Founded in 1974, Sabrina Group is in the business of sportswear and leisure wear garments, with production outsourced and products sold in the US, Europe, Japan, and other places of the world. The company itself focuses on product design and R&E.

When Joyce Chou, Class 2013 of NTU-Fudan Program, didn’t have her family business in her career plan in the beginning when she took over the family business. She started working part-time during summer as a front-line worker at her parents’ company, a position put her in the double-pressure from her parents and colleagues. She didn’t ask for it; she wanted a career in pre-school education.

6 years ago, Joyce’s father passed away due to cancer, and her mother fell to sickness, too. Her family didn’t want to surrender their company, and convinced Joyce, in a soft-speaking manner by saying: ‘You are our only hope.’ In the same year Joyce began to manage the family business with a rough start.

For a new successor to retain the key personnel and stain aggressive in business development, the first thing to do will be convincing senior employee. ‘I needed their trust, but the development was frustrated to almost a complete hold up’, says Joyce. In the end, she managed to convince the senior employee in one by one manner to adopt the new way of doing business. Soon the company started the first factory in Vietnam, followed by the second one in Cambodia. The employee size doubled, but the revenue increased by 50%.

Joyce’s company enjoyed a good turn around because she was able to retain the senior personnel who had help started the company and attracted young talents. Respect for a company’s culture and the senior personnel had paid off. Now the company has 11,000 workers with an annual sales of USD 250 million （£1.63）.

This case suggests that Taiwanese SMBs must start their management hand-over early. According to a scholar: ‘A founder must regard preparing a successor as an equally important part in business development.’ Many second-generation successors of enterprise lack of passion or are unfamiliar with the required skill set for their family businesses, and eventually many of these companies were bought-out. Therefore, family business inheritance plan is critically important.

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