Success of Family Company: Critical Evidence from the Portugal

Abstract

Abstract During the last time, the attention to a phenomenon of family business steadily grows. Today this form of business is considered to be a vital and needful for economic development. Despite this, the basic theory of family business is heterogeneous, limited and insufficient. The purpose of this paper is to define the sense of family company’s success. The object of research is family business as an economic phenomenon. There is a double subject of this study: firstly, to find out the main indicators and information resources about successful companies can be detected and, secondly, to analyze one representative family company managed by several generations as a case study for identifying its key success factors. This qualitative research was prepared on the basis of general theoretical scientific methods, in particular, analysis, synthesis, analogy, comparison, generalizations and methods of expert estimates. In the first phase, secondary research of scientific literature and electronic resources about the paper topic was conducted. On the base of that results, the primary research was conduct, which is based on analysis of family wine company Quinta de Santa Eufemia in Portugal. That research part has the form of a case study. Based on the received information, the key success factors were identified. The sources of that research are internet web-pages of the company, articles about the company in magazines and scientific journals form Emerald database, reports of the company and financial data from Amadeus database, in-depth interview with a family member of a family company representative. The scientific acquisition of this research is improving understanding of a family company’s success from the perspective of difficulties faced by a family company and the way of overcoming obstacles. The results of this study allowed to find a main point for the family company’s success based on literature review. In addition, the activity of Quinta de Santa Eufemia was analyzed as the case study for critical evidence of that phenomenon. This study has contributed to the theoretical part of family business research providing a significant step to providing insight the family company’s success and its main factors which influence an effective functioning of a family company.   Keywords: family company, success, winery, family business