Last Updated on 10 February, 2024 by Abrahamtolle
Why do family businesses outperform?
Family-owned businesses outperform the main stock indices. They outperform because they have skin in the game, attract better shareholders, have conservative leverage, and thus become antifragile, they do less risky M&A, have long industrial know-how, and do smarter capital allocations. They are owner-operated businesses and their interests are aligned with outside investors.
What is a family-owned business?
Family businesses are all around us: the local pizza-shop on the corner, the auto dealership, the small local newspaper, or your web-domain provider. They are all most likely run and owned by the founder or a small group of people – often a family.
These owners have a real passion for their business and are not afraid of working outside normal office hours – they are not working for the paycheck.
I prefer to call such companies family businesses or owner-operators: they both own and manage the business simultaneously. To avoid the agent-principal conflict, I believe it makes sense for outside investors to invest alongside owner-managers/operators. A lot of empirical evidence points toward outperformance for this group among public companies.
There are many public family-businesses:
Perhaps surprisingly, plenty of public companies can be labeled as either owner-or family-managed.
Let me give you a list of random companies that fit this category: Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, Wal-Mart, L’Oreal, Investor AB, Samsung Electronics, Oracle, BMW, Nike, FedEx, Lukoil, Comcast, Brookfield Asset Management, Constellation software, O’Reilly Automotive, Credit Acceptance Corp to name a few.
According to McKinsey, 33% of the S&P 500 are defined as family businesses, while 40% of the 250 biggest in France. I have no numbers from Germany, but I expect a higher percentage.
This is great news! “Outside” investors thus have plenty of opportunities to invest alongside successful owner-operators.
A family business has skin in the game
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio… I find it profoundly unethical to talk without doing, without exposure to harm, without having one’s skin in the game, without having something at risk. You express your opinion; it can hurt others (who rely on it), yet you incur no liability. Is this fair?
– Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The phrase skin in the game is made popular by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book by the same name. In the introduction Taleb writes that skin in the game implies symmetry in human affairs, that is, fairness, justice, responsibility, and reciprocity.
If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. The concept of skin in the game is essential to understand the world. If a well-paid CEO with insignificant ownership makes a blunder, he risks no financial loss while an owner-manager would.
The real risk-takers are the owners and you want to make sure the managers face the same risks as you do. This lack of symmetry is called the Agency problem:
A family business minimizes the agency problem
The conflict of interest between the owners and the managers is both well known, understood, and covered in numerous books, periodicals, and journals.
The agent (manager) is expected to act in the interests of the owners (the principal), at least in theory, but in practice, the interests of the agent often deviate substantially from the principal because of several reasons, something I’ll come back to in a later article.
Many methods exist to align the agent and the principal, such as stock-based options and long-term performance compensation. But the bottom line is this: the best way to minimize the agent-principal conflict is to have the agent owning outright a significant stake of the business. This is simply the best alignment you can have.
In a successful enterprise, all parties need to work well together: a structure that keeps everyone aligned for the long-term. Peter Thiel writes about this in From Zero to One:
- Ownership: who legally owns a company?
- Possession: who runs the company from day today?
- Control: who governs the company’s affairs?
For example, the management team of Coca-Cola might own just a trivial part of the company, but they exert a tremendous amount of “possession”. This might give them incentives to focus on short-term results to the detriment of long-term plans, even if they receive stock compensation. To cut costs might be a better option than to invest large sums that might pay off in ten years, and in that time the management might have been fired anyway.
Thus, the incentives are to maximize the salary in the shortest amount of time. The board is supposed to govern together with the annual general meeting, but this is far from reality in practice.
This is why many investors, including me, prefer to invest in companies where the manager owns a real stake in the business. At the end of the day, this is the only way to make sure all parties have skin in the game.
Family businesses outperform the market
There is a lot of evidence indicating that family businesses have performed much better than the market (as a group):
Rüdiger Fahlenbach (2009[1]) concluded that eleven percent of the largest publicly traded US firms are headed by a CEO that founded the firm. These CEO-led firms differ in the sense that they spend more on R&D, have higher CAPEX, and make more accretive M&As.
This results in a significantly better performance than agent-CEO companies: 4.4% higher annual return compared to the benchmark from 1993 to 2002.
