Cocktail de la Rentrée at Grand Hôtel Dieu

The cocktail de la rentrée is one of our flagship events, designed to bring members together and attract new members to our growing association.
This year, we held the Cocktail at PwC ‘s beautiful new offices, in the Grand Hôtel Dieu in Lyon, one of our city’s most remarkable renovation projects of recent years!
A full house (we were limited to 70 members and guests) gathered in the Salle des Crochets, formerly used as the main location for medical students to store and study dead bodies…

Philip Last made a welcome speech and then invited Michel Bouzigues, our treasurer and partner at PwC Lyon to tell us a little more about the move for PwC and some of the challenges for making an old hospital (officially closed in 2010) ready and fit for purpose as offices for one of the world’s Big 4 audit and accountancy giants!

We wanted to explain to members / guests a little more about membership and its benefits. Julia Macleod of Two Hats kindly accepted our invitation to explain their experience of how FIBA had helped them set up their new brewery in the region. Julia was perfect; a finer piece of advertising copy for FIBA membership has not yet been written!

After the speeches, we moved to the Cocktail area and while networking conversations blossomed, Michel, Claude Lecerf and Sandrine Amador from PwC took groups to visit the new offices.
Finally a prize draw was made for free tickets to our Christmas Lunch…we will be seeing more of the Bouzigues family and their good friends, Heidi & Erik Heras!