Thirty, thirteen, three
Twenty to nine on a Tuesday. The board room of a metalworking company in the southern industrial belt of Buenos Aires: three hundred and forty employees, three sheds and a new machine that arrived from Italy in March and still has the wrapping on its control panel. The founder is seventy-one and has been sitting there since 1979. The eldest son, thirty-eight, has run operations for the past nine years.
The consultant puts up the third slide. It has three large numbers and a staircase going down.
“Thirty per cent make it to the second generation. Thirteen, to the third. Three, to the fourth.”
Nobody argues. The founder looks at his son and the son looks at the table. They move on to the next slide, which is called “Stages of the process” and has five.
The slide was on the screen for eleven seconds and it set the shape of the eight months that followed. Nobody asked where the three numbers came from: they had already done their work. In eleven seconds they turned those two men into a case in a table.
(The scene is a composite reconstruction. The numbers that follow are not: every one of them has an author, a year and a publication.)
The myth is not that family businesses fail. It is the idea that there is a mortality rate belonging to the family name, a curve that plays itself out and against which the owner can only last a little longer. That curve has not been measured anywhere. What has been measured is the price of one decision: who is handed the leadership.
A note about these figures. There are four measurements that put a price on succession, and further down all four appear together, side by side. None of the four was done on mid-sized Argentine companies: three were done on listed companies, and the fourth, the one that most resembles yours, followed 5,334 handovers at privately held Danish firms. What travels from one country to another is the direction of the effect, not its height.
Two hundred manufacturers in Illinois
The three numbers have an address, and there is broad agreement about which one: Keeping the Family Business Healthy, by John L. Ward, Jossey-Bass, 1987. The sample is two hundred Illinois manufacturers, drawn at random from those listed in annual industry publications between 1924 and 1984. Sixty years, one state, one sector.
The result has two steps, and the second is measured on the first. Twenty per cent of those companies were still in existence as independent firms under the same name. And of that twenty per cent —not of the total— thirteen per cent were also still in the hands of the same family.
There was nobody to compare them against, and to get in you had to have survived. Nobody counted how many non-family companies from the same list were still standing; without that second number, the thirteen per cent does not tell you whether it is a little or a lot, it just says thirteen. And to appear on a list that starts in 1924 you already had to have come through the Great Depression.
Selling counts as dying. A company that was sold, merged or spun off leaves the count exactly like one that went bankrupt. The exit an owner plans for twenty years goes into the same column as insolvency proceedings.
The book is out of print and we did not have it in our hands. We verified three independent reproductions of the same sample and the same result: a trade magazine, the authors of the Harvard Business Review family business handbook, and a professor at INSEAD. The chain of citations is verified; the page is not.
None of this invalidates the count: Ward counted what he said he was counting. What does not hold up is the use. That table says nothing about a metalworking company in greater Buenos Aires in 2026, and it is the one that will shape the conversation you have this year.
What gets quoted, what was published, and the three method decisions:
The preposition that cost a generation
Ward wrote that this thirteen per cent lasts through three generations: across all three, with the third inside and working. It gets quoted as making it to the third, as though that were where it ended. Between the two prepositions there is a whole generation, some thirty years, and in Spanish the slip is easier still: one word, hasta, does the work of both.
The same slip, applied a second time, is where the thirty comes from. The trade magazine that reproduces the study flags it on that exact figure: thirty-two per cent of those companies lasted at least sixty years, that is, through the second generation. With the other preposition it becomes “thirty per cent make it to the second”.
With that, the figures stop contradicting each other. The formulation of Ward that reaches us through the chain of citations carries a sentence the slide never uses: fewer than two thirds of those two hundred survive the second generation, meaning that they reach it. Around a third of the two hundred go all the way through it, sixty years. And the thirteen per cent —the same one as before, the one counted on the twenty per cent left standing and not on the two hundred— goes through the third. They are three markers on the same curve measured with two different yardsticks: the first two on the total, the third on the survivors. The slide kept the middle one and moved it.
The three per cent for the fourth generation is the only one still without an address: it appears in no formulation of the study, and in none of the sources that reproduce it. Those sources do carry, on a different cut of the same sample, a third thirteen per cent, and we declare its base as we did for the other two: close to thirteen out of every hundred of those two hundred companies —now on the total, not on the survivors— lasted ninety years or more as independent firms under the same name, well into the fourth generation.
