixtures business, which, with Licoys, we sold to another French private equity firm for more than $400 million. But that’s not the end of the story… With the help of our ACG France president, I was able to convince Licoys to join the board and then step into the presidency himself. In this new role, he has attracted a high caliber of speakers and continues to drive new membership. With ACG, we made the connection. And the beat goes on. Ashley E. Rountree ACG France Downer & Co. LLC [email protected] (c) 2005 Mergers and Acquisitions Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.majournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com