The first meeting with a foreign investor almost always goes well. The second meeting decides the deal. In family office investment, the second meeting is where the questions arrive: who carries the risk, what the sponsor has put in from their own pocket, what happens if the plan slips by a year, and how anyone gets out. Most Greek proposals that stall do not stall for lack of capital. They stall for lack of answers.
This article expands on «Family offices και ελληνικές επιχειρήσεις – Η συμφωνία αρχίζει πριν από το κεφάλαιο», an opinion piece by Athanasios Aggelakakis, founder of Aggelakakis & Associates, published in Oikonomikos Taxydromos (ot.gr) on 14 October 2026. The original asks what a Greek business must have answered before it sits down with a foreign investor. This version looks at the same table from both sides: the family office deciding whether to commit capital to a Greek company, and the sponsor deciding whether that capital is the right capital.
Key takeaways
- Interest and capital are rarely the binding constraint in family office investment. Preparation is, on both sides of the table.
- A family office is not a fund. It usually has no deadline to invest and is not chasing a tenfold return. Its first question is where it can lose money, and who absorbs the loss first.
- Three things end most conversations early: dependence on one or two people, assurances in place of verification, and an exit plan with no fallback.
- An unresolved issue found before commitment is a design problem. Found after commitment, it is a loss and a breach of trust.
- Readiness is not a permanent attribute of a company. It is judged against a specific investor and a specific investment.
Approval is not implementation
“Of the deals I have seen fail, few collapsed because the money was missing,” Aggelakakis writes. “Most collapsed because the answers were.” Over recent months he has held a number of these conversations with family offices, the structures that manage large family fortunes and that look at the Greek market with growing frequency. The pattern he describes is consistent. The interest is there. The capital is there. What is usually missing is preparation, and not only on the Greek side.
The gap between interest and execution is also visible in public data. In September 2026, a government briefing on the Development Law reported 928 investment plans approved under the current framework, with a combined budget of €3.1 billion and €1.5 billion in state aid, according to Capital.gr. Almost as a footnote, the same briefing mentioned 191 plans approved under the older Law 3299/2004 that were never implemented and have since been recovered in a clean-up of files from earlier development laws.
The two figures are not directly comparable. They come from different laws, different periods and different economic conditions, and 191 is not a failure rate. They make one point clearly: approval is a decision about eligibility, not proof that a project will be built. The current regime is Law 4887/2022, as amended by Law 5203/2025 (GG A’ 87/02.06.2025) and Law 5297/2026 (GG A’ 64/28.04.2026), and its aid remains conditional on the project being delivered as approved.
The same logic applies to private capital. Interest at a first meeting is the start of a process, not an agreement.
Which investor do you actually want?
Family offices are not all alike. One wants a dividend every year. Another will accept nothing for five years. One expects a say in every significant decision; another is content with a quarterly update. These are not stylistic differences. They produce four different deals.
| Investor profile | What it typically expects | What it gives the sponsor | What it costs the sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income-oriented | Regular distributions from early in the investment | A predictable, low-friction partner | Cash paid out is cash not reinvested in growth |
| Patient | No distributions for several years, value built over time | Time to build the business | Usually a larger stake or stronger exit rights in return |
| Active partner | Board representation and consent rights on major decisions | Experience, networks, governance discipline | A real reduction in the founder’s autonomy |
| Passive co-investor | Quarterly reporting, limited involvement | Capital with little interference | Little strategic support; reporting discipline still required |
The profiles are illustrative. Real family offices combine these traits, and the same office can behave differently from one investment to the next.
The first question for a Greek business, then, is not “where do I find an investor?” but “what kind of partnership do I want?” A founder who does not intend to share control should not open a conversation with an active partner. And a number of the businesses looking for a family office do not need a new shareholder at all. They need a properly structured bank loan, or two more years of patience and trading history.
The quality of capital matters as much as the amount. In family office investment, a willing investor is not necessarily the right one.
How family office investment decisions differ from a fund’s
On the other side of the table, things are no simpler. A family office does not think like a closed-end private equity fund, which typically has a fixed investment period, a finite life and a duty to return capital to its own investors on schedule. A family office rarely chases a tenfold return and, as a rule, is under no pressure to invest this year.
Its priorities tend to be different: not to lose capital, to pass wealth on to the next generation, and never to discover something the other side knew from the start.
In Aggelakakis’s conversations, “how much will I make?” was seldom the first topic. The question behind every other question was a different one: where exactly do I lose my money, and who pays first if it goes wrong? Two follow-ups usually come next. What has the sponsor put in from their own pocket, in cash rather than effort? And if the market freezes for three years, can the structure still meet its loan instalments?
This is second-level reading of a proposal. The investor assumes the headline return is optimistic and spends the meeting testing something else: the downside, the order in which losses fall, and whether the people running the business are exposed to the same risks as the capital they are asking for. A sponsor who wants to pass that test should arrive with:
- a downside case, with every assumption stated, not only a base case;
- a sources-and-uses table showing the sponsor’s own cash contribution;
- a debt-service test under a stress scenario, such as revenue arriving twelve months late;
- a clear ranking of who absorbs losses first across equity, any subordinated finance, senior debt and the conditions attached to state aid.
