Unsustainable Family Business in Saudi Arabia - The Roadmap Ahead

Family businesses play a crucial role in the global economy. The GCC especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupies a significant place in the global economic pie. It offers many employment opportunities to the Saudi and non-Saudi nationals and contributes a significantly to the GDP. According to the government sources there are an estimated 538,000 family businesses in the Kingdom and together this family business cluster contributes approximately 216 billion dollars to the national GDP and provides employments to approximately 7.2 million workers that constitute about 52 percent of the total workforce. Beside such a great potential there are only a few of them can thrive and survive in the present circumstances in the market. Just a third of family businesses are successful thanks to a new generation of entrepreneurs in command. Future success depends to a large extent on the successive achievements of these newly minted entrepreneurs and sustainability of family businesses of such companies in the past affects the success of future generations of these family businesses. There are many challenges these family businesses are facing once left them unattended may cause them to fail is the focus of this study. Hence there is a need to focus on several attributes of sound management in order to be able to continue and grow to remain sustainable would be contribution of this study. The purpose of this study therefore is to identify the various success factors associated to the question of unsustainability of these family businesses (FB) in Saudi Arabia (KSA). Our understanding indicated that Family Businesses (FB) is short-term oriented. For sustainability these FBs need to create and give more importance to factors such as strategic thinking, to train next of kin to ensure succession planning and sound corporate governance for business longevity. As recommendation the immediate family members and potential business leaders emerging from the younger generations need to be trained for their business continuity and survival.