European Family Businesses (EFB)

European Family Businesses is the EU federation of national associations representing long-term family owned enterprises, spanning small, medium-sized and larger companies. It operates from Brussels, a few minutes from the European institutions it exists to influence.

Who belongs

The members are national associations rather than individual companies. Bodies such as Family Business UK sit inside this structure, and a family company's connection to EFB normally runs through the association covering its own country.

The badge on this listing marks it as a business families organisation. That describes whose interests it represents rather than who attends its meetings, which are largely institutional.

For a family company, the practical question is not how to join EFB but whether your national association is a member, and if your country has no such body, what that means for your representation in Brussels.

How it works

This is a federation rather than a membership product, so EFB publishes no dues for individual companies. Enquiries about participation go to EFB or, more usefully, to the national association in your market.

What it does

Policy advocacy is the substance. EFB publishes position papers on the questions that determine whether family companies can survive across generations in Europe: the transfer of businesses between generations, competitiveness, and specific regulatory burdens such as emissions trading.

Business transfer is the recurring theme and the one that matters most. Every EU member state taxes and regulates the passing of a company to the next generation differently, and those rules decide whether a family firm survives a death in the family or has to be sold to settle a bill. A federation arguing that case at European level addresses something no single national body can reach.

Alongside the policy work sit events and summits for family business leaders and continuing engagement with European institutions.

For a family reading this directory, the honest assessment is that EFB is infrastructure rather than a network you will experience directly. It will not give you peers, education or investment ideas. What it does is represent family ownership as a category in the place where European rules are written, which is worth knowing exists even if you never attend anything it runs.