A class of students specialising in “family business” at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business - Northeastern University, Boston were recently hosted at MB Conveyors, the Vicenza-based producer of conveyor belts that are also used in the manufacture of plastics. The visit took place on May 19 as part of an educational visit to Italy by a group of students coming not only from the United States, but also from other parts of the world, as diverse as Vietnam and Greece, who chose this particular specialisation course in order to study companies that have  successfully implemented a family-based management model.

The North-East of Italy is famous worldwide for its business structure, built on this model, which features different levels of development that nevertheless have surprising points in common, precisely because the underlying structure is, in all cases, the “family”.  And this is why students from all over the world are interested in analysing it and want to grasp the keys to its success.

This is the second consecutive year that MB Conveyors has welcomed a group of students frequenting this course, giving them an account of the journey accomplished, over a period of thirty years, by the company and by its founders, Gianpietro Baldisserotto and Giordano Molon, who are now handing over the reins to their offspring Mattia, Paola, Ivan, Beatrice and Anita, all of whom play an active role in the family business.

The visit included a short tour of the production departments and a presentation of the history of the company and of the families of its two founders, and ended with a question-and-answer session. The questions, in particular, revealed the aspects that particularly interested the students, who got straight to the point, drawing attention to the relationship between the two families, the balance between the various members of a single family, the advantages and disadvantages of working with members of one’s own family, relations at work, and so on. There also emerged a broader interest in Italian companies that have managed to carve out a space for themselves in the world, offering  a quality product.  At the end of this instructive day the students were given a copy, in English, of the company’s comic strip “Mr Convy, the conveyor belt in time”, a story of the company in which it is possible to identify all the members of the two families.