A different perspective reveals how misleading statistics about family businesses can be.
Perhaps the most quoted statistic in the world of family business is this one:
30% of family businesses make it to the second generation, 10-15% make it to the third and 3-5% make it to the fourth generation. Thousands of newspaper, magazine and journal articles report this statistic. The marketing materials used by the burgeoning family-business consulting industry are rife with those numbers.