That thirteen does not knock down the three, and this has to be said in a piece that is teaching people to look at bases. They measure different things: the thirteen counts continuity of the name; the three promises continuity in the family, which is the more demanding of the two yardsticks. On that demanding yardstick, the sample does not even report a number at ninety years. All that holds, then, is that the three per cent has not been measured anywhere, and that the only figure the same sample gives at that point —counting something else, and counting it more loosely— is more than four times larger.
With the sample in view, the phenomenon can be named without insulting anybody: the imported curse. A local, old result with no control group, travelling from language to language, shedding its sample until it arrives dressed up as a law. Nobody falsified anything: there was a chain of citations.
So far, one badly quoted number. That it is wrong does not mean the idea behind it is wrong.
The same number, dated this year and holding an Argentine passport. On 5 May 2026, La Nación published “Por qué solo 3 de cada 10 empresas familiares sobreviven al recambio generacional” (why only 3 in 10 family businesses survive the generational handover). The version reproduced eight days later by a professional association in the field attributes the 30% and the 13% to estimates from an Argentine university. Not to Ward, not to Illinois, not to 1924: to a local estimate from 2026. That is how a number gets laundered: it loses its address, it loses its date and it gains citizenship. And four paragraphs further down, the same piece states —citing two other sources— that an Argentine family business lives between twenty-two and twenty-eight years and a non-family one between eleven and thirteen. The text announcing the curse contains, on the same page, the fact that family businesses last more than twice as long. (We could not trace that pair of figures back to its primary source: we cite it for the contradiction, not for the magnitude.)
Compared against what?
Family businesses do die, and no autopsy of a figure changes that. What the Illinois sample could not answer is whether they die more than the rest. Before the figure, a translation: the half-life of a group of companies is not the average age at which a company dies, it is the period within which half of the group is no longer there.
In 2015, four researchers published in a Royal Society journal their tracking of 26,561 American companies that were publicly listed between 1950 and 2009. The half-life of a listed company is around ten years, whatever the sector. And they count the end exactly as Ward counted it: bankruptcy, but also mergers and acquisitions. The two use the same yardstick.
If half of all listed companies —with a board, auditors and no inheritance problem inside— disappear within a decade, the metalworking company in the scene, open for forty-seven years, is not a case of failure foretold: it is a rare case of survival. And if your company has been standing for more than a decade, you are on that same rare side.
Two limits. What was measured is listed companies, and the one in the scene is not listed. And age does not protect you going forward: mortality in that group is almost the same at forty years as at five. The years you have been open prove what has already happened, not what is coming.
That is the good part. Now the expensive one, which is also measured.
Four points of profitability
Simply comparing companies that handed the leadership to a son with those that hired somebody from outside proves nothing: nobody drew lots over those companies. Drawing lots means, in plain language, tossing a coin over who goes into each group, without looking at how each one was doing; it is the only way to be sure that the two groups start out level and that whatever happens afterwards is down to the change and not to which company you started with. Here there was no coin: the owner chose, and he chose while looking. That is the dead end, and that is where the discussion sat for twenty years.
Four researchers got out of the dead end by looking for a fact unrelated to how the company was doing but that would move the probability of the succession staying in the family. They found one: the sex of the departing chief executive's first child. With a firstborn daughter, the job stayed in the family in 29.4% of cases; with a firstborn son, in 39%.
Why that licenses talk of cause: the sex of a child born forty years earlier has no relation to how the company is doing today, and comparing two groups that differ mainly in that comes fairly close to having drawn lots over them. It says nothing about any particular child: it separates populations, not people.
The sample is 5,334 chief executive successions at Danish limited liability companies, most of them privately held, between 1994 and 2002: 1,776 stayed in the family and 3,558 went to somebody from outside. It was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Two more translations are needed. Operating profitability on assets is, in plain language, how much operating profit the company produces for every hundred dollars invested inside it: machines, stock, receivables. Here the average was six and a half. And “percentage points” is not the same as “per cent”: falling four points from six and a half is not losing four per cent, it is losing more than half.
The result. Operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around the handover to a family member. The study does not say how long that fall lasts: it licenses neither talk of permanent damage nor the assumption that it sorts itself out.
Four points on a base of six and a half is around sixty per cent of operating profitability. In money, with an arithmetic that is ours and not the study's: for every ten million dollars invested inside the company, four hundred thousand dollars less in operating profit a year. Last year's accounts for your company hold the two numbers you need to redo that sum with your own.
