Ryan Agre holds the dual role of vice president of finance and family office for Vermeer Corporation, a manufacturer of industrial, commercial and agricultural equipment based in Pella, Iowa. He talks about the challenges and opportunities the role presents.
How did your dual role as VP of finance and family office come about?
Back in 2011, I was coming out of law school and was looking for my next adventure. I was in the Pella area and knew the Vermeer family. My experience before I went to law school included finance — I’m an accountant — as well as M&A activity and experience in the family office space.
Vermeer was looking for an M&A expert, but equally important, they were beginning the journey of trying to figure out whether to launch an internal family office. And so my resume checked two boxes.
On the family office side, I was looking forward to helping them understand — which I firmly believe is true — that the intimacy that you have with somebody who’s in-house is extremely important. You can get intimacy with outside consultants, but having somebody day in and day out, working with the family group on all matters, not just one particular project area, is super helpful.
About half of the family members live in the Pella area, so there is a lot of traffic through the office. If you have a family that is dispersed around the world, it might be a slightly different storyline. But in my case, being someone who lived in the community and was a known commodity made it easier to do a transition. I came in at the senior manager level and over the next couple of years progressed into the executive ranks.
How is this dual role set up?
We have about five head count in the family office and about 75 on the corporate side that I manage. There are no dual roles other than mine. Of course, we’re in small town America — they all know each other. It’s not as though they’re completely separate, but from a work functionality perspective, there is nothing that overlaps. I provide strategic leadership and executive oversight of the family office, but that office also has a day-to-day leader. On my finance teams, I have a direct staff group that leads each of the relevant large-scale groups within finance.
My calendar is busy with very disparate projects. Today, for example, I just ran down the hallway to assist my team in working through an international M&A transaction. Right before that, I was down in the family office, assisting with a charitable foundation tax return question.
We spend a significant amount of time with the board having conversations on: Is this dual role as effective as it could be? My role is to help provide education and communication back and forth. But it’s also helpful for me to bring messaging and, when necessary, raise the red flag — for example, if we anticipate an issue that will pit the board vs the family vs the corporate executives.
We’ve got a lot of unusual — but very effective for our specific instance — structures in place. For example, on the corporate side, I have half of finance and I have a peer who manages the other half. It is highly unusual in most corporate spaces to have two executives who split finance down the middle. I’m very confident in our governance structure, that everybody understands the boundaries and what their responsibilities are, and they honor those.
What is the advantage of this setup?
I can understand what the family desires and bring that in an appropriate, measured way back to the company at the executive table, and vice versa. Right now, we have only two family members who are executives — over a dozen other executives are nonfamily members. We are managing this company with the understanding of what the family desires, but the family is not managing day to day. We want to make sure we maintain a very healthy balance of input and honoring what the shareholders desire — but at the same time allowing management to make the critical decisions they need to be effective.
How does the strategic leadership you provide in finance and in the family office overlap?
They’re incredibly integrated. For instance, my exposure to the family’s information needs and education initiatives means that we can build out education on products or business demographics or types of technology. The family itself and a typical family office wouldn’t know that as intimately as I do, because I’m sitting in the day-to-day meetings.
I can also flag potential conflict areas. Let’s say there’s a downturn coming — we can help the family group start to understand that this is potentially coming, what it means for them, and what it means for the company and its employees. I can also take what the family is concerned about and wants to understand regarding the business, and I can come back and apply it on the corporate side. For example, if I know the family really doesn’t want to be part of a particular technology or to work in a particular part of the world, I can bring that family perspective to the company. It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t enter into it — but I can help everyone evaluate it and anticipate possible objections from the family. It’s better than if we get six months into a large project, discover that it is not what the family wanted, and then have to go back and try to unwind it. There is extreme value in sitting in both spaces and being able to have those conversations.
It’s also helpful at the board level. I sit in on committee meetings and provide feedback. They can then understand, too, from a governance perspective, whether the company is being effective, and they can have that conversation with the family group. I find it fascinating and see enormous synergies sitting in both spaces.
What risks and opportunities do you see in your roles?
We have a stated intention of being family-held in perpetuity. It’s a continual challenge, as with all family offices, because it’s full of different perspectives and expectations, and the family is getting bigger. Family members get married and introduce new individuals, who haven’t grown up with the same history and culture. So how do you get them embedded in understanding what the culture is and what the mission is? And then you’ve got additional generations that keep getting added on. How do we maintain the cultural understanding of what really the family group itself desires?
And what is our role in that? It’s really more about the family instilling these values in themselves — but how do we help facilitate it? How do we help facilitate the environment where they can have good interactions, good conversations to establish that culture, and then also set the strategic vision for who they want to be as a family group? That’s ultimately the most important thing. That’s really the biggest risk — but it’s also the greatest privilege and greatest opportunity.