Three red flags that end the conversation in twenty minutes
Three features of Greek proposals, in the author’s experience, cut a family office’s interest within the first twenty minutes.
1. Everything runs through one or two people
Permits, key customers and banking relationships all depend on the founder or one trusted associate, and nobody can answer the question “and if that person were gone tomorrow?”. Key-person risk is not unique to Greece. In founder-led companies, however, it is often undocumented: relationships are personal, approvals sit in one inbox, and there is no delegation or succession plan. For an investor whose own mandate is continuity across generations, it is one of the first things they look for.
2. Assurances in place of verification
Where the investor expects evidence, they hear “we have discussed it with the ministry”, see an internal spreadsheet and are offered reassurance from acquaintances. None of it can be checked. The distinction between declared, documented and verified claims applies directly: a declaration carries no weight until a third party outside the sponsor’s control can confirm it.
This second red flag was the starting point of the 360° Investment Readiness Protocol™: to check what has actually been substantiated before a plan reaches an investor, and to say “not yet” when it is not ready. If the investor finds the inaccuracy instead, they leave. The “no” is rarely spoken. There is simply no next call.
3. An exit with no fallback
Asked “how do we get out?”, the sponsor replies “we will sell to a strategic investor in five years”, without a single line on what happens if that sale does not take place. An exit that depends on one buyer appearing at one moment is a hope, not a plan.
A credible answer names more than one route, such as a trade sale, a buy-back by the founders, a refinancing that allows the investor to exit, or a pre-agreed put option, and states what each route depends on. For a minority stake in an unlisted Greek company, the pool of potential buyers at exit may be narrow. That makes the fallback more important, not less.
The pending item that changes the whole deal
Take an example from the original article. A manufacturing company is discussing a family office’s participation in the equity of a new plant. A bank will finance the rest. Due diligence shows that connecting the plant to the power grid will take a year longer than the business plan assumes. Production moves back a year. The loan instalments do not.
| Same fact, two moments | Found before commitment | Found after commitment |
|---|---|---|
| Options available | Phased development, a different site, a different financing structure | Renegotiation, from a weaker position |
| Who bears the cost | Shared, and priced into the terms | Whoever is left funding the gap between debt service and delayed revenue |
| Investor relationship | A problem solved together | “What else were we not told?” |
If the issue surfaces before commitment, there are solutions. If it surfaces after the equipment has been bought and the contracts signed, what remains is the loss, and an investor wondering what else was left out.
Grid connections, permits and utility works depend on third parties and on administrative timetables that a sponsor does not control. A business plan that treats them as fixed dates carries a risk it has not priced. Under current conditions, the prudent assumption is that third-party dates slip; the useful question is what the structure does when they do.
Why preparation has economic value: the option to wait
In Investment under Uncertainty (1994), economists Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck showed that when an expenditure cannot be recovered, the ability to wait for new information has real economic value. An irreversible commitment extinguishes that option: once the money is spent, the decision can no longer be revisited cheaply. A simple net-present-value test misses this, because it treats every decision as now or never.
Applied to family office investment, the conclusion is direct. Preparation does not delay the investment. It allows the parties to decide in time whether it should happen, how it should happen, or whether the capital would be better placed elsewhere.
The theory also cuts the other way, and precision matters here. Waiting has a cost: a competitor moves first, a grant call closes, construction prices rise. Dixit and Pindyck do not say “always wait”. They say the value of waiting must be weighed against the cost of delay. The common failure in Greek proposals is not waiting too long. It is committing before the information that would have changed the decision is in hand.
Questions to settle before signing
In family office investment, the agreement has to say what happens when things do not go as planned. Three questions matter most.
- Who puts in more money if it is needed? Overruns and delays are always funded by someone. The agreement should define whether shareholders contribute pro rata, what happens to a shareholder who does not, and how dilution works.
- Which decisions require the investor’s consent? A defined list of reserved matters, such as budgets above a threshold, new borrowing, related-party transactions or the sale of key assets, protects the investor without paralysing management.
- How and when can the investor leave? Timing, valuation method and mechanisms such as tag-along and drag-along rights or put and call options are best agreed before the investor enters, while both sides still have room to say “no”.
If the answers are not clear before signing, they will be given after it, through lawyers. The firm’s guide to investing in Greece as a foreign company covers the corporate structures in which these terms are usually set. The drafting itself is work for qualified counsel.
Due diligence runs in both directions
In family office investment, preparation is not a one-way exercise. The business owner should examine the investor as carefully as they are being examined: where the capital comes from, how the family office actually takes decisions and who signs, how long it intends to stay, how it behaved with previous investee companies when things went wrong, and whether its reputation fits the business. Source-of-funds checks are a regulatory obligation as well as a commercial precaution.
Readiness is not a permanent property of a company. It is judged each time, against a specific investor and a specific investment. A company that is ready for a passive, income-oriented co-investor may be unready for an active partner who expects a board seat and monthly reporting.
