Wealth Management

Voted #6 on Top 100 Family Business influencer on Wealth, Legacy, Finance and Investments: Jacoline Loewen My Amazon Authors' page Twitter:@ jacolineloewen Linkedin: Jacoline Loewen Profile
Showing posts with label family business loewen succession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family business loewen succession. Show all posts

January 25, 2010

Family businesses can grow to become major forces in their economies.

It is tough to keep a family business in the hands of the family, yet there are options. Private equity likes family businesses as other companies prefer doing work with them and customers like the feel of a family brand over a corporate one.
Very few large family businesses thrive beyond the third generation. Those that do, find ways to run themselves professionally while making the family happy. Private equity can play a huge role in keeping family legacy but the business moving forward profitably.
McKinsey and Co did research on how family businesses have managed to evolve and survive in various countries.

In advanced economies, as well as in emerging markets, most companies start out as family-owned businesses. From their humble beginnings, driven by entrepreneurial vision and energy, some have grown to become major forces in their economies. Indeed, this still happens not only in emerging markets, with their chaebols in South Korea and grupos in Latin America, but also in North America and Europe, where relatively young family-owned businesses such as Wal-Mart Stores, Bertelsmann, and Bombardier, to name just a few, have become front-runners.
But family-owned businesses—companies in which a family has a controlling stake—face a sobering reality: the statistical odds on their long-term success are bleak. In fact, a number of studies, taken together, suggest that only 5 percent continue to create shareholder value beyond the third generation. This statistic should come as no surprise, given the business challenges any company faces in increasingly competitive markets, to say nothing of the difficulty of keeping growing numbers of family shareholders committed to continued ownership. One kind of risk for these businesses comes from the generations that follow the founder, whose drive and business acumen they might not match, though they may insist on managing the company.
Jacoline Loewen, partner, author of Money Magnet, How to attract investors to your business.