If I hadn't, I'd be haunted. I'd have a hard time living with myself if I hadn't honored my father and mother by taking over the business. But modern cultural and economic shifts have allowed family business owners to shake that destiny like never before. Their primary obstacle is often sentimentality. If it closed that would be the hardest part.
Family businesses are in no danger of evaporating.
Joe Astrachan, editor of the quarterly magazine Family Business Review, estimated that 90 percent of businesses in the United States are family owned, ranging from Anheuser-Busch to Sosinsky's. Almost a third, he said, survive into the second generation and about 12 percent last into the third. The reason is often to avoid estate taxes, which can run as high at 65 percent of the business' worth. But in today's fluid economy, younger business owners often have opportunities their parents lacked. The options at every age are so much greater than 20 years ago.