The legal, technical and financial due diligence of the transaction is the work of specialists. The aim of preparation is that the plan reaches them without surprises.
“A deal is not decided at the signing. It begins to be decided long before, by whether the answers existed before the questions arrived.”
— Athanasios Aggelakakis, ot.gr, 14 October 2026
What this means for international family offices looking at Greece
For a family office comparing Greece with Portugal, Spain or Central and Eastern Europe, the headline incentive is the easy part of the comparison. The harder question is where well-prepared opportunities can be found and checked. A Greek company that can answer the second-meeting questions competes on evidence, not only on incentives. Such companies form a smaller and more valuable pool than headline interest in the market suggests.
International contacts now open doors that were closed to Greek businesses only a few years ago. The theme is consistent with the conversations among family offices, private banks and investment funds at the European Private Wealth Excellence Forum in Athens in September 2026. Only plans that survive the questions of the second meeting get through them.
What this analysis does not claim
- It is not a survey. The observations on family office investment come from the author’s conversations with family offices. Family offices vary widely, and nothing here should be read as a statistic about the market.
- Public figures are as reported. The Development Law numbers come from a government briefing reported in September 2026. They are not audited outcomes, and the two figures cited belong to different laws.
- Preparation does not decide the outcome. A well-prepared company can still be declined, priced lower than it hoped, or overtaken by market conditions.
- The rules move. The Development Law was amended twice between 2025 and 2026. Anything tied to a scheme must be checked against the rules in force when capital is committed.
A checklist before the second meeting
Before the second meeting on any family office investment, a Greek business should be able to answer each of these questions in writing.
- What kind of partner do we want: income-oriented, patient, active or passive? Are we ready for what that partner will ask?
- Do we need equity at all, or would debt, or time, serve us better?
- Can we show where the investor loses money first, and how much of our own cash is committed?
- Does the structure still meet its debt service if revenue starts a year late, or if the market freezes for three years?
- Which permits, customers and banking relationships depend on one person, and what is the plan if that person is unavailable?
- Which of our claims are declared, which documented and which verified?
- What is the exit if the strategic sale does not happen?
- Who funds overruns, which decisions need the investor’s consent, and how does the investor leave?
- What do we know about this investor’s source of funds, decision process and record with previous investee companies?
Frequently asked questions
How is family office investment different from a private equity fund?
A closed-end private equity fund typically has a fixed investment period and a finite life, and must return capital to its own investors on schedule. A family office invests the wealth of one or a few families, usually without a deadline to deploy capital, and tends to put capital preservation and continuity across generations ahead of maximum returns. Individual family offices vary widely.
What do family offices ask Greek businesses first?
Rarely “how much will I make?”. The underlying question is where the investor can lose money and who absorbs the loss first: how much cash the sponsor has committed, how the structure behaves under stress, and whether debt service survives a prolonged downturn.
What are the most common red flags in Greek investment proposals?
Three recur: key-person dependency, where permits, customers and banks run through one or two people; assurances such as “we have discussed it with the ministry” in place of verifiable evidence; and an exit plan that relies on a single strategic sale with no fallback.
Should every Greek business look for a family office investor?
No. Some businesses do not need a new shareholder at all; a properly structured bank loan or more trading history may serve them better. Equity changes ownership, governance and, sooner or later, strategy, and is usually the most expensive capital a business can raise.
What should be agreed before a family office invests?
At a minimum: who funds overruns or delays and how dilution works; which decisions require the investor’s consent; and how and when the investor can exit, including the valuation method and mechanisms such as tag-along and drag-along rights or put and call options.
Does Development Law approval mean a project will be implemented?
No. Approval is a decision on eligibility and aid. In September 2026, a government briefing reported 191 plans approved under the older Law 3299/2004 that were never implemented. Implementation still depends on financing, permits, execution and compliance with the conditions attached to the aid.
About the author
Athanasios Aggelakakis is the founder of Aggelakakis & Associates, an investment advisory firm headquartered in Thessaloniki that works with international investors entering Greece. The original Greek-language article was published in Oikonomikos Taxydromos (ot.gr) on 14 October 2026.
Sources
- Aggelakakis, A. (2026). «Family offices και ελληνικές επιχειρήσεις – Η συμφωνία αρχίζει πριν από το κεφάλαιο». Oikonomikos Taxydromos (ot.gr), 14 October 2026.
- «Σύσκεψη στο Μαξίμου για τον Αναπτυξιακό Νόμο: Έχουν εγκριθεί 928 επενδυτικά σχέδια ύψους €3,1 δισ.». Capital.gr, 17 September 2026.
- Dixit, A. K. & Pindyck, R. S. (1994). Investment under Uncertainty. Princeton University Press.
- Development Law: Law 4887/2022, as amended by Law 5203/2025 (GG A’ 87/02.06.2025) and Law 5297/2026 (GG A’ 64/28.04.2026). Overview by Aggelakakis & Associates.
This article is general information. It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and no financing, approval or outcome is promised. Regulatory references reflect the rules in force at the date of publication and should be confirmed against official sources before any decision.
