Over the past year, our partners led the sale of a family's main asset: a billion-dollar industrial business based in Canada. The third generation, recently put in charge of the family's affairs, had decided to sell. They no longer had the expertise or the appetite to run the business themselves.
The family office team knew the asset in extraordinary depth: operational detail, customer book, regulatory picture. What they had never done was lead a large-cap North American M&A transaction. They needed someone who had, and that is why they called us.
By the time we arrived, the team had already begun a sale process and had received two offers from private equity funds. We stopped everything. We split the company into two distinct entities, restructured the deal entirely, and ran a new process for each. The two new entities were ultimately sold at a combined price 85% above the best offer the family had received under the original structure, beyond anything they had thought possible.
To run it, Westwick took the lead and worked hand-in-hand with the SFO's analyst team throughout. We assembled the outside advisory stack the deal required (a Magic Circle law firm, a top-tier investment bank) and ran the negotiation end-to-end. The process took close to a year.
The lesson is not that the in-house team was failing. They were doing their job well. It is that family offices, by design, are lean, and on any given mandate, a specific piece of expertise may simply not be in the room. Bringing in Westwick temporarily for that mandate, and only that mandate, had an outsized impact on the future of the family and its wealth. An 85% price uplift is not a marginal improvement. It is a generational one.
Once the transaction closed, we left. The family and their office went back to business as usual. The SFO team took over the redeployment of the proceeds, which they were well equipped to do.
This is how we work. We step in where the mandate exceeds what the existing team can carry. We do the work alongside them. And we hand the office back cleanly when it is done. The end of a Westwick engagement is measured by the family being back to its own way of working, with an office that knows what it is for.
Frequently asked questions
When should a family office bring in outside help for a transaction?
When the mandate exceeds what the in-house team has done before. A family office can know an asset in extraordinary depth and still never have led a large-cap M&A process. Bringing in a specialist for that mandate, and only that mandate, keeps the office's judgement at the centre while adding the one piece of expertise that is not in the room. In this case it was the difference between the best original bid and a price 85% above it.
What did splitting the company into two entities change?
It let each business be sold to the buyer that valued it most, through its own process, instead of one price for a combination that suited neither. The two entities were sold at a combined price 85% above the best offer the family had received under the original structure.