The same number in three currencies:
The objection is obvious: surely the companies that hand the firm to a son are the ones that were doing worse. The authors anticipated it, and the answer is the most uncomfortable part of the study.
The ones that chose a son were doing better
The authors looked at both populations before the handover, when nothing had happened yet. Those that ended up handing the leadership to a family member were returning seven point four for every hundred of invested assets. Those that ended up hiring from outside, six point one. It is a little over one point, and it is statistically solid.
That turns the easy reading upside down. The image of a company falling back on the family because it cannot attract an outside professional ends up reversed: handing the leadership to a son is a decision that companies in good shape can afford, and it is those companies that then pay the bill. Not because the person taking over is worth less: the study does not measure that. What it measures is the average result of a rule that compares against nothing.
Choosing the right person for a job is a problem with evidence of its own, and we devoted a whole piece to it. Here there is a single candidate and the interview took place thirty years ago.
That is profitability. What is left is the other half of the owner's wealth: what the whole company is worth.
What the market was paying for the founder
There is a way of answering that does not depend on anybody's opinion: look at what somebody paid. Two researchers calculated, company by company, how much each one was worth in the market for every dollar it would cost to replace its assets. If it comes to one, the market is paying what the hardware is worth. If it comes to three, it is paying for something that does not appear in the inventory.
The sample is 508 listed Fortune 500 companies, with data from their shareholder filings in the second half of the nineties.
Before the numbers, a distinction that in a mid-sized company usually lives inside a single person. Chairing the board is not running the company: the chair leads the body that sets direction, approves the large investments and oversees whoever runs the business; the chief executive runs the operation day to day and answers to that body. In the table that follows, those two chairs are counted separately, and everything else depends on that separation: the founder can keep one and let go of the other.
With the founder in charge —both chairs— the market was paying 3.12 for every dollar of assets.
With the family still owning the company, but with the chairmanship and the chief executive role in the hands of people hired from outside, 1.94. Almost exactly what a company with no family inside it was worth: 1.95.
With the descendants in charge —one chairing the board and another as chief executive— 1.74. Below both of the above.
And the value nobody expects: the founder as chair, with a hired chief executive, 2.81. The distance from 3.12 is not statistically solid: for the market, the two configurations were worth practically the same.
What the market was paying extra for was not the family name. It was one person. And that person, sooner or later, is not there.
Whoever runs a three-hundred-person metalworking company in greater Buenos Aires does not appear in that table and looks nothing like the companies in it. What travels is the question, not the height.
The four configurations, ranked by what the market put on the table:
The table is from the nineties and from the United States. The reasonable question is whether this still happens today, and outside there.
Five years on
It does. A 2026 McKinsey report —a consultancy report, without peer review, and that is exactly where it sits here: fresh confirmation of a direction that had already been measured— followed two hundred family businesses in fifty countries and ten sectors.
Total shareholder return falls on average 5.7 percentage points in the five years after the handover compared with the five before. It is a different yardstick from the Danish one —it measures what the shareholder receives, not what the asset produces— and it points the same way.
The best pair of figures in the report dismantles the family-name reading. A third of all transitions create value: thirty-three out of every hundred, counting family successors and outside ones alike. When the successor comes from the family, twenty-nine out of every hundred. Twenty-nine and thirty-three are practically the same. The heir, on average, creates value almost as often as any other successor. (This twenty-nine is not the Danish 29.4% from earlier: that one measured how often the job stays in the family; this one measures how many transitions end up creating value.)
That is why the authors point not at the heir but at the person leaving. The deterioration also shows up when the incoming chief executive comes from outside the family, and the only thing the two cases have in common is the person departing: conflicts he did not resolve, inherited systems and a reporting structure built around his own authority.
The four measurements in this piece, side by side:
Four figures that have actually been measured, and not one of them says your company is going to die. The autopsy of the number on the slide does not belong here: it is in Figure 1, and none of these four figures appears in that figure. None of the four is a curse and none can be quoted as “what is going to happen to your company”. They are the measured price of a decision, which is a different thing altogether: prices get negotiated.
Fifty countries. Ours is missing.
In Argentina the founder is already gone
The regional picture was taken by researchers from here. A 2020 study from the IAE and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, published in a peer-reviewed journal, photographed the governance of 155 of the largest family businesses in Latin America.
