For ages, the world has been seeing that millions of profitable, promising, and mighty family businesses do not last beyond their founding generation or, at the most, their third generation. 

It is already getting late for family businesses to begin their formal initiative for preserving, protecting, and nurturing the family’s soul. This soul with love has helped their businesses navigate and prevail through storms, helping them create remarkable history during their first two generations. . 

Lately, the evidence of Indian family businesses facing a critical challenge of keeping the family together has been on the news nationally and worldwide. In the past few decades, these family businesses have enlightened the world of business with an undaunted spirit of welfare and wellbeing of all. They had been worshipped and looked up to, not for decades but even a century.

It is heartbreaking to see the world of the family business witnessing the destruction of some of the mightiest, long-standing, and inspiring businesses. 

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Why do the mighty family businesses fall? Why do they fail? Is there a problem in the business world? Or is it in their family world? Or both even? So, where does all go untoward? 

More crucially, what can the rest of us learn from these wake-up calls and make a choice to pause, reflect and ask the person in the mirror: Where do I want to see my family business future as? How would the current and the going forward generations hold the family’s soul and continue growing in happiness, growth, and abundance? 

The truth is that love makes us feel invincible against any odds that life throws at us, any disease, natural disaster, or anything harmful. Love makes us feel protected and safe. And while we have this spiritual source of healing and infinite growth, we become enablers of growth – growing and adding life in all we do. 

Thus, when the business empire and the dynastic family behind show signs of failing, it is a larger scale of loss than mere properties, estates, cash, bonds, and similar instruments of wealth. When a formidable family business falls, the immeasurable and real loss is the loss of dreams of many, loss of hopes of many, loss of trust even in love for many, loss of bearings for many millions who are connected with them and look up to them as a beacon of hope and good-heartedness. 

But as a family business – should we care? If yes, how? Where do we begin? 

Building, maintaining, and growing a family business isn’t easy. For over two decades, our deep hands-on work with family businesses worldwide has made us understand what truly keeps a family business together and sustaining? How can family businesses be enabled to thrive – keeping & growing love at the core? How does the institutional strength of the family that owns/runs/governs businesses and the businesses themselves keep growing in prosperity, purpose and meaning?

And the only and only answer to these questions is: 

To create a prevailing institutional strength of the family business, the owners must decide to give importance and priority to architect a formal structure along with relevant systems to nurture the essential informal of the family.