In a more recent study, Cox and Shulman[2] concluded that the performance of entrepreneur-managed companies from 2005 until 2011 performed substantially better than used benchmarks such as Russell 2000 and S&P 500. Horizon Kinetics Wealth Index confirms the results from 1990 to 2011:
Source: Horizon Kinetics.
The most recent study, to my knowledge, is Credit-Suisse’s [3] from September 2017, where they found family-owned companies to perform 5% better annually than other companies from 2006 until 2017.
The above research is of course just based on averages and generalizations. Among the owner-operators, there are many poorly managed and governed companies. A large owner or family is of course no guarantee of responsible ownership as there are plenty of cases where infighting between a family has torn a great company apart. Due diligence is required!
The Family Business Index
Euronext has an index called Euronext Family Business. The index tracks 90 family-run businesses listed across four Euronext exchanges – Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, and Brussels. The index includes, among else, famous companies AB Inbev, Bollore, Christian Dior, Heineken, L’Oreal, LVMH, and Vivendi.
A family business mostly has better governance
The agency problem could also be labeled as a governance problem. In a structure where the ownership structure is mainly passive, even the big institutions are most of the time passive, and where board members have insignificant ownership, the CEO and managers exert huge power.
This is less likely to happen in a family-owned business: they handpick board members to avoid the agent-principal issue. 39% of the board members of family businesses are inside directors including 20% who belong to the family, compared with 23% in non-family companies, according to this study [4].
They might face challenges in attracting and retaining competent board members because the latter fear the decisions are made more informally (within the family) than formally. However, this might be offset by loyalty, an attribute highly regarded by an owner.
A family works for less pay compensation
“Last year I asked the board to reduce my salary to zero and to lower my bonus factor. CSI had a great year, so despite those modifications, my total compensation actually increased. This year I’ll take no salary, no incentive compensation, and I am no longer charging any expenses to the company.”
–Mark Leonard, Constellation Software, shareholder letter of 2014.
Most owner-managers work for the love of their work, not for the money. They expect their ownership stake to generate most if not all of their wealth.
Opposite, a hired CEO works for the paycheck or the potential wealth from whatever incentives the board has given.
An owner has passion and treats the job more like a lifestyle. Many of them have wealth, which has provided them with f***-off money to pursue whatever interests they have. But they still choose to work long hours.
Furthermore, many of them continue to work well beyond retirement age, just like Warren Buffett, who is still working full time in his 90th year. Another example, Trygve Hegnar, 76 years old and the owner of a newspaper and financial magazine in Norway, still writes for the daily newspaper six times a week, all year round. He has never missed one day for over 30 years. You’ll never see a hired editor do the same.
In Zero To One Peter Thiel argues that a start-up company does better the less it pays the CEO. Thiel mentions Aaron Levie that paid himself a lower salary than everyone else in the company – four years after he started Box. Every employee noticed his obvious commitment to the company’s mission and emulated it – Levie’s pay set the standard for everyone else. Levie would obviously not do this if he didn’t own a significant share of the company. This shows the power of owner-operators and leading by example.
Evidence shows most owner-managers don’t reward themselves with extravagant pay packages like a third-party manager would do. Over the long-term, this attitude compounds as this mentality trickles down in the organization and ultimately could result in a potential cost advantage. A serious owner leads by example.
Families have a long-term focus, they pass the Marshmallow test:
Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
– The Road Less Travelled, by Scott Peck
I guess you have read about the Marshmallow experiment?
An American psychologist tested the ability of four-year-old children to delay gratification. Just like children are bad at delaying gratification, the agent-principal problem makes managers with no skin in the game prone to instant gratification.
The stock market is full of marshmallow CEOs. Even worse, there are plenty of shareholders who want these marshmallow CEOs, perhaps looking for “catalysts or triggers”.
I prefer to invest in companies where the CEO has the ability to wait for the second marshmallow, in other words, to wait for a long-term project to reap its full potential. I tend to think that this is most likely to happen where there is an owner-operator.
When a founder or family spends all their life building a business, a long-term orientation tends to cover all areas of the business: customer relationships, product lines, investments, R&D, CAPEX, customer service, employees, and salaries/compensations.
