No Successors

Abstract

Families who have no family successors to manage the business solve the problem in a variety of ways. Usually, they sell the business. A Dutch family could find no motivated successors in a given generation and eventually sold its business. A mere one generation later, family members identified a competent, motivated family member, bought the business back, and installed the new successor at the head of it. More and more often, our observations suggest, families in business refuse to accept the idea that their only alternative to having no direct successor is selling out. So far as they are concerned, having no immediate successor does not have to mean the end of their role in the business.