Best Managed Companies Award: Excellence in Swiss SMEs

"Best Managed Companies," the competition conducted in 48 countries by Deloitte Private, compares companies in a comprehensive assessment against the consulting and auditing firm's globally recognized benchmark. This has been continuously developed in the 25 years since the Best Managed Companies Award was launched. Companies that submit to the in-depth analysis receive an independent and substantive assessment of how their operations compare to a global community of over 1,000 exemplary managed companies in four key business areas.

Intensive evaluation process

All participating companies undergo an intensive multi-stage coaching and assessment process. Their performance is comprehensively assessed in the areas of strategy, productivity and innovation, culture and commitment, and governance and finance. Only companies that excel in all four categories have a chance of winning the award.
"The companies honored this year share several elements that are particularly critical to success today: They are all highly agile, flexibly organized and have a clear focus on growth. They also manage not to insist on outdated traditions and still maintain their core values. The 'Best Managed Companies' award is an incentive for all decision-makers in the Swiss economy to shape the future of their companies with foresight, innovative strength and a sustainable management culture," said Andreas Bodenmann, Program Officer and Head of Deloitte Private at the gala event on July 7, 2022 at the SIX ConventionPoint in Zurich.

Best Managed Companies: Beacons of the Swiss Economy

Four traditional family-owned companies were honored as "Best Managed Companies":

• The Wipf Group is a Swiss family business that can look back on a history of more than one hundred years. It uniquely combines entrepreneurial tradition with forward-looking, innovative solutions and has thus successfully established itself throughout Europe as one of the leading suppliers of packaging solutions.
• Groupe Acrotec SA brings together independent companies in the field of micromechanics under a common "a passion for precision" philosophy and efficiently creates mutual synergies. In doing so, it smartly exploits the governance advantages from the combination of group structure and partnership.
• The SUHNER Group impressed with the leadership renewal initiated by Jürg Suhner and the successful realignment. The company impresses with a clear strategic orientation on its comprehensive competence in tools, processes and materials know-how for metal and focuses uncompromisingly on solutions for the creation of success-critical metal components for its customers.
• Precipart, founded in 1950, convinced as a family-run company with its successful and clear focus: The company offers high-tech solutions for its worldwide clientele in the medtech, aerospace and space as well as industrial markets by means of innovations and an "engineer possible" approach.

Next, two other exemplary managed companies received the "Best Managed Companies" award:

• MindMaze, which is active in the field of digital therapy, was the first mature start-up, a so-called scale-up, to receive an award. It is driving its strong growth by means of cleverly structured governance, thereby ensuring the company's agility in the long term - a strong corporate culture provides significant support in this regard.
• The competition does not end after one year either, as all companies can regularly undergo the test and contest the workshops. The beverage manufacturer Capri Sun, which is highly successful in more than 100 countries, was the first company in Switzerland to do so, and its growth strategy geared to sustainability won over the jury as an excellently managed company.

Further strengthening Switzerland as a location

"Privately owned companies are and will remain an important innovation driver of a diverse and strong Swiss business location. Deloitte has been actively addressing location issues for many years. Switzerland must do everything in its power to shape regulation in key policy and technical areas in such a way that companies have the entrepreneurial freedom they need to develop sustainably," explains Reto Savoia, CEO of Deloitte Switzerland. "Unfortunately, this freedom is being restricted again and again. This is now evident almost every quarter with ever new, sometimes radical popular initiatives or even referendums against perfectly sensible laws."

On this year's jury, Nadia Lang, CEO of the ZFV-Unternehmungen cooperative, Jens Breu, CEO of SFS Group, Gilles Stuck, Head of Market Switzerland at Julius Baer, and Prof. Thomas Straub, Associate Professor at the University of Geneva for Strategic Management and Corporate Strategy, advised and evaluated the participating companies.

Source: Deloitte