A creative exit for a regulated family asset

When a family faced the abrupt decline of a company they owned due to a change in regulation, they called Westwick to shut it down. What we put in place instead was a new profitable business.

One of our partners was asked to take on a difficult mandate for a family. A change in regulation had overtaken one of the family's controlled companies, and the business had to stop. But because it was regulated, it could not simply be closed — it had to be wound down in an orderly way, on the regulator's terms. Revenue collapsed from around a billion to barely ten million. The highly qualified team, however, had to stay on for the regulator-mandated transition.

The straightforward option was painful: run the legacy business at a loss through a long tail, let the staff drift, and accept a messy end. Our partner proposed something else. Rather than wait out the wind-down passively, he set up a new company for the family in an adjacent regulated activity, and used the existing team — the same specialists, the same managers — to build it.

The result was three wins. The family's original regulated entity was wound down cleanly on the regulator's timeline. The staff, many of them deep specialists, kept their jobs, and the managers transitioned into something they could actually build. And the new business, started out of what looked like a dead end, eventually became a healthy and lucrative line that the family was able to sell a few years later, on its own terms.

When a family hands Westwick a mission, it is rarely solved by picking option A over option B. Most of the time, the answer is a third option that nobody has thought to write down yet.

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