Book excerpt: Family business is one of the earliest forms of economic organisation and is still the most common form of commercial entity in the world, fulfilling roles across the spectrum of business and organisational activities, ranging from craft specialists, to local mobile food outlets, to online traders, to corner shops, to market sector suppliers, to internationally branded multinationals. Starting up, developing and maintaining such initiatives requires a dedicated entrepreneurial spirit and a range of management skills, as well as periodic episodes of good timing and targeting. Since the advent of mechanisation and industrialisation, larger organisations and publicly-listed companies have often been viewed as the measure of economic sustainability, in part because collecting information on such groups is relatively more straightforward than doing the same for the many hundreds of thousands of smaller family firms, sole traders and entrepreneurs. This book aims to reinforce the importance of family businesses and to highlight the challenges they face as they evolve.