In Lombardy those running companies are increasingly over fifty: generational handover is prepared early, and on the numbers too
4 October 2026, 10:24
In Lombardy family businesses make up almost six in ten of the companies with a turnover above €20 million: more than 3,500 companies, over €300 billion in revenue, 1.2 million people at work. These are the figures with which the Young Entrepreneurs of Confindustria Lombardia (the regional branch of Italy's main employers' federation) presented Bridge Up, a project to support the change of leadership in these companies.
Alongside them is a figure that weighs more. Between 2000 and 2025, in Lombardy, top positions held by people over fifty rose from 772,000 to 1.25 million, an increase of 62 per cent. Those entrusted to people under thirty fell from 142,000 to 78,000. Today the over-fifties hold two seats in three on boards of directors. And according to Maria Anghileri, national president of Confindustria's Young Entrepreneurs, almost half of Italian family businesses will change generation within ten years.
The delay shows in the age of those in charge
Those figures describe a habit before they describe a problem. In family businesses succession gets postponed: there is always an order to close, an investment to complete, a son or daughter who is not ready yet. It is the most common mistake, and an understandable one: whoever built a company struggles to imagine it without them, and trusts that, when the time comes, everything will sort itself out.
The time, however, rarely announces itself. It can arrive with an illness, a quarrel between siblings, an unexpected takeover offer. Then the handover happens in a hurry, with whoever is there, and without anyone having been able to prepare.
The real difficulty lies not in the numbers but in the people: emotions, power, family wealth and different ideas about the future are tangled up in the same room. That is precisely why it needs a path with set deadlines, shared between the family and the company, that lets control evolve instead of passing it on all at once.
Whoever takes over must be able to present a plan, not just a surname
Bridge Up focuses on three things: financial and managerial training for the successor, a written business plan, and access to financial instruments built around each case, with a group of banks and investors taking part in the project. The reason was explained by Stefano Rossi, president of the Lombard Young Entrepreneurs: continuity must become a concrete choice in markets where private equity opportunities are growing and bank credit faces ever tighter limits.
In plain terms: when the person signing changes, the bank redoes its sums. The founder has a track record the branch has known for thirty years; the successor does not. What makes the successor credible is the ability to say where the company is going, with which investments, with which margins, and to explain it before anyone asks. A bank does not trust perfect accounts but consistent ones, and consistency is built by those who know how to read the figures.
That is why the heir prepares on the numbers too, and in good time. It is not enough to have studied economics or worked for a few years in another company: they need to have had responsibility for a piece of the business, with a budget to meet and variances to explain every month. That is where it shows whether they can make decisions, and where the staff learn to recognise them.
When there is no successor, there are four routes
Not every family has a son or daughter who is ready, or willing. In that case the options remain: bringing in partners, qualified outside management, growing in-house managers into leadership roles, with shareholdings too, or selling the company. None is a defeat, if it is chosen in time rather than suffered.
The data accompanying the project say that succession, when it is carried through, does not hold a company back. According to the AUB Observatory on family businesses, those that completed a generational handover between 2013 and 2022 grew on average by 7.4 per cent a year. Among the examples cited by Il Sole 24 Ore is Beretta of Gardone Val Trompia, now in its fifteenth generation: five centuries of handovers.
Continuity is not defended with nostalgia: it is built with method, transparency and vision. And the first step is the easiest to write down and the hardest to take: setting a date.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Sole 24 Ore on 2 October 2026.