Irish family business survey for 2025
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What are the key findings of the PwC Irish Family Business Survey for 2025?
Welcome back to Breakfast Business with me, Tom McEnany, standing in for Joe Lynham. Now, PwC has just released its latest Irish Family Business Survey. This one's for 2025. With me to discuss the results of the survey is Mairead Harbrun, who's Private Client Partner at PwC. Good morning, Mairead. Good morning, Tom. Now, one of the things you found, one of the most interesting things in the survey, I thought, was that Irish businesses, Irish family businesses are more growth orientated than their international peers.
Yeah, so I guess despite all the uncertainty, the Irish economy is still performing really well. And our survey showed that 20% of those surveyed experienced double digit growth last year. And 83% of them have strong growth ambitions for next year.
How are Irish family businesses performing compared to international peers?
You know, which I guess ties in with the stats you were giving earlier about AIB revising their forecasts that we're looking at over 9% GDP growth this year. And it's a strong growth forecast for next year as well.
Yeah, there seems to be a common thread in both what AIB has been saying this morning and what you're saying now, which is that, well, we all thought, or there were a lot of people, sorry, I didn't think so, there were a lot of people suggesting the sky was going to fall in on Irish businesses. And the sky is pretty much where it was before July and the US tariff, the new US tariff policy came in.
Yeah, and definitely the survey does also bring out that people are feeling those challenges. So definitely Irish participants are definitely feeling those kind of economic uncertainty and those 72% of them cited economic concerns. So despite the positive sentiment, there's also deep challenges there in terms of the impact of the global uncertainty supply chain concerns. And in Ireland in particular, 65% of participants felt that we're really having a workforce challenge. We don't have the availability of skilled labour we need to kind of achieve really strong growth ambitions.
What challenges do Irish family businesses face in achieving growth?
No surprise there that Irish businesses would be struggling to find skilled labour. Any other results from the survey? What else were they telling us?
Sure. Another 65% of participants thought that AI is a growth opportunity. But actually, you know, despite saying it's a growth opportunity when challenged, when we dig deeper in the survey, a lot of them are feeling overwhelmed with the choice available, with kind of determining that return on investment that they might get from AI in terms of integration into their current systems. So, again, while there's positive sentiment about the opportunity that AI presents, there's also a number of challenges to counter that enthusiasm.
And also struggling. It's the one I try to get my head around all the time, Mairead, is that if you do invest in AI, by the time you've sorted out that investment, AI will have moved on in a matter of a month or two, that your investment could be obsolete.
Yeah, this is a real challenge.
How is AI perceived as an opportunity by family businesses?
And we see it survey after survey. We also had a law firm survey. And again, those that had invested heavily in very bespoke AI were finding difficulty justifying that return on investment. So it's definitely a fast moving area.
And the thing, you were specifically looking at family businesses. For those family businesses, presumably they were looking at keeping it in the family.
Sure. And that's a big, I suppose, differentiator with family businesses versus kind of their listed or larger owned competitors is that they have, I suppose, patient capital. So they don't have short term quarterly earnings reports to guide their decisions. They can take that longer term view.
What unique advantages do family businesses have over larger competitors?
And I think that's a real strength of family businesses, actually, that they don't have that short term pressure, that they can look towards the future. And there are some challenges, though, with being a family business, thinking of succession, thinking of even the tax hits that can come along with passing to the next generation. So, you know, there's definite pros. There's a lot of loyalty from employees to family businesses and that kind of ethos.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the key findings of the PwC Irish Family Business Survey for 2025?
0:01–0:55
2
How are Irish family businesses performing compared to international peers?
0:55–2:05
3
What challenges do Irish family businesses face in achieving growth?
2:05–3:00
4
How is AI perceived as an opportunity by family businesses?
3:00–3:45
5
What unique advantages do family businesses have over larger competitors?
3:45–4:42
6
How do family businesses approach succession planning and future growth?
4:42–6:10