A respected investor told me, “You end up with the shareholders you deserve”. I’m hoping that’s true (2011 letter)…… It takes lots of time and effort to attract and educate competent shareholder/partners. The last thing we want them to do, is sell (2013 letter).
-Mark Leonard, CEO of Constellation Software
Most family-members consider themselves business owners and thus take a long-term view of their investment. According to Harvard Business Review [5], the average holding period for a publicly traded equity was about seven years in the 1950s, while it’s now around six months. Quite a difference! Furthermore, in the 1950s households owned about 90% of US Corporations’ shares, but today institutions own over 65% of public companies.
Owner-operators attract different types of shareholders who understand long-term thinking and are not attracted to “coupon” investments (dividend stocks, for example), short-term catalysts, turnarounds, or triggers.
Warren Buffett has spent all his life “educating” his shareholders, and there is a reason for this: good shareholders are an integral part of how management can complete long-term projects that might take a decade to pan out. Without such a shareholder base, management stands no chance to make long-term investments.
How management communicates this is of great importance because in most stocks the investors don’t know if there are going to be any future marshmallows: better with one bird in the hand than two in the bush. Shareholder groups put enormous pressure on both management and board, hence a CEO should better focus on attracting shareholders with this mindset and expectations.
A family business manages their own money
I think it’s safe to say that most people are more careless with other people’s money than their own, just like Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations. Most people are more frugal with their own money than someone else’s. The economist and thinker Milton Friedman set up this matrix in Free to Choose:
On Whom Spent | ||
Whose Money | You | Someone Else |
Yours | 1 | 2 |
Someone Else’s | 3 | 4 |
Category 1 is you spending your money on yourself, which obviously gives both incentives to be cautious about spending and how to spend it. Category 4 is the worst: Someone else is spending money on somebody else, which gives no incentives to curb spending or pay attention to how it’s spent (typical of taxpayer’s money). An owner-manager can be put in category 1 or 2, while an agent-CEO belongs to 3 and 4.
Skin in the game means less bureaucracy
A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.
– From Zero To One, by Peter Thiel
A founder is not setting up a business to pull strings in a bureaucratic organization.
On the contrary, they want to have an innovative and decentralized structure that focuses on producing good products and services.
Berkshire Hathaway is an obvious example where Buffett lets his managers operate completely on their own. An agent-CEO is much less likely to accept such a structure.
Families are conservative, they aim for survival, thus low leverage
Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.
–Skin In The Game, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Family-owned businesses take on less debt than corporate peers. This might lead to underperformance in strong economic expansions but much better performance during recessions.
They are not trying to be smart by optimizing the capital structure, but rather focus on survival. Sequence matters, and there is always the presence of ruin. It does not matter how many good years a business has: if there is just one zero in the return sequence, you will end up with nothing.
Taleb writes that cost-benefit analysis is flawed because there is always the possibility of ruin. If ruin is present, it might not matter if the cost-benefit is positive. If there is a 1% chance of crashing a plane we will eventually end up with no pilots left.
Owner-operators understand this very well and want to err on the safe side. Why? Simply because they have skin in the game.
A family business usually has access to capital
Owner-managers with a successful long-term track record are more likely to get favorable access to capital compared to agent-managed companies because of their long-term focus and lower financial leverage.
According to McKinsey [6], family companies have lower costs of debt than corporate peers.
A family performs more rational M&A
Mergers & acquisitions have proven to be a possible minefield for the acquirer as evidence indicates underperformance due to lack of synergies and clash of cultures.
Family-influenced businesses tend to be prudent when they do M&A, making smaller but more value-creating deals than their corporate counterparts. According to McKinsey, the average deal of a family business was 15% lower than corporate peers both in the EU and the USA in a survey between 2000 and 2009.
Agent-CEOs might have incentives to build empires and get bigger, while the owner-managers focus on profitability and prudence. Thus they focus on price and quite likely turn down a deal if they see it as a risky bet.
This study shows that companies with a high shareholder turnover perform badly in M&A, resulting in underperformance and poor results for shareholders. History shows the most intense M&A activity occurs at the end of an economic expansion when earning multiples are the highest.
Owner-operators often do the opposite: they wait until prices are correct. Mark Leonard in Constellation Software writes in his letters that their most attractive acquisitions have happened during recessions. He admits that their corporate and PE divestitures are larger than their founder businesses and more of a cultural challenge post-acquisition.
