> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Can Family Businesses Survive the Second Generation? - URL: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/can-family-businesses-survive-the-second-generation/ - Published: 2026-08-07T07:02:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-11T13:23:15.000Z - Description: What we inherit, what we lose, and why so few businesses survive the person who built them. - Author: Emmanuel Cobbi There’s a shop somewhere. Or a transport company, a small factory, a trading house. Every family seems to know a version of it, the business everyone still calls by the founder’s name years after he’s gone. “Papa’s business.” At first the name is a point of pride. Then something shifts. The founder steps back, dies, or simply can’t make the decisions that once looked effortless. The children inherit the buildings, the vehicles, the accounts, the shares. And somewhere in that handover, the business itself starts to disappear. This isn’t just a family matter, either. A study of 30 family businesses in Bamenda, Buea, Kumba and Limbe found that only about 17% were considered sustainable into the second generation, and roughly 7% survived into the third. It’s a small sample, but the pattern points at a question a lot of successful families eventually run into: can something built around one person become an institution that outlasts him? Family businesses usually start with an advantage money can’t buy. Relatives trust each other. Kids help out at the shop during school holidays, and people push through hard stretches because they believe they’re building something that belongs to all of them. The problem is that same closeness can turn into a liability. A lot of first-generation businesses aren’t really institutions at all. They’re extensions of the founder’s reputation and his relationships. Family ownership isn’t the weakness here; in plenty of businesses, family commitment is exactly what gets a company through the hard years. The trouble starts when trust between relatives quietly replaces the systems and records a business needs no matter who owns it. Take a supplier who extends credit because he trusts the founder personally, or a customer who pays late because he knows him well enough to get away with it. The founder is the one who knows which customer is good for the money, which supplier is under pressure, which staff member can be trusted with a difficult situation, and who owes him a favor from fifteen years ago. Most of that knowledge never gets written down anywhere. It lives in phone calls, handshakes, memories built up over decades. When the founder leaves, the family doesn’t just lose a manager. It can lose the entire informal system that kept the business running. Succession, in other words, can’t start at the funeral. By then the hardest decisions are already overdue. Planning for it ahead of time is awkward in ways that are easy to underestimate: a child who asks how ownership will be split can come across as impatient, while a manager who asks who’s in charge if something happens to the founder risks being seen as disloyal outright. So the founder holds on. He signs off on every important decision himself, keeps the key relationships close, and hands the next generation responsibility without quite enough authority to learn what running the place actually takes. Then the handover arrives all at once, forced by circumstance, and the family has to sort out ownership, management, property and money at exactly the moment grief and old resentments are running highest. That’s when the gap between owning assets and running a business becomes obvious. A family can end up holding land, buildings, vehicles and shares while the actual enterprise that gave those things their value quietly falls apart. Property survives. The commercial activity around it doesn’t always. A few well-known Cameroonian business families show how messy this transition can get. The estate of businessman Paul Soppo Priso, for instance, ended up tied up in disputes that dragged on for decades after his death. Business in Cameroon has reported that much of the commercial empire he built either declined or disappeared, while significant assets got pulled into succession fights. The Fotso family’s story is another warning sign. After Victor Fotso died, serious disagreements broke out within the family over succession and the handling of his estate. It’s too simple to say the next generation destroyed what he built. The more useful lesson is that when too much of a business rests on one founder, the people who inherit it can end up with the assets but not the institutional strength that made those assets worth anything. There’s another complication too: the children might not actually want the business. Founders tend to assume their kids will naturally want to carry on what they started, but a son might have no interest in the transport company, or a daughter might simply want to run something of her own instead. When taking over becomes an obligation instead of a choice, a successor can end up more focused on protecting the founder’s legacy than on building the company’s future. That’s a real risk. No business gets to stay frozen in its founder’s era forever, and the next generation might need to close an unprofitable branch, bring in digital distribution, or hire professional managers the family didn’t grow up with. That’s not betrayal. It might be the only way to keep the thing alive. Honoring what a founder built doesn’t mean preserving every choice he made; sometimes the most faithful way to protect a legacy is to change it enough that it survives him. Some families have handled this better. The Kadji Group is a more complicated case. Members of the next generation were already working in the business before Joseph Kadji Defosso’s death, so they had real experience by the time succession happened. Even so, the process has involved family disputes, which shows that preparation reduces conflict rather than eliminating it entirely. The Sohaing family offers a similar lesson. André Sohaing brought his wife and children into the management of the business before he died in 2015\. That didn’t stop later succession disputes from surfacing, but it meant the next generation had already spent real time inside the company before they had to run it. Neither case proves family businesses can avoid conflict altogether. What they suggest is something more useful: family ownership doesn’t have to mean family management. A family can fight and still keep the company functioning, as long as ownership of shares doesn’t automatically decide who runs it. That takes a real separation between the family and the enterprise. Family members can benefit financially without holding every executive title, and a successor should learn the business properly before being handed control of it outright. The books shouldn’t live only in the founder’s head, and relationships with suppliers need to belong to the company rather than to whoever happened to build them first. The next generation also has to be allowed to actually build something of their own. The founder built his business for the world he was operating in; his children are operating in a different one, and what worked to create the company may not be what keeps it standing. The real inheritance isn’t the land, the shop, the trucks, the hotel, or the name over the door. It’s the judgment and relationships that created those things in the first place, along with whatever systems let that knowledge outlive one person. An inheritance can be divided among children easily enough. Whether it stays a business, or just becomes a pile of assets with the same old name attached, depends on whether it can run without him.