A few years ago, I watched up close as the succession of a family business went wrong. A car dealership group, around ten locations, a well-known automotive brand. The owner-director could have stepped back long before he did. Instead, he stayed in place, doubting whether his daughters were capable of taking over. That doubt ended up shaping the entire course of the succession and, in hindsight, the survival of the company itself.
Delay feels logical, and it isn’t
Research by ABN AMRO and Ipsos among family businesses (December 2025) points to a pattern I see constantly in my own practice: a clear majority of owner-directors, around 68 percent, consider succession important, yet only 37 percent actually have a concrete plan in place. Among smaller family businesses that share drops further, to roughly 8 percent. The intention is there. It’s the translation into an actual process that keeps being postponed.
This isn’t unwillingness. It’s an understandable human response: someone who built a company with their own hands doesn’t experience letting go of it as a strategic decision, but as a loss. Every extra year feels like time gained. In practice, it’s more often time lost: time in which a successor cannot grow into the role and the organisation remains dependent on a single person.
Demographics are raising the stakes
Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reports that the share of owner-directors aged 65 and older has risen sharply in recent years, from roughly 7 to 13 percent. The Netherlands counts an estimated 300,000 family businesses, accounting for around a third of employment and a third of value added in the business sector. Succession, then, is not just an individual drama: it is an issue with real economic weight, particularly in sectors where family businesses form the backbone.
What delay costs
Back to the dealership group. One daughter eventually decided succession wasn’t what she wanted and moved abroad. The other did join the organisation: not to lead it herself, but to put forward her own son as successor. A young man in his early twenties, capable, but without the years of experience needed to hold his own in a sector defined by sharp, fast-moving acquisitions, let alone lead a multi-site organisation.
The owner-director, by then well into his eighties, stayed at the helm and brought in expensive external specialists to fill the gaps. It didn’t deliver the results he needed. After his death, a dispute over the inheritance broke out and that dispute proved fatal to the organisation. What he had built with his own hands fell apart the moment he was no longer there to hold it together.
A question for candidates too
This issue doesn’t only play out on the owner’s side of the table. I regularly speak with executives and directors approached for a role within a family business and for them the distinction matters just as much: are they genuinely being groomed for leadership, with the mandate and the time to grow into it? Or are they being brought in to buy time for a sitting owner-director who isn’t ready to let go, without real room to actually steer the business? That distinction deserves to be examined early in the conversation: not discovered after taking the job.
Closer to home
A succession dispute is currently unfolding at a regional transport company in the North Sea Canal Area, and as far as I know it has not yet been resolved. I’m deliberately not naming it here: the matter is current and sensitive, which calls for restraint. What it does illustrate is that this isn’t a problem confined to one sector or to the big cities: it plays out just as much in manufacturing and logistics around the North Sea Canal as it does in automotive retail.
What actually works
In my experience, successful successions share one thing: they are treated as a multi-year process, not a decision made on a single day. That means starting early: not when health or age forces the issue, but years before. And it often means bringing in an outside perspective. Not to sideline the family, but to honestly assess whether a candidate, family member or not, can actually carry the role, independent of loyalty, expectation or good intentions. That conversation is uncomfortable. Postponing it is more uncomfortable still, in hindsight.
In closing
At Fornell Human Capital, we prefer to have that conversation well before the need becomes urgent: not as crisis intervention, but as part of a process that gives a successor time to grow into the role. Is succession on your agenda or is that question still being postponed?