The undercapitalization, meant as the double effect of the inadequate level of equity capital contributed by the proprietary families and of the difficult access to external equity and debt capitals, which are already low by definition in Italy[1];

 The lack of managerial resources, meant both as the inability to temporarily attract experienced managers for managing the transients in a family business life cycle (e.g., training of the potential successors, internationalisation management, succession management) and the difficulty in retaining these managers in case of profitable growth of the business;

The succession, meant as the transfer of the managerial leadership from a family member to another. The above-mentioned threats are well-known ones, but the credit crunch has stressed their potential impact on family businesses. In particular, the existing literature on family business management topics has always indicated the succession as the first threat (Chua et al., 2003; Ward, 2004) in terms of incidence on the survival rate of a family business: 50% of the Italian family businesses dies out at the second generation and only 15% of them survives after the third generation (CERIF, 2008); but after the credit crunch, the percentage of family businesses that are preparing to succession by force of circumstances (31%[2], CERIF, 2008) and the increase in the percentage of family businesses among the impaired and the non-performing credits expected by ABI in the next two years, make the experts think that the succession incidence on the survival rate is going to boost.If the expectations are correct, it's crucial for the survival of a family business to shift to a fully aware approach of succession management that we can define “Succession Risk Management”, meant as the process aimed at mitigating all the factors that can threaten the succession by inhibiting the transfer of the managerial leadership.  At a first estimate, the mitigation process could be the one showed as an example in Figure 1.