A family develops industrial know-how
A long-term owner develops a lot of knowledge about their industry.
For example, look at what happened to Credit Acceptance Corp at the end of the 1990s: They made many mistakes and subsequently experienced poor operational performance.
But management learned from their mistakes, improved their understanding of the market and the industry.
Since then, the same owner-operators have managed to make this an incredibly profitable business. With high management turnover, this might be unachievable.
Cultural benefits
We nearly always promote from within because mutual trust and loyalty take years to build, and conversely, newly hired smart and/or manipulative mercenaries can take years to identify and root out.
– Mark Leonard, 2011 shareholder letter
The quote from Mark Leonard says it all. Berkshire Hathaway is a perfect example of succession planning because Buffett for a long time has made plans should something happen to him.
Owner-operators plan for years to make sure the company remains in the right hands.
Skin in the game results in smart capital allocations
A company has five ways to allocate capital:
- Reinvest in the business.
- M&A.
- Pay down debt.
- Pay a dividend.
- Buyback shares.
Over time allocating decisions play a significant part in the compounding abilities of a stock. There is, of course, no general conclusion where the capital is of best use because this depends on company-specific circumstances.
However, an agent-CEO has more incentives to switch to allocations that enhance his compensation and not the return on assets.
In William Thorndike’s The Outsiders, a book that goes through eight excellent capital allocators, all CEOs are owner-operators. That could, of course, be a coincidence, but most likely not. They are not afraid of going against the current trends, which often means canceling buybacks at high earning multiples and wait for better prices. The statistics reveal that most companies buy back shares during economic expansions, less in recessions, which is often to the detriment of value creation.
Family owners are investment agnostics and do what makes sense given the circumstances. They are cautious about diversifying and prefer to focus on their core products and services. If something does not make sense, they don’t do it. Plain and simple.
As Thorndike concluded: successful CEOs think more like investors than managers.
A family-owned company might be valued at a discount
When the free float of shares is low, it might lead to a discount or perhaps bigger short-term volatility, or even both. Analysts and brokers often argue that a large and controlling shareholder is negative, and the company needs some “catalyst” to release “shareholder values”.
However, for a long-term or perpetual owner, this is great news: Mr. Market is our servant and we want to exploit the opportunities thrown at us. If a company trades at a discount, this means you get more “bang for your buck” by buying stocks with lower multiples.
A family has a wider purpose than making money
Finally, most family-business leaders have a much bigger purpose than just making money.
Many family businesses started, for example, in a small or rural place and felt an obligation to give something back. Thus, they have a higher vision than just making money, which often is a good thing.
Many of them can increase prices and make more money, but this can, of course, jeopardize the brand and long-term profits. They don’t focus on what they “could”, but what they “should”.
Costco is a perfect example where the main goal is to serve its members by selling the products at practically no mark-up and focus on their membership fees as the primary revenue and income (I wrote about Costco and its moat earlier).
Likewise, Jeff Bezos in Amazon is guided by the customer experience. At the end of the day that will lead to profits.
Footnotes:
[1] Rüdiger Fahlenbach: Founder CEOs, Investment Decisions, and Stock Performance (2009), Journal of Quantitative Analysis.
[2] Raymond Cox and Joel Shulman (2011): The Investment Returns of International Entrepreneurs.
[3] The Irresistible Charm of The Family Factor, 27.09.2017.
[4] Founding-Family Ownership and Firm Performance: Evidence from the S&P 500.
[5] What Good Are Shareholders?Justin Fox Jay W. Lorsch.
[6] The five attributes of enduring family businesses.
FAQ:
– What is the family business index?
Euronext Family Business Index tracks family-run businesses listed across Euronext exchanges. These businesses, such as AB Inbev and L’Oreal, are known for their long-term focus and commitment to responsible ownership.
– How do family-owned businesses attract better shareholders?
Family-owned businesses tend to attract shareholders who understand long-term thinking and are not focused on short-term gains, catalysts, or triggers. This helps in creating a stable shareholder base.
– Why do family-owned businesses tend to avoid excessive leverage?
Family businesses prioritize survival over short-term gains and, therefore, maintain lower financial leverage. This conservative approach often leads to better performance during economic downturns.