Do growth aspirations go hand in hand with succession solutions in family businesses?

The purpose of our research is to establish if growth ambitions of entrepreneurs in family businesses go hand in hand with succession solutions. We are focused especially on transition countries, where the studies on this topic are very rare; the main reason being that the private enterprises were outlawed during the era of a socialist economy. But the social and economic changes in the Eastern Europe in the 1990s have created an opportunity for the rebirth of entrepreneurship and family business development. Within transition countries we focus particularly on the case of Slovenia that is one of the former socialist countries where the possibility to establish private enterprises was opened in 1988. Even though the importance of family enterprises has been proved by numerous researches we still cannot answer the question, what is a family enterprise, since there is no universal definition of it. In our paper we therefore pay also a special attention to the appropriate definition of a family enterprise in transition countries. One of major problems that family businesses are facing is the transfer of ownership and management to the next family generation (succession in management and ownership). While significant research efforts have been devoted to the topic of succession in countries with the tradition of entrepreneurship and market economy, very little is known about how family enterprises in transition countries are coping with the succession problem, even though according to experience from established market economies it shall become a serious problem. On the other hand a firm's growth is regarded as a key to economic development and to the creation of wealth and employment. While there are some researches on performance and ambition contrasts between family and non-family enterprises (in developed market economies), there is no report on differences about this issue between family enterprises that have gained succession solutions with comparison to those, that have not. The growth aspirations in our research were assessed by analysing the entrepreneur's anticipation of an increase in the number of new jobs, while the potential of his/her businesses to grow was based on his/her opinions about the creation of new markets and market expansion with innovativeness of their products/services, and regarding the innovativeness of the technology used. This paper therefore attempts to make three main contributions with providing clearer insight into: (i) succession issues in family businesses, (ii) entrepreneurial growth aspirations of entrepreneurs in family businesses and (iii) the impact of unsolved succession problems on ambitions of entrepreneurs to grow their business in future in transition countries in general, with particular focus to the case of Slovenia.