On 13 October, 2022 Gerry Lane, founder and owner of Asian Tigers Indonesia, signed a Management Buyout (MBO) agreement with Bill Lloyd, long-term managing director of the company. Here Steve Jordan talks to Bill about what the future holds.
The agreement between Gerry and Virginia Lane and Bill Lloyd comes into effect from 1 January, 2023 and the gradual buyout will commence from that date. To avoid confusion, this MBO affects only Indonesia. Virginia Lane continues to run Asian Tigers in the Philippines. Bill has earned a solid reputation, both with customers and industry friends and partners over the last 19 years and, in a recent press release, Gerry said that he is “confident that our standards and emphasis on quality will be well maintained into the foreseeable future”.
For Bill it’s been a long apprenticeship. “A big hats off to Gerry and Virginia. They took me under their wing, moulded me, mentored me personally, sent me overseas for training, and reached into their pockets to prepare me for this time,” he explained. “At that time I didn’t think it would lead to an acquisition, I just thought he wanted the best management in place, maybe it wasn’t at the forefront of his mind, or maybe it was.”
Bill perhaps wasn’t the obvious choice in the early days. His lifestyle was not typical of a potential business owner. “Gerry and I had a laugh about that the other day,” said Bill. “I was just a surfer boy who wanted time off to ride waves. But Gerry is very pleased with where we are at today, and we will be carrying on his legacy. I promised him to make the ethical choices moving forward in the ways that he has mentored me and would want them to be made.”
It’s true that Bill has been running the show in Jakarta for a long time, with minimal interference from Gerry. So much so that the employees are not only happy with the switch, Bill said they asked ‘so what changes?’.
But there will be subtle changes of course ...
Photo (right to left): Gerry Lane, founder and owner of Asian Tigers Indonesia, and Bill Lloyd, long-term managing director of the company