113. Partnership Paranoia?

Dear Gerard,

Thanks for your reply. I want to come back to your reasons why setting up your foreign branches failed. Not that I have much experience with this, but after reading the reasons you mention, I have the feeling you possibly missed the most important reason. Namely, that you are not starting them up with a local person.At least, that is what I understand from your account. You write that you want your good people from Slovakia and Romania to have the opportunity as country manager to start a branch in another country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps, in retrospect, their biggest obstacle to achieving success was not having a network of relationships and not knowing the local problems.

You are now mainly focusing abroad to achieve growth and you are working through your bad experiences as regards organic growth and are looking at acquisitions / mergers and partnerships.

Our company does not need to grow abroad, as long as there is room to gain extensive local market share. This is especially true for asset management. We are able to grow organically in this area and we look at mergers and acquisitions to accelerate growth. This allows us to reduce costs per head, target growth opportunities and launch new products, for which you need a certain scale. For the other part of the business, i.e. international, we undertake more brokerage plays. But this can also be run centrally from Amsterdam by foreign people at our desks.

Now, I want to come back to your argument for looking to achieve growth through partnerships.

How do you prevent your partner saying to you one day: ‘Gerard thanks for the cooperation. I’ve learned from you how to connect your service to ours and it works so well that I’m going to do it myself’. I don’t know if it is possible to prevent this legally. That’s my biggest fear with partnerships, one party is always stronger than the other, or will become so over time and will then take his chance to grab the entire cake.

Do you agree, or am I being a little paranoid?

Best regards,

Gerard