At the moment I am searching for a managing director for a family business in the North Sea Canal Area. It is a supplier of metal components and assemblies, more than forty years old, with around 220 employees at two production sites and customers in machine building, energy and the maritime industry. The second generation is handing over day-to-day management. The third generation has deliberately chosen the role of shareholder. For the first time in the company’s history, the director will come from outside the family.
What struck me in this assignment is what was already in place before the first candidate was approached: a newly composed Supervisory Board, a family charter and a handover period of about six months. That is less obvious than it sounds.
Leadership without ownership
A director-major shareholder usually runs the company without having to account to anyone. Ownership and management sit in one person, so the mandate is as large as he makes it. A director from outside takes over the management, while ownership stays with the family. That difference does not resolve itself.
This calls for agreements that earlier generations never needed: what the director decides independently and through which channels the family exercises its influence as shareholder. If a family makes those agreements only after the new director has started, they feel like a correction and are received as one. Before the appointment you settle them together. Afterwards they have to be negotiated with someone who is already on board.
What the figures show
Family businesses are putting that structure in place more often. Research by Nyenrode Business University, RSM and Van Lanschot Kempen showed in 2024 that almost 60 percent of family businesses with more than 200 employees have a supervisory or advisory board, compared with 22 percent in 2013. At the same time, according to research by Maastricht University (April 2026), 54 percent of family businesses have no formal family governance at all and 41 percent of owners are not adequately prepared for ownership itself. Research by ABN AMRO and Ipsos I&O (July 2026) adds that almost sixty percent of Dutch entrepreneurs have not yet taken any step to prepare a successor.
The most instructive figure comes from an international study of more than 200 successions in family businesses across fifty countries, published this spring. Only about a third of leadership changes created value and that was also true when the successor came from outside. The researchers mostly traced the cause to the departing leader, who either leaves too abruptly or keeps deciding behind the scenes and so undermines the authority of the successor.
Why one says yes and another says no
That last point is familiar from my conversations with candidates. In earlier assignments I spoke with two experienced executives about a comparable role at a family business. The first accepted. What drew him was the task of preserving the core of the company while organising it more professionally for the future. The second declined. He would not get the room the role required, because the family shareholders kept involving themselves in day-to-day decisions. The responsibility would be his, the authority would not.
For anyone considering such a role, that is the question that matters. To whom are you accountable and what can you decide without it first being discussed within the family? Ask it in the second interview, not when the contract is on the table. A family that has arranged this well will answer without hesitation. A family that has not yet made up its mind will show that in its answer too and that is valuable information before you sign.
The departing director in a new role
In the assignment I am working on now, the current director-major shareholder joins the new Supervisory Board alongside two independent members. That can work well. His knowledge of customers, employees and the history of the company remains available, and he learns a role he never had before: supervising a business he ran himself for many years. It does require discipline, from him and from the board as a whole. The new director reports to the Supervisory Board, not to one of its members.
Why this matters in the IJmond now
Manufacturing in the IJmond and the Zaan region faces difficult choices. A TNO study for the province of North Holland (September 2026) rates steel and manufacturing, both deeply rooted in these regions, as vulnerable because of energy prices and the availability of raw materials. For a family business in metalworking, the first external director therefore often coincides with a change of course: further automation, export growth and less dependence on a handful of large customers. Whoever takes the helm in that phase needs room to decide.
A careful search for a position like this usually takes three to four months. An international benchmark of more than 100,000 retained searches from 2020 to 2023 arrives at an average of 117 days to placement, and our own searches are in the same range. That time is better spent if the governance is in place before the first interview.
What I tell family businesses in the region
Treat the appointment of the first director from outside as a board decision rather than as filling a vacancy. Before the search begins, settle what the director may decide independently and through which channels the family exercises its influence, for example through the shareholders’ meeting and a family charter. Agree with the departing director how he will position himself in the new situation and put it in writing. Then discuss openly with candidates how the family stays involved. The best candidates will ask anyway.
In closing
For a family business, the first director from outside is a break with a tradition that is sometimes forty or fifty years old. Whether that break makes the company stronger is largely decided before the new director walks through the door.