Don’t fall in love with your product: Lessons from an 800-year-old family business
The Frescobaldi formula: humility, reinvention, and stewardship across 30 generations - how to sustain a family business in changing times....
Family business
How the Mulliez family built a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem
Antoine Mayaud, a shareholder and member of the Association Familiale Mulliez (AFM) behind Decathlon and Auchan, explains how the family embedded entrepreneurship into its culture and processes, creating a system that repeatedly generates new businesses.
Rapid read:
- The Mulliez family institutionalized entrepreneurship through shared ownership (“everyone in everything”), aligning incentives and encouraging collective venture creation.
- Governance structures and cultural values actively support new businesses, combining autonomy, experimentation, and long-term cohesion.
- Tailored funding mechanisms and active family engagement ensure a continuous pipeline of ventures, sustaining entrepreneurial energy across generations.
Few family businesses manage to sustain entrepreneurial energy across generations. Fewer still achieve it at scale. The Mulliez family of northern France stands out as an exceptional case: over five generations, its members have founded more than 130 businesses, including major retailers such as Decathlon and Auchan.
What makes the Mulliez story distinctive is not simply the number of ventures created, but the deliberate construction of an entrepreneurial ecosystem – one that combines shared ownership, strong cultural values, governance discipline, and active support for new ventures. Rather than relying on individual entrepreneurial heroes, the family institutionalized entrepreneurship as a collective capability.
The origins of the Mulliez ecosystem trace back to 1905, when Louis Mulliez founded a yarn twisting factory in Roubaix, at the heart of France’s textile industry.
From a textile mill to a collective entrepreneurial vision
The origins of the Mulliez ecosystem trace back to 1905, when Louis Mulliez founded a yarn twisting factory in Roubaix, at the heart of France’s textile industry.
From the outset, the family adopted an unconventional approach to succession. Instead of transferring the business to a single heir, Louis Mulliez encouraged several of his children to create their own ventures, providing them with capital and retaining minority stakes. “It was an amazing decision,” says Antoine Mayaud, a third-generation family member. “My cousins and I tried to understand why he didn’t transfer his own business. We found in his letters that he was obsessed by the fact that he didn’t want his children to grow under the “shade of the ‘tree’ he represented” – in other words, the shade he cast as the founder of the firm. About his grandfather, he continues: “The other amazing thing is that he asked them to enter into a joint venture arrangement – each of them would be the shareholder of the others.”
This approach culminated in the creation of a shared ownership system known as “Everyone in everything” (“Tous dans tout”). By 1955, siblings and in-laws had become shareholders in each other’s businesses, aligning their interests and fostering mutual support. This model laid the foundation for a powerful idea: entrepreneurship was not an individual pursuit, but a collective endeavor backed by shared risk and shared reward.
The AFM enabled family members to hold a portfolio of shares across the family’s businesses, reinforcing the “Everyone in everything” philosophy.
Institutionalizing the ecosystem
In 1968, the family formalized its system by creating the Association Familiale Mulliez (AFM), a holding structure that unified ownership and provided a framework for governance and collaboration. The AFM enabled family members to hold a portfolio of shares across the family’s businesses, reinforcing the “Everyone in everything” philosophy. It also supported a growing network of companies spanning retail, services, and other sectors, eventually encompassing more than 90 companies operating in 80 countries. By combining shared ownership with centralized governance, the Mulliez family created a structure that encouraged both entrepreneurial initiative and long-term cohesion.
The worst thing in an enterprising family is for the young generations to just take their dividends.
A crisis of confidence
In the 1990s, the Mulliez family faced a critical challenge as it transitioned to the fourth generation. Senior members questioned whether younger family members were capable of sustaining the businesses. Selling the portfolio was seriously considered. Mayaud recalls: “My family went through a very big crisis: a crisis of gray hair, which is rather common in family businesses. As you become older, fear tends to weigh more heavily in the balance than trust. My cousins, who were the first launchers of many of our companies, said: ‘We fear that our children will not be able to take over.” So they decided to sell all the existing companies.”
The turning point came when a group of younger family members proposed a different path – one that combined preserving the existing businesses with creating new ventures. Their spirited intervention led to a renewed commitment to entrepreneurship.
A central concept in this renewal was affectio societatis – the emotional attachment to the business. From 1995 onward, the family actively worked to re-engage its members. Antoine Mayaud personally visited hundreds of relatives to understand their aspirations and encourage their involvement: “For me, it’s to motivate family members to be as close as possible to each other and as close as possible to the business, whether they are business-oriented or not, by encouraging them to contribute.”
He believes that active and involved family members are vital to the business’s longevity and is keenly aware of the hazards posed by disengaged heirs: “The worst thing in an enterprising family is for the young generations to just take their dividends.”
Driving generational success
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Explore programsDesigning governance for entrepreneurship
The Mulliez ecosystem is not only cultural; it is also deeply structural. Over time, the family developed governance mechanisms that actively support entrepreneurial activity. At the family level, governance includes a family council that is elected by shareholders, committees overseeing areas such as education and family cohesion, and an elders’ council to safeguard unity and long-term alignment.
To guide its business endeavors, the family has also developed some general principles. For instance, the family prioritizes business ventures that are inherently original. In this vein, they routinely run small-scale tests and embrace the idea that mistakes are part of the process. Mayaud insists: “You need trust and you need patience to help younger ones launch their own business.”
Another tried and tested principle is autonomy: all the businesses within the AFM umbrella are independent of each other, though they are free to build synergies between themselves. The family believes that a firm should operate without becoming too tied to another, so that trouble in one company does not jeopardize the entire ecosystem.
Building financial engines for new ventures
A critical component of the Mulliez ecosystem is access to capital. The family experimented with several funding mechanisms, learning through iteration. Mayaud explains that the idea for a dedicated fund initially emerged after a prolonged period – almost 15 years – during which no family members chose to launch ventures within the family ecosystem. Many preferred to build their companies independently, seeking to avoid family oversight and the constraints of having relatives as shareholders. He recalls: “I was a member of the family board with my cousins, and we said: ‘That’s very dangerous!’ Because these entrepreneurs will probably keep selling their shares to put their money into their own businesses and there will be no more family project.”
In 2002, the family launched CREADEV, an investment fund designed to support both family and external ventures. Yet while successful in many respects, the fund struggled to attract the family’s own budding entrepreneurs. The reasons were clear: the application process was complex, and founders were reluctant to give up control by ceding majority stakes. The response was swift and pragmatic. A second vehicle – the Club des Entrepreneurs (CDE) – was introduced with a simpler design and more founder-friendly rules. The result was striking. The CDE attracted more than 40 family entrepreneurs and achieved a significantly higher success rate than typical investment funds. Beyond capital, the real value of the system lay in access to expertise, mentoring, and tailored boards of directors. Mayaud highlights: “It is a real success because they take advantage of our ecosystem. For instance, we invest capital but that is not the most important element. The most important, for them, is to benefit from the talents of the whole ecosystem.”
A shared future, deliberately shaped
Sustaining entrepreneurship over generations requires more than structures and capital. It also demands a shared sense of purpose. In the Mulliez clan, this is actively cultivated through large-scale visioning exercises that take place roughly every seven years. These collective processes bring together hundreds of participants across generations, combining open discussions on future trends with moments of shared reflection. Mayaud emphasizes the importance of bringing cousins from the edges of the family system into the visioning exercises: “I always noticed that these people on the periphery had the best ideas. They were the most creative.”
Overall, the exercises not only generate strategic priorities; they also reinforce a sense of collective ownership and renew the spirit of affectio societatis. In this way, unity is not assumed – it is continuously rebuilt.
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