Every founder believes their business is built to last. A few of them are right.
There is something both humbling and urgent about this truth. Across the world, people pour decades of their lives into businesses, only for those businesses to quietly collapse the moment they step away. The enterprise that felt permanent was, in fact, personal. It was never a business. It was a person with a company attached.
According to the Family Business Institute, only 30 percent of family-owned businesses survive into the second generation. Just 12 percent make it to the third. And of the companies that were listed on the S&P 500 in 1955, over 88 percent no longer exist today. These are not stories of failure. Many were once thriving. What they lacked was design, the kind of deliberate structure that lets a business breathe and grow without its creator at the centre of everything.
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