One figure carries the section. The founder is still involved in the governance of the company in 33% of cases across the region. Here the third counts companies with the founder sitting at the table, and it has no relation to the third of transitions that create value in the McKinsey report: they coincide in the number and in nothing else. In Argentina, 7%: the lowest value of the six countries measured.
The link with the previous section makes itself. If what the market pays extra for sits with the founder and not with the family name, then in Argentina's large family businesses that premium has, on average, already expired. That anticipates nothing about the future: it describes the present, and it explains why the conversation about succession always arrives late here.
These are the largest companies in the region, with data from 2014, and Argentina contributes fourteen of them: the ceiling of the market rather than its average. None of this is a reproach: that generation did what had to be done, and the arithmetic of life took care of the rest.
Where a founder is still sitting at the table, and where he is not:
With all the numbers lined up, one question is left: if the evidence penalizes succession, does it penalize the family?
The problem is not the family
There is a measurement of management practices, done on 732 mid-sized manufacturing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, that at this point may come as a surprise: when the majority shareholder is a family and the chief executive role is in the hands of somebody hired from outside, those practices tend to be somewhat better, not worse. Family ownership, on its own, does not work against you.
What the evidence penalizes is not that the company belongs to a family. It is the rule by which whoever runs it gets chosen. Ownership is not chosen; the rule is.
And that rule is applied once every thirty years. Handing over the leadership of a mid-sized company is the largest capital allocation decision you will ever make. Larger than the machine that arrived from Italy. Four points of profitability on everything the company has invested inside it beat the return on almost any project that board approved with minutes taken.
In Why capital projects go off track we wrote about what happens to an investment that gets approved without a file. This is an investment of that size, and it almost never has one.
So the question that remains is not whether your successor is up to it. It is what file that decision has. Below is what your company demands of any investment, set alongside succession.
| What your company demands before signing off an investment | What the same thing is called in succession | Where to look for it on Monday |
|---|---|---|
| A written business case, with numbers | What the handover costs and what not doing it costs | The financial statements for the last three years and operating profitability on assets |
| At least two alternatives compared | Who else could run the company | The list of candidates assessed, if it exists |
| Decision criteria set before seeing the candidates | What the person taking over has to know how to do | The document where they are written down, if there is one |
| A committed date and its milestones | When the handover starts and when it ends | The minutes where the date appears |
| A committee that approves and signs | Who decides, besides the person leaving | The composition of the board |
| A post-completion review against what was promised | What the successor will be measured against in two years | The indicator and the threshold, written down today |
Not one row asks for anything your company does not know how to do. All six are used every year for investments half this size.
Questions for Monday
The first three can be answered right now, without opening anything. The next two need a number your accountant has to hand. The last two mean asking somebody else.
Three from memory, two with the accounts, two to ask
- What was the last figure you heard about family business survival, and who told you it? What matters is whether anybody asked where it came from.
- Name the person who would succeed to the chief executive role if it were needed tomorrow. Now name the second. If there is no second, that is today's finding.
- In which document is the criterion for choosing written down? If the answer is “it is not written down, but we all know it”, there are as many criteria as there are people at the table.
The two that follow need a number your accountant has to hand.
- What was your operating profitability on assets over the last three years? Write it down, and next to it that same number minus four points.
- How much is that difference, in money, per year? Compare it with the last investment your board approved with minutes taken.
The last two have to be asked of somebody else.
- Who else was assessed for the job, and against what written criteria? If the answer is “nobody else”, it does not mean your candidate is badly chosen: it means that today nobody can know, not even him.
- Ask the three managers who report to the chief executive who they would report to the day after the handover. If the three answers do not match, that is the structure your successor inherits.
The slide lasted eleven seconds and it set the shape of the eight months that followed. That is all the power a number nobody went looking for needs: it does not have to be true, it is enough that nobody asks.
What was wrong with it was not the pessimism: it was the subject. The three numbers do not describe the family business; they describe two hundred Midwestern factories, counted against nobody, in a century that has ended. And it was missing the one number that really is theirs: four points of profitability on their own assets.
The founder also has what most of his peers in the region no longer have, and it is the thing the market pays for: he is still sitting there. What he does with the years he has left inside the company does not go on the agenda unless he puts it there.
