In a family business, the boardroom and the kitchen table are never far apart. Professional topics creep into family dinners. Family dynamics shape business decisions. This porosity between the two worlds conditions everything: relationships, conflicts, and above all the way the wealth will be passed on.
What is porosity, exactly?
In the vocabulary of family governance, porosity describes the degree to which the family sphere and the business sphere blend into each other. The higher the porosity, the more business topics invade private life, and the more family dynamics weigh on professional decisions.
In practice, high porosity looks like a call from the accountant during the summer holidays. A conflict between siblings over strategic direction that poisons the Christmas dinner. A business owner who no longer knows when he is "the boss" and when he is "dad."
Low porosity looks like a family where the business owner comes home and switches to parent mode, partner mode, a person in their own right. Where business decisions are made at the office, and family conversations stay in the family.
The business: an asset unlike any other
A stock portfolio, a rental property, a life insurance contract: you can value them, split them, liquidate them without touching the family's identity. A family business, no.
It is tangible and visible. Made of products, services, employees, and premises, it is not a line on a bank statement. You can form a physical attachment to it. You can project an identity onto it. The children grew up in it, sometimes literally.
It carries a symbolic weight. In field research conducted with entrepreneurial families, when the business owner is asked what the company symbolically represents, the answer almost always comes back in the same form: "It's like my child." Or: "It's the child I received from my parents. It used to be a bit like my sibling, now it has become my child."
« "Within a family system, the business represents the other child of the family. It is something tangible, visible. It is easier to form an emotional bond with this economic entity because it is made of products, services, and people." »
Valérie Denis, expert in family and transgenerational entrepreneurship
This symbolic weight is what makes porosity so powerful. You don't just "leave the office" when the office is your life's work, your parents' legacy, and your children's potential future.
How porosity shows up in daily life
Both directions of porosity reinforce each other. The more the business invades the family, the more family tensions crystallise around the business. And the other way around.
Porosity complicates transmission
When the boundary between the two worlds is blurred, the question "who should take over the business?" is never just about competence or willingness. It carries the full weight of the family's relational history.
A child who grew up feeling jealous of the business because it consumed all of their parent's time will not approach the takeover the same way as a child who was included in the conversations from adolescence.
A business owner whose personal identity is entirely fused with their role in the company will find it much harder to let go than one who managed to preserve other spaces in their life.
« Readiness for transmission depends first and foremost on the personality of the person who is going to pass it on. Some people are naturally proactive. Others are last-minute. And with age, this tendency gets stronger. »
Valérie Denis, expert in family and transgenerational entrepreneurship
Transferring ownership without transferring power
A classic trap in high-porosity families: the legal transfer is done, but the real transfer is not.
The parents say: "Everything is sorted. We transferred the bare ownership to our children. We kept the usufruct." The tax optimisation is done. On paper, the transfer is underway. But in practice, the next generation is at the helm with the responsibilities of a business owner, without full decision-making power over strategic direction.
This is a fundamental family debate: transferring ownership is not enough. You also need to transfer the decision-making space that comes with it. Otherwise, frustration builds, even among well-meaning heirs who find themselves responsible but not autonomous.
75% of business owners aren't ready. Thirty years later, same finding.
This number is striking. Despite decades of awareness campaigns, the share of business owners who plan their succession has not moved. The reason is not a lack of information. It is that readiness depends on the personality of the business owner, and that personality is often inseparable from their relationship with the business.
A business owner whose entire life revolves around the company is a business owner for whom "passing it on" feels like "losing a part of themselves." Porosity makes the transmission harder to contemplate, not because it is poorly prepared on a technical level, but because it is emotionally heavier.
Naming porosity to better accompany it
The advisor's role is not to judge a family's degree of porosity. Some families function well with a high degree of overlap between private and professional life. Others need watertight compartments to maintain balance.
The advisor's role is to name the porosity. To make it visible. To ask: where does the business end and the family begin, in your case? And when the time comes to pass it on, which boundaries will need to be redrawn?
This is work that starts well before the valuation and the tax law. It starts with mapping the individuals who orbit the wealth, understanding their respective roles, and creating a space for dialogue where the two worlds can coexist without merging.
« The advisor who wants to play the role of conductor needs a score. Each family is a different score. »
Arnaud Parmentier, Head of Sales Abbove
