Heritage meets innovation: modernising family businesses without compromise

Don’t just think, BMW, Aldi and Walmart, but also consider Killik & Co, Timpson and Fentimans. Some of the most successful brands are family-owned and constantly updating their service offerings to keep up, if not lead, the crowd.

Yet, many family-owned businesses globally are facing a major issue. The 2025 Family Business Barometer Survey revealed that 32% said that balancing tradition with innovation was a major challenge.

Many are hesitant to disrupt their established ways of working. After all, if it’s worked through the generations why wouldn’t it work now?

But with constant geopolitical strife, economic turmoil and society changing quicker than ever, today’s businesses are facing challenges never seen before, and clinging too closely to tradition can lead to stagnation.

Businesses can modernise their legacy systems and brand, without it coming at the expense of what made them a successful family brand to start with.

Remember why you started in the first place

Most family businesses start with a passion for innovation, driven by the opportunity to be first or to do things better than those that have come before.

Innovation and risk are ingrained in their DNA. Yet over time and successive generations, this can be lost as the attitude of leadership shifts from ‘disrupter’ to ‘manager’.

Because of this, family-run businesses run the risk of suffering from not only legacy infrastructure but legacy leadership. That idea that the business has reached its optimum position and there is nowhere else to go paralyses the leadership from making effective decisions.

The progressive thought of “here’s what we could do” is replaced by the passive statement “this is what we do.”

In reality, sticking to the status quo and accepting limitations is the antithesis of what made the business successful in the first place.

This isn’t a blanket case. Founded and still owned by Doug and Dame Mary Perkins, Specsavers has undergone a multi-year data transformation to become a data-driven retailer, centralising data and rolling out self-service analytics across the business.

It’s built a cutting-edge integrated customer experience programme that combines surveys, reviews and data to continuously optimise journeys across more than 2,700 stores in 11 countries.

By keeping that innovative spirit alive, Specsavers has prospered with a 92% awareness rate among customers, making it the category leader.

It’s proof for other family run businesses that sticking to the foundations of what prompted their existence originally is a key to success.

Change can be emotional

The change management process is also fundamental. If it’s taken as read that change can be difficult, then just as much energy must go into managing the process and associated stakeholders as into the desired changes themselves.

More than any other, in family run businesses, ‘business is personal’. There are relationships to manage.

That means the road to modernisation isn’t just practical, it’s emotional, so sometimes logic must take a back seat.

Simultaneously, businesses can fail to clearly establish and publish their core values, or a blueprint for how leadership and management should behave. And even when those frameworks exist, they are often vague – designed to keep the business running smoothly rather than to guide it through change.

Over time, values that once encouraged ambition and experimentation can become shorthand for how things have always been done. They offer comfort when business is as usual, but little clarity when evolution is required.

Without a shared understanding of what change looks like, and what’s permitted in pursuit of it, innovation quickly becomes personal, political or both.

So how do family businesses modernise without breaking the very foundations they were built on?

1. Stakeholder engagement must be treated as a strategy
   
   

Before any transformation begins, businesses must align on three fundamentals: ambition, permission and resource. What are we genuinely trying to achieve? Who has the authority to make decisions? And what time, budget and capability are available to support change?

2. Change should be grounded in research and pre-testing
   
   

Modernisation works best when it’s anchored in primary research with core audiences. This isn’t about chasing trends for the sake of it, but pressure-testing assumptions before they harden into strategy. Testing and pilots allow businesses to learn quickly, refine ideas and build confidence internally.

3. Customer service and communication can’t come last
   
   

Change is disruptive, even when it’s positive. Businesses that modernise successfully make themselves more available, not less – anticipating questions, friction and uncertainty. Clear, consistent communications about why change is happening helps customers feel included rather than inconvenienced.

The best change sometimes requires investment

One of the legacy issues with family run businesses can be the hesitation before committing to investment. They can be more frugal, harking back to a time when cash and opportunities were tight and risk was high.

Learn from the likes of JCB, controlled by the Bamford family, who committed £100m to developing hydrogen combustion engines as a low-carbon alternative to diesel for construction and agricultural machinery.

A dedicated team of over a hundred engineers has produced dozens of prototype hydrogen engines and machines, positioning JCB as a leader in zero-emission off-highway technology.

Too often, when it comes to technology, the pace of change leaves many founders completely at sea, and a lack of understanding adds to the reluctance to change.

When is the right time to invest and how quickly will new tech be obsolete?

Yet in many ways, family run businesses have always led the way in innovation and modernisation.

The most successful ones still do. It’s just up to the rest to follow suit.

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