One question this piece does not answer is left over: what distinguishes the successor who works from the one who does not? There is a 2025 answer, based on some two thousand four hundred successions followed through the administrative records of an entire country, and it does not talk about families: it talks about something in the successor's biography that is settled years before the handover. Part two takes it apart.
What file does the biggest decision of the next thirty years have?
In ninety days the board can have on the table what almost no family business in the region has: the succession file. Three pieces, none of them emotional. What the handover costs, in points of profitability and in money. Which candidates exist and against what written criteria they are compared. And which parts of the company depend today on a single person. It starts with one afternoon and the last three years of accounts. Let's talk.
References
- Ward, J. L., Keeping the Family Business Healthy: How to Plan for Continuing Growth, Profitability, and Family Leadership, Jossey-Bass, 1987 — the origin credited with the 30-13-3 series. Sample: 200 Illinois manufacturers selected at random from those listed in annual publications from 1924 to 1984. Reported result: 20% were still in existence as independent firms under the same name and, of that 20%, 13% were still in the hands of the same family. Formulation from the first page of the book: "Only 13% of successful family businesses last through three generations. Less than two-thirds survive the second generation." This firm did not access the book. What was verified is the reproduction of the sample and of the result in Robert Holton's piece for Family Business Magazine, plus the explicit attribution of the 30-13-3 series to this book by Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer (Banyan Global, authors of the HBR Family Business Handbook) and by Filipe Santos (INSEAD, 2013). Where the 30% comes from: Holton flags the through/to slip on this exact figure —"Thirty-two percent of firms lasted at least 60 years, or through the second generation. Misquoting 'through' as 'to' reduces the life expectancy of the firm by at least 30 years"—, so the "30% make it to the second generation" in circulation is that 32%, rounded and with the preposition changed. By the same token, "less than two-thirds" does not contradict it: it measures a different milestone (reaching the second generation, not going all the way through it). The 3% for the fourth generation appears in no formulation of the study and in none of the sources that reproduce it. The same article records, on a different cut of the same sample —on the total of 200 and not on the survivors—, that "nearly 13% of the companies in the study lasted as independent firms with the same name for at least 90 years, which is well into the fourth generation."
- Daepp, M. I. G., Hamilton, M. J., West, G. B. and Bettencourt, L. M. A., "The mortality of companies", Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 12(106), 2015 — the control group missing from the previous reference. 26,561 American companies publicly listed between 1950 and 2009 (Compustat North America and Historical), censored data included. The half-life of a listed company is around a decade, whatever the sector, and the mortality rate is approximately constant with age. Estimates by method: 7.02 years (frequency window), 10.46 (Kaplan-Meier), 10.83 (Nelson-Aalen) and 11.94 (maximum likelihood). What is cited here is “half-life ≈ 10 years”, which is a different quantity from “average lifespan”; the second-hand write-ups that talk about 15 years do not correspond to this study. The study counts both bankruptcy and mergers and acquisitions as the end of the company: it is the same yardstick used in reference 1, which is why the two are comparable.
- Bennedsen, M., Nielsen, K. M., Pérez-González, F. and Wolfenzon, D., "Inside the Family Firm: The Role of Families in Succession Decisions and Performance", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(2), 2007, pp. 647-691 — the column this article rests on. 5,334 chief executive successions between 1994 and 2002 at Danish limited liability companies, both public and privately held, with a large majority of the latter: 1,776 family and 3,558 non-family. The causal identification uses as an instrumental variable the sex of the departing chief executive's firstborn: the frequency of family succession is 29.4% when the firstborn is a girl and rises to 39% when the firstborn is a boy (an increase of 32.7%; first-stage coefficient 0.0955, standard error 0.0138). Result: "operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around CEO transitions". Average operating profitability on assets across the whole sample is 6.5%; the companies that ended up handing over to a family member were returning 7.4% before the handover against 6.1% for those that promoted somebody from outside (a difference of 1.3 points, significant at 1%; 1.4 points industry-adjusted). The negative effect is larger in fast-growing industries, in skilled-labour industries and at relatively large companies. The event window is not reproduced here: the result is stated as a fall “around the transitions” and this article extends it neither in time nor into permanent damage.
