Keeping Your Community's Family-Owned Businesses

Are family-owned businesses important to your local economic base? This is a big source of economic development for many communities, but we rarely here anyone talk about it. One issue we should be thinking about is "succession planning" in these businesses.

Family businesses produce over half the U.S. gross domestic product, and provide 60 percent of all the nation’s jobs. Yet, though proven farsighted in business, astonishingly few of the nation’s successful entrepreneurs apply their forecasting skills to the crucial question of succession. According to a survey of 1,143 family businesses (mostly formed after World War II) conducted last year by MassMutual Financial and the Raymond Family Business Institute, nearly two in five of these companies will see their founders retire in the next four years. A startling 42 percent of those enterprises have not named a successor. Read more here and also here.