If you want, you can fulfill your dream of self-employment in the next few years - without founding a start-up.

According to a calculation by the Cologne Institute for SME Research, 14,600 Hessian companies will face a generational change in the next four years.

Nevertheless, according to a survey by the Hessian Ministry of Economic Affairs, more than a third of entrepreneurs (39 percent) do not know how this step should be taken.

This rate makes experts and trade associations sit up and take notice, because a company handover takes an average of five years.

She warns that if you don't think about the future early enough, you risk the end of well-performing businesses.

Especially since the question of succession has not become any easier in view of the demographic development.

Inga Janovic

Editor in the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and responsible editor of the business magazine Metropol.

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Good for those who have children or relatives who are enthusiastic about their own company.

39 percent of the Hessian managers of small and medium-sized companies surveyed assume that their business will remain in family hands.

A real family business

Isabelle Himbert, the daughter of Simone Weinmann-Mang and Wolf Mang, who is also well known in Hesse as President of the Association of Hessian Entrepreneurs, can report how that feels in practice.

Himbert has just taken over the mechanical engineering supplier Arno Arnold in Obertshausen, which his grandfather founded.

A large family council was faced with this decision. The parents didn't want to push their two children, but they wanted to clarify things early on.

Since then, Isabelle Himbert, whose professional career has now taken her to Obertshausen via Singapore, Stockholm, Paris and Dublin, has also known where she is.

"One thing is clear, I won't change employers anymore."

At best, this also applies to Joy Edwin Thanarajah, who has just followed in big footsteps, as he says himself.

At the beginning of the month, his previous boss Thomas Deininger officially handed over responsibility for the 120-employee recruitment consultancy Deininger Consulting to the thirty-four-year-old, which is based in Frankfurt and operates branches in Berlin, New Delhi, Düsseldorf, London, Mumbai, Shanghai and Warsaw.

The two men are a kind of rarity when it comes to succession: According to the survey, only five percent of those surveyed could imagine one of their employees buying and continuing the business.

This option is considered even less frequently than selling (eight percent).

"I really wanted to organize the succession internally"

For Thomas Deininger, on the other hand, it is the best option so that not only the company lives on as a legal and economic construct, but also the culture that the customer is familiar with: "I definitely wanted to regulate the succession internally," he says.

He has always ruled out takeover bids.

Since 1981, Deininger has primarily placed employees for the upper management levels for its customers.

Banks in particular, but also construction companies, car manufacturers and hidden champions from medium-sized companies can be supported by him in the search for specialist and managerial staff.

The transition does not come as a surprise for them either, Thanarajah and Deiniger, who was born in 1944, have been preparing for this step for several years, and the junior has been part of the management board since 2020.

Before he made one of his employees his preferred successor, Deininger took a close look at the economist who was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in central Hesse.

He came to Deininger Consulting around 15 years ago.

You don't make a successor decision overnight, says the senior.

trust in the successor

But over the years he has gotten the feeling that Thanarajah lives the corporate culture with the same seriousness as he does himself. "With the generational change, I'm creating long-term perspectives for my company," says Deininger, who says he has sold all of the company shares .

But he doesn't want to stop just yet.

"In this industry, you can't go all at once." But he will withdraw from the operative business.

"Now I have to think of the step to success for the next twenty years," says Thanarajah, his successor, summing up his assignment.

He will certainly rely on Deininger's preparatory work in terms of digitization, in which he also played his part.

Because from 2010, the newly minted entrepreneur headed the Research Center, the research department of the personnel consultancy.

Deininger relied on the Internet and databases earlier than others, hired more than 20 employees specifically for searching and maintaining contacts on the Internet and over the years built up a digital information collection well filled with profiles, contacts and company knowledge, which is now a kind of guarantor for this that Deininger can place bosses or engineers who fit into the company with their qualifications, but also with their style.

Of course, computer knowledge cannot trump the consultant's knowledge of human nature.

The decisive factor, says Deininger, remains the personal approach.