Our Team

Lauri Union is the founding executive director of Babson College’s Bertarelli Institute for Family Entrepreneurship. She came to Babson with extensive experience both in family business leadership and entrepreneurship through organizational transformation. At the age of 27, Lauri became president and CEO of her family business, Union Corrugating Company, a deeply troubled manufacturer of building products. Union grew the company significantly and led it to become an industry leader, remaining on the board after a private equity sale. Her work at Union Corrugating is featured in two Harvard Business School cases. She also led the turnaround of a large family business in the food industry from severe distress to stability and profitability in just 12 months.

Union is a recognized global thought leader, featured in numerous articles, interviews, and case studies. She joins a select group of five colleagues worldwide in being thrice named a leading global academic in family enterprise by Family Capital Publishing. Her most recent articles have been featured in Business Insider, Entrepreneur magazine, and Family Business Magazine. Her published cases include “Diunsa: An Entrepreneurial Family’s Digital Response to COVID-19,” published in the journal Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, “Next Gen Transformation at Rotoplas,” published in the Harvard Business School case library, and “Waterston,” an approach to family entrepreneurship teaching featured in Teaching Entrepreneurship Volume Two (Elgar, 2021).

Union began her career as a management consultant at Bain and Company. She earned her BA in economics Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University as well her MBA from Harvard University. More recently, Lauri has completed certificate programs in Marriage and Family Therapy, Family Business Advising (CFBA), and Family Business and Wealth Advising (CFWA). Union is currently a doctoral candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, where she studies neuroscience of learning and focuses her research on family entrepreneurship education.

William B. Gartner is the Bertarelli Foundation Distinguished Professor of Family Entrepreneurship at Babson College and Director of Research at the Bertarelli Institute for Family Entrepreneurship. He is recognized as a leading scholar in the field of entrepreneurship: 2005 Swedish Entrepreneurship Foundation International Award winner for outstanding contributions to entrepreneurship and small business research; 2013 Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division Foundational Paper Award winner; and the 2016 Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division Dedication to Entrepreneurship Award winner. According to the latest datasets released by Elsevier BV, Professor Gartner is among the top 1.5% of scholars in the world. He was recently honored with a Justin G. Longnecker Fellow Award by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) at its annual conference in January 2022.

His book: Entrepreneurship as Organizing: Selected Papers of William B. Gartner recently was published in a paperback edition by Edward Elgar. He has served in various academic positions at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, the University of Southern California, Clemson University, San Francisco State University, California Lutheran University, ESSEC in Paris, and, the Copenhagen Business School. His scholarship spans a wide array of topics in the entrepreneurship field, including entrepreneurship as practice, the social construction of the future, varieties of value creation and appropriation, “translating entrepreneurship” across cultures and countries, the demographics of entrepreneurial families, and, the nature of legacy in family entrepreneurship.

William Gartner’s Latest Thought Leadership Articles »

Andrea recently entered the higher education field when she joined BIFE in a project and administrative assistant role. Prior to joining the IFE, she spent over 20 years managing small- and large-scale operations in academic medicine, small animal medicine, and clinical research.

Her management roles afforded her opportunities to lead an employment division of a 1200-bed hospital in the Midwest and then using that experience to move from ancillary services to clinical services within the Harvard Medical School system, where she ran the business side of cardiovascular medicine for one of the teaching hospitals. Her exposure to clinical operations in invasive and non-invasive cardiology as well as NIH and private research operations opened up the next avenue of her career development within a clinical research organization. There she helped to lead the data management process for five national and international clinical trials which ultimately led to the award of a new $10M contract.

Opting to have more family time, Andrea turned her focus away from large scale operations to smaller, more localized business. She followed her passion for animal rescue work by going to work for a small veterinary practice nearby her home. She was able to bring business process, budgetary skills and a strong belief in the value for continuing education to her new role as a Practice Manager where all aspects of business were within her scope of oversight. This included budgetary, marketing, client satisfaction, clinical program development and human resource management. In her willingness to risk taking on a totally different career challenge, the clinic was owned by a doctor who had a family philanthropic foundation and owned five small practices. She turned the one in Weston where she worked from a failing practice to a flourishing one, growing it to 3.9M and she took another practice not meeting its potential and more than doubled its growth while adding new services and specialty surgery.

Through her managerial background and previous professional development, she helped grow the five practices to 14 practices, hired and trained all new managers, developed a management succession plan that was predicated on grooming present employees for internal upward mobility as well as designed an annual educational program sponsored by industry leaders to bring forward timely and meaningful continuing education for credit towards veterinary and certified technicians’ licensure. These programs also helped managers remain current on timely business and clinical changes occurring within the field. This program was hosted several times through Babson’s Executive Ed facility.

Now a member of the BIFE administrative team, Andrea has taken on special projects and administrative support designed to help BIFE continue its expansion of offerings as it grows in scope and national/international recognition. Her BA is in Mass Communications from Emerson College and her MS is in Administrative Services from Boston College.

I am passionate about working with entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to creating positive change in their communities.

Growing up in an extended family that operated a variety of family enterprises, I have seen firsthand the opportunities and challenges of family entrepreneurship—but more importantly, I see the potential of family entrepreneurs to create real and positive change in their communities.

As an alumna, I appreciate how Babson prepared me to be entrepreneurial in different sectors throughout my career. I started out my career in corporate consulting, advising clients on business incentives and valuations in a variety of industries, including financial services, consumer products, and technology. My work included liaising with our international offices in in Southeast Asia.

In my social sector work, I led consulting engagements in strategic planning, growth planning, performance measurement, board restructuring, and prospectus and road show development for fundraising. I have extensive experience helping clients compellingly articulate their work to a funder audience, and have demonstrated success launching and running national initiatives and programs.

My entrepreneurial journey included starting an innovative food-services concept with family, advising early-stage entrepreneurs, and serving on the board of a family foundation supporting education in Thailand.

My passion for entrepreneurship and social impact came from my experience growing up in northern Thailand. I witnessed a clear discrepancy in life outcomes between those born into privilege and access, and those born into poverty. I saw my father—a social entrepreneur—strive against all odds to found a nonprofit college in my hometown, giving rural youth access to higher education. I saw how the trajectory of one’s life can be changed through entrepreneurship, education, and opportunity.

I am excited to be working with our next generation of Babson entrepreneurial leaders who are committed to creating economic and social value around the world.

Sarah Parker Schlesinger has worked with multigenerational successful families for over 20 years. Over her 25-year career, she has helped more than 100 families structure solutions for issues inherent in multigenerational family businesses and shared, generational wealth. Sarah works with families in a thoughtful and structured manner to ensure that future generations understand the foundational values of the family. Sarah provides insight and guidance to help the next gen find their voice within the family and productively integrate the family value with their personal goals and passions.

Before joining Babson, Sarah helped build the CCC Alliance, one of the world’s largest peer-to-peer organizations for UHNW families and single-family offices. She also founded Kinship Services to work more in-depth with families to become successful wealth stewards. Prior to that, Sarah worked for BNY Mellon Private Asset Management, where she educated financial service professionals to better understand the needs of HNW families and family offices.

Sarah’s career was inspired by her own family enterprise and philanthropy in her native New Orleans, which involved a professional sports team, real estate, and family foundation addressing health care and education.

She has a degree in Business Management from Boston University and completed the Trust and Estate planning program at Williams College. She and her two children reside in Newton, MA.