Case Study

How Fortinova Uncovered Hidden Challenges

Becoming a listed company brought along a plethora of new requirements and challenges that needed Fortinova’s attention. Thanks to BoardClic, Fortinova’s board was able to pinpoint topics for discussion that they weren’t previously aware of.

Founded: 2010
Turnover: 135m SEK
Country: Sweden

Industry: Real Estate
Type: Public Company

Customer Since: 2021
Product:
Board Evaluation

 

Fortinova is a Swedish Real Estate Company with a heart for people and a big vision — to become Western Sweden’s most prominent real estate company in the residential market.

You may wonder how they plan to do this. And the answer is they have a very specific strategy. A strategy that’s not all about acquiring property and business growth.

It’s much more about people and the environment:

  • Growing municipalities in Western Sweden
  • Building and maintaining strong relationships with tenants and local businesses
  • Focus on the three sustainability cornerstones: ecological, social and economic

A sea of challenges

On November 19th 2020 Fortinova celebrated its listing on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market. Not only are they now trading on the market but they’ve gained 5,000 new shareholders. Most definitely a reason to celebrate.

But listing on the stock market also brought forward some challenges for Fortinova. One of these included implementing a structured process for board evaluation. The problem was that they’d never conducted a board evaluation before and they didn’t have a lot of time to spend on this. Becoming a listed company brought along a plethora of new requirements and challenges that needed their attention.

“Conducting a Board Evaluation was one of many new things we had to get used to. Naturally, we didn’t want to spend too much time on each step and we were looking for an easy-to-use solution,” says Anders Johansson, CEO of Fortinova.

They decided to try the platform that one of their board members recommended — Boardclic.

Helping hand

Fortinova had no particular expectations but they were pleasantly surprised with the experience. Anders Johansson explains:

“One thing that stood out to me was the support and service we received. We work with several suppliers and our experience of BoardClic was definitely an A+. The customer success team helped us with everything from setup to follow-up and it felt very professional.”

Fortinova chose BoardClic because the platform helped them conduct fast and easy board evaluations while gaining useful insights.

They’re now able to identify areas where the board is aligned but needs some clarity and fine-tuning. As a company focused on sustainability, they found additional value in BoardClic because it helped them identify important issues in that area.

“Using BoardClic and their evaluations can help uncover potential issues and areas of improvement within the organisation that otherwise would have remained hidden.”

Anders Johansson

CEO, Fortinova

Shining a light

BoardClic enabled the board to pinpoint topics for discussion that they weren’t aware of. Thanks to the platform’s insights, senior leadership was able to bring these topics to the table and move forward with them.

Shining a light on the areas for improvement wasn’t the only benefit Fortinova found in using BoardClic. The platform also provided a bird’s-eye view of the evaluation results, helping the board understand where they are and where they want to be. At the same time, it was also possible to dive into the details when they needed to.

“BoardClic provides a great overview of the result. The platform does a great job in summarising key areas with the option to dive into more detailed answers in case we would like to.”

Ready to grow

According to Johansson, Boardclic has made Fortinova’s evaluation results easy to refer to. What he likes about the platform is that the evaluation overview contains actionable information for the board. Board members don’t have a lot of time to spend working with the results on a regular basis but BoardClic makes it easy to revisit them for continuous improvement.

“It is very easy for us to go back to the platform and quickly find trends and answers that we need for a specific purpose.”

This enables Fortinova to not only discover the board’s strengths and weaknesses but to review the results as often as they need and find new opportunities for growth.