I was recently asked to give a talk about family businesses, and the conference organizer told me not to even mention the “three generation rule.” As he put it: “Everyone already knows that family businesses don’t last.”
He’s perfectly right. An oft-cited statistic is that only 30% of family businesses make it through the second generation, 10-15% through the third, and 3-5% through the fourth. These are disheartening numbers.
