Legacy management: strengthening family businesses in the future!

Legacy management: strengthening family businesses in the future!

Entrepreneurial families have been influential players in the economy and society for generations. Your work is characterized by successes, but also by repressed burdens that come from the past. In view of this complexity, the WIFU Foundation has published a new practical guide. The guide entitled “Legacy Management in Entrepreneurial Families – Continuing What Fits, Putting Away What is Problematic” by Prof. Dr. Heiko Kleve offers support for family businesses to actively address their family history and to shape transgenerational legacies in a meaningful way. The publication date was June 18, 2025 and is available online for free at www.wifu.de/bibliothek.

The aim of the guide is to support entrepreneurial families in coming to terms with their history. In particular, the importance of unconscious past experiences is emphasized, which often continue to have an impact in multi-generational family businesses. Taboo topics, such as corporate behavior in times of dictatorship, can burden generations and require a sensitive approach.

Strategies to strengthen resilience

The guide presents three central strategic approaches that are intended to help entrepreneurial families increase their resilience and promote family cohesion. The first approach is the selective view of the past, which integrates memories and emotional repetition and encourages conscious work through the past. The second focus is on preserving traditions and at the same time creating something new in order to harmonize the interaction between family and company. Finally, the current-related loyalty within the active generation is highlighted.

The guide also addresses challenges that entrepreneurial families often face. These include letting go of stressful patterns, loyalty conflicts and repeating family behaviors. Case studies and systems theory perspectives facilitate understanding of these theoretical approaches and provide practical guidance for family members as well as successors and advisors.

Importance of family businesses for society

Family businesses are not only an important part of the German economy, but are also perceived as resilient and popular employers. According to Prof. Birgit Felden from the Berlin School of Economics and Law, the popularity of these companies often correlates with their size. Smaller companies are better able to convey social values ​​and think more long-term, which makes them particularly attractive, especially in times of skilled labor shortages.

Family businesses show stable employee commitment: over a quarter of employees have been with the company for more than ten years. This long-term commitment is explained by factors such as security, trust and a strong identification with the company's goal. Dr. Markus Thannhuber from Einhell Germany AG emphasizes that family businesses are often active on the home market, but are also important in the international arena.

Experts consider the ability to be resilient to be a crucial competitive factor for these companies. Dr. Alexander Schmidt from osb international and Boris Söffge, Managing Director of Söffge GmbH, explain resilience as the ability to resist external challenges and react in a timely manner. In the current “diversified polycrisis epoch”, experts like Prof. (FH) Dott are calling for Markus Weishaupt a critical examination of existing dogmas and openness to diversity and digital skills.

The WIFU Foundation, which has been funding research in the area of ​​family entrepreneurship since 2009, supports these developments with a clear focus on cross-generational sustainability. Around 80 family businesses from German-speaking countries support the foundation with the aim of establishing chairs, supporting research and awarding scholarships. The new guidelines can therefore be viewed as part of this overall approach to sustainably strengthen family and business resilience.

Further information on the topics of family entrepreneurship can be found on the WIFU website, where congresses and events that focus on the concerns of family businesses take place regularly.