The longest-lived companies manage for decades, not quarters.
McKinsey’s comparison of 600 listed family-owned businesses with 600 non-family peers, and the 2025 EY / University of St.Gallen index of the world’s 500 largest family firms, describe the same behaviour. It is separable from the shareholder register — which matters in Switzerland, where barely half of the companies founded in 2018 were still active five years later.
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Companies that reach their hundredth year are usually described in the language of character: prudence, patience, stewardship. Two large datasets allow a description in the language of management instead.
McKinsey published the first on 28 November 2023. It compares 600 listed family-owned businesses with 600 listed non-family peers, adds a survey of a further 600 mostly private family firms and interviews with more than 20 family business leaders. The second is the Global 500 Family Business Index, compiled by EY and the Center for Family Business at the University of St.Gallen and published in March 2025.
Read together, they describe the same behaviour, in terms that do not depend on who holds the shares.
Family ownership covers most of the world economy and is rarely counted as one category
McKinsey defines a family-owned business as one in which founders or their descendants control at least 20 per cent of share capital or voting rights. On that definition, and on figures McKinsey attributes to UNCTAD, such companies account for more than 70 per cent of global GDP, generate annual turnover of between US$60 trillion and US$70 trillion, and are responsible for about 60 per cent of global employment.
The EY and University of St.Gallen index measures the top of that population. Its 2025 edition ranks the 500 largest family businesses by revenue: US$8.8 trillion in combined turnover, 10 per cent more than the 2023 edition, and 25.1 million employees. Individual revenues run from US$3.5 billion to US$648.1 billion; 80 per cent exceed US$5 billion. Europe accounts for 47 per cent of the list, North America for 29 per cent and Asia for 18 per cent.
The inclusion rules are strict, which is what makes the age profile meaningful: at least 50 per cent of voting control in family hands, or 32 per cent for listed companies, with multigenerational involvement or at least 50 years of operation. Of the 500 companies, 85 per cent have traded for more than half a century and 34 per cent for more than a hundred years. The oldest, the Japanese construction group Takenaka, is 414 years old.
The measured advantage is operational, and it changes with size
Between 2017 and 2022, McKinsey finds, family-owned businesses posted an average total shareholder return of 2.6 per cent against 2.3 per cent for non-family peers, and average economic profit of US$77.5 million against US$66.3 million. Their economic spread — the difference between return on invested capital and weighted average cost of capital — was on average 33 per cent higher.
The gaps are modest, and they are not the same at every size. Mid-size family firms, with revenues between US$150 million and US$5 billion, delivered 10 per cent higher capital turnover than comparable non-family companies over five years: they are better investors of the capital they deploy. Large family firms, between US$5 billion and US$100 billion in revenue, ran operating margins 1.5 percentage points higher: they are better operators. Family firms of 25 years or less grew revenue about twice as fast as non-family peers, then converged as they matured.
Two limits belong in the reading. The comparison covers listed companies, whose disclosure makes them measurable but not necessarily typical. And McKinsey records the category’s weaknesses alongside its strengths: a tendency to underinvest in research and development, and unresolved succession questions at every generational handover.
Four habits carry most of the effect, and none of them require a family
The behaviours McKinsey associates with the strongest performers are specific enough to copy. Their leaders name a long-term perspective among the top three reasons for their success, alongside the ability to innovate and to enter new markets.
Reinvestment comes before extraction: over five years, family-owned businesses delivered dividend yields 12 per cent lower on average than non-family peers. Balance sheets are built to absorb shocks: leverage ratios average six percentage points below those of non-family peers, and nearly ten points below among the outperformers. Concentrated ownership makes both possible — 92 per cent of the outperformers have at least 40 per cent family ownership.
Caution is not passivity, and this is where the pattern is most often misread. Among the outperformers, about 40 per cent say they finance more than half of their investments with debt, where other family firms report financing about 12 per cent of their investments that way. They carry less leverage overall and use it more deliberately. Governance is equally formal: more than 90 per cent of outperformers report an effective and independent board, against 72 per cent of other family firms, and around 80 per cent document family members’ roles and responsibilities in writing.
The same horizon effect appears in companies with no family at all
If the advantage belonged to families as such, it would stop there. It does not. The Corporate Horizon Index, built by the McKinsey Global Institute with FCLTGlobal and published on 8 February 2017, classified 615 large- and mid-cap US listed companies by how they were managed between 2001 and 2015, without regard to ownership.
Between 2001 and 2014, the firms it classified as long-term grew revenue 47 per cent more than the others and with less volatility, grew earnings 36 per cent more and economic profit 81 per cent more. By 2014 they were spending almost 50 per cent more on research and development, and their market capitalisation had grown by US$7 billion more. Across the full period to 2015 they added nearly 12,000 more jobs on average.
Concentrated ownership makes a long horizon easier to hold. On this evidence it is not a precondition for it.
In Switzerland longevity is visible at the top and rare at the base
Nineteen Swiss companies appear in the 2025 index: MSC Group in 14th place with US$92.6 billion of revenue, Roche 20th with US$67.2 billion, Kühne + Nagel 62nd with US$26.5 billion and Richemont 81st with US$22.4 billion, followed by Liebherr, Schindler, Emil Frey, Barry Callebaut, Swatch, Endress+Hauser, Stadler Rail and Bucher Industries among others.
The base of the pyramid looks different. Federal Statistical Office data record 594,098 active enterprises in Switzerland in 2023 and 46,931 newly created that year. Of the companies founded in 2018, 83.7 per cent were still active after one year, 62.0 per cent after three and 50.7 per cent after five; even in health and social work, the most durable branch, the five-year figure was 63.1 per cent. Across the European Union, Eurostat puts the 2023 enterprise birth rate at 10.5 per cent of active enterprises and the provisional death rate at 8.5 per cent. Turnover of this order is normal. Longevity is not.
The Swiss economy is also structurally owner-managed. On the structural business statistics, which count a slightly wider population, 624,219 small and medium-sized enterprises made up 99.7 per cent of the 626,033 market-economy firms in 2023 and employed 3.19 million of 4.82 million people. Most are answerable to no quarterly calendar at all. Nor, strictly, are the listed ones: SIX Exchange Regulation requires audited annual and half-year financial statements. For the great majority of Swiss companies, the reporting rhythm that shortens the horizon is chosen, not imposed.
What an owner can decide without changing the shareholder register
The evidence points at four decisions that sit entirely inside a company.
- Put the distribution policy in writing. A stated payout band, agreed by the owners in advance, converts reinvestment from an annual argument into a rule.
- Set a leverage ceiling and test it. Choose the level of debt the business can carry through a demand shock, then confirm it against a downside case rather than a plan.
- Buy an outside view for the board. One genuinely independent director, with the standing to disagree, is the cheapest element of the outperformers’ governance profile.
- Document owner roles and the succession sequence. Written responsibilities are what allow a long horizon to survive the person who set it.
None of this requires a family, and none of it is free: lower payouts, unused borrowing capacity and outside scrutiny all have a cost in the current year. That is the trade the evidence describes.
The index has appeared every two years since 2015, so the next edition falls in 2027; the share of the 500 that have passed their centenary is the number worth following. The question for a board is narrower and easier to answer: which decision taken this quarter would look different if it were judged in 2036?