Adelaide team makes finals of the FECC

The University of Adelaide Business School’s graduate team made up of MBA students Anastasia Bougesis, Jason Bobis, Jing Holmes and James Davidson, and coach Michale Browne recently returned from a snow-covered Burlington, Vermont, USA, where they competed in the 2024 Schlessinger Global Family Enterprise Case Competition (SG-FECC 2024). The competition comprised 25 universities across 14 countries. The Adelaide team were finalists in the graduate stream, with team member James Davidson awarded one of the two presenters of the finals awards.

Competing in SG-FECC 20224 was the culmination of the MBA’s Family Business Fundamentals course taught by Associate Professor Chris Graves and Dr Michael Browne. The course provided a grounding in family business from both an academic and practical perspective. The course included a series of mock case presentations which were the ideal preparation for the competition, where our team was pitted against graduate teams from universities across the globe.

Using the skills developed across the Family Business Fundamentals course, their MBA studies, and their practical experience, Anastasia, Jason, Jing, and James presented their findings and were then questioned by an international panel of judges from academia and business on three cases and then a fourth case in the final. The cases spanned the full range of family business including growth, entrepreneurship, governance, and succession.

The team entered the competition with the objective to challenge themselves, grow their knowledge in family business, as well as in problem solving and real-world case analysis. Competing in SG-FECC 2024 went a long way towards meeting these objectives, allowing them to grow professionally, as they workshopped solutions to the case problems (for the last two cases in the preliminary round and in the final they had just 4 hours to prepare!). The competition and networking events provided an opportunity to grow their networks as they met fellow competitors, judges, and the wonderful hosts from The University of Vermont, Grossman School of Business.

The team’s participation in this event would not have been possible without the generous support of Richard Owens OAM, who sadly passed away in mid-January. Anastasia, Jason, Jing and James extend their gratitude and sympathies to the Owens family.