Founded by Edouard Thijssen and Edward Janssen to empower multigenerational family businesses and offices with governance and collaboration tools tailored to their unique needs.
🗣 Language: The webinar was held in Spanish with live English and French interpretation.
What does a real succession actually look like?
In this session, we heard from Liliana Estrada, founder of Eficacia, a Colombian company with 20,000 employees built over 41 years, and her daughter Marcela Londoño, who took over as CEO a decade ago. Together, they told the full story: the clean break, the boardroom tensions, the months of silence, and how they found their way back to each other and to a stronger company.
Six lessons they shared:
Exit completely. A founder who stays physically present, even with good intentions, makes it harder for the successor to build their own authority.
Send the next generation out first. Marcela's 8 years at an external company before joining Eficacia were the foundation of her credibility and her confidence.
Govern the transition, not just the business. Without a strong independent board chair, governance became a battleground. Bringing in the right president changed everything.
Name the emotional cost before it becomes a crisis. The business nearly cost them their relationship. A frank conversation and the willingness to have it saved both of them.
Give the founder a new role to move toward. Liliana's reinvention into technology and startups wasn't just good for her. It gave Marcela the space to lead.
The successor's job is to become themselves, not a copy. Marcela's breakthrough came when she stopped measuring herself against her mother and started leading as herself.
Succession is not a transaction. It is a relationship under extraordinary pressure and what determines the outcome is the quality of the people and their willingness to say what is true.
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