While not typical, sons that decide to start a business in the same field as their fathers tend to fare much better than those striking out in their own direction, according to a study published by Germany’s Institute of Labor Economics. In it, they analyzed the data from Norwegian firms between 1999 and 2007 to discover that while only four percent of new entrepreneurs decided to start their own business this way, they were found to perform much better than their peers in a variety of metrics. Results were the same whether the father had started a business himself or had just worked as an employee in the field.
Survival during a business’ first four years is often a very telling sign of its future success and the sons in the study were able to achieve a six percent increase over similar firms that did not have a family influence. Most remarkable, however, is that sales, total assets, and the number of employees in these companies was around double their peers which landed them in the top five percent of their industry for those respective categories.
Although there is no direct, measurable cause for the advantage, the study identifies the edge as ‘dinner table human capital’ as many interviewed participants said that they learned much of what they knew from simply listening to their fathers around the dinner table at night. They would recount stories of success and failure as well as discuss problems that they were facing within their walls and as an industry as a whole. The children were also likely to have a head start on building relationships in the marketplace and were able to use their father’s name to establish trust.
