These burdened shelves, however, largely lack insightful volumes for family business owners on the subject of effectively guiding one’s firm into the next generation. Although several useful titles exist, unearthing them often requires a fair amount of effort. The reasons of business book publishers for neglecting this market are difficult to fathom in light of the fact that, according to Family Business Review, 80 percent to 90 percent of all the businesses in the United States are family owned. These firms generate nearly $6 trillion of our $10.5 trillion economy and employ over half our workforce.

While they grab fewer headlines than their large-cap corporate cousins, these businesses face profound and increasingly serious issues. Two out of five family businesses will change hands in the next four years; 55 percent will see a leadership change within a decade. The transfer of family businesses to the second generation (four-fifths of U.S. family businesses are currently controlled by their founders) obliges their patriarchs and matriarchs to appraise not only their business assets and strategies, but also their family values and relationships.

Perhaps the challenges confronting every family business as it wrestles with succession are too unique for effective distillation into a business self-help tome. Indeed, building a thriving business may come to seem easy by comparison with the task of passing it on successfully. According to Family Business magazine, barely 10 percent of family businesses survive to the third generation, and only 4 percent struggle on to the fourth.

The bloodless gamesmanship and strategic gambits of corporate leviathans may keep readers turning the pages of best-selling business books, but those of us who have built and run our own enterprises are usually unwilling to emulate these tactics close to home. Indeed, the take-the-money-and-run strategy employed by corporate poster-boys like Welch, Dunlop and Grasso usually has no place in our thinking. Overwhelmingly, we are building for the future: Nearly 90 percent of the nation’s entrepreneurs want their firms to remain in family hands after they exit the scene.

This month, we bring to a close our four-part series on building our families’ 100-year plans with a look at family business succession issues and how they are intimately tied to our aspirations for our families, our financial relationships and our philanthropic pursuits.

Our family values and interests evolve with each succeeding generation; for this reason, the family constitution we design to guide our business must be flexible. And since (despite the messianic ardor of many entrepreneurs) there is no corporate analog for apostolic succession, we must establish criteria to inform those who will lead our companies in the future, as well as standards to which family members seeking employment there must adhere.

But at the end of the day, no entrepreneur can foresee all eventualities; we must trust our successors to make good decisions, for both the business and the family. As Gene Wach, one of the entrepreneurs profiled in our cover story this month (“Commerce and Consensus” ), says: “If you want to have a good family business, it’s important to have a good family!”

Dwight Cass
Editor-in-Chief