- Villalonga, B. and Amit, R., "How do family ownership, control and management affect firm value?", Journal of Financial Economics, 80(2), 2006, pp. 385-417 — where the premium on a family business actually comes from. 508 publicly listed Fortune 500 companies, 1994-2000, with data from shareholder filings: 2,808 firm-year observations, of which 1,041 correspond to 193 family firms and 1,767 to 336 non-family firms. Table 6 Panel A contains family firms only, broken down by who chairs the board and who holds the chief executive role, and its cells are counted in firm-year observations, not in firms. Average Tobin's q (market value over the replacement cost of assets): founder as chief executive and chair, 3.12 (215 observations); founder as chair with a hired chief executive, 2.81 (73); descendant as chair with a descendant as chief executive, 1.74 (306); chair and chief executive both hired, 1.94. The value for non-family firms, 1.95, comes from Table 2, not from Table 6. Panel B, regression: founder-chief executive +1.16 (significant at 1%); descendant-chief executive −0.23 (at 10%); hired chief executive −0.02, not significant. The difference between 3.12 and 2.81 is not statistically solid (t = 0.76). The authors' verbatim conclusion: "family ownership creates value only when the founder serves as CEO of the family firm or as Chairman with a hired CEO... When descendants serve as CEOs, firm value is destroyed." The cell for founder-chair with a descendant as chief executive (1.61) is not used in this article: it rests on ten observations and the authors themselves warn that it lacks significance.
- McKinsey & Company, "Passing the baton: Creating value through CEO succession at family businesses", 2026 — the fresh, global confirmation. 200 family businesses in 50 countries and 10 sectors. Total shareholder return falls on average 5.7 percentage points in the five years after the transition compared with the five before; only a third of transitions create value, and the share is 29% when the successor is a family member. The report's thesis points at the departing CEO —unresolved conflicts, inherited systems, reporting structures built around his own authority— and not at the quality of the heir, because the deterioration also shows up with outside successors. It is a consultancy report, not a peer-reviewed study, and in this article it is used as confirming colour, never as a column. The improvement figure for successful transitions that circulates in some coverage is not cited here: it could not be verified against the original report.
- Vazquez, P., Carrera, A. and Cornejo, M., "Corporate governance in the largest family firms in Latin America", Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, 27(2), 2020 — the regional layer, peer-reviewed and signed by researchers from the IAE and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. 155 family firms drawn from the AméricaEconomía ranking of the 500 largest Latin American companies (2015, net sales to December 2014), financial firms excluded. Sample composition: Brazil 40%, Mexico 31%, Chile 10%, Argentina 9%, Peru 6%, Colombia 3%. Averages: 65% of the capital in the hands of the controlling family; 86% of boards chaired by a family member; 46% of directors are family members; average board of 9.15 members; 55% with a family chief executive; 30% combining the chair and the chief executive role; founder present in governance in 33% of cases; 1.5 overlapping generations. Founder presence by country (Table II): Brazil 45%, Mexico 31%, Chile 25%, Colombia 25%, Peru 11%, Argentina 7%. These are the largest companies in the region, with data from 2014, and Argentina contributes fourteen cases: the country figures are indicative.
- Bloom, N. and Van Reenen, J., "Measuring and Explaining Management Practices Across Firms and Countries", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(4), 2007, pp. 1351-1408 — used here for a single point, in a single sentence of the body. The measurement rests on 732 mid-sized manufacturing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, not on the later, expanded World Management Survey, which does cover thousands of firms. Verbatim from the paper: "family ownership combined with professional management (i.e. where the CEO is not a family member) has a mildly positive association with good managerial practices." The coefficients in that table, and the result that separates family ownership from the rule by which the chief executive is chosen, are material for the second part of this piece and are not cited here.
- La Nación, "Por qué solo 3 de cada 10 empresas familiares sobreviven al recambio generacional", 5 May 2026, and its reproduction in the newsletter of the Instituto Argentino de la Empresa Familiar (Javier Faiwusiewicz, 13 May 2026) — cited as an object, not as a source: they are dated proof that the 30-13-3 series circulates today in the Argentine business press attributed to a local estimate rather than to its origin. The same piece states, citing Fundación Observatorio PyME and ECLAC/IDB, that an Argentine family business lives between 22 and 28 years against 11 to 13 for a non-family one. That pair of figures could not be traced back to its primary source, which is why it is cited as a claim made in that piece and not as a finding of our own.
All peer-reviewed sources were read in their published version. Last verified: August 2026. The two exceptions —Ward's book, which could not be accessed, and the McKinsey report, verified through coverage— are declared above.