Not all entrepreneurship is fast-paced and ephemeral. Some companies stay in business for centuries or even millennia, and, as experts have discovered, such long-lived firms have a few traits in common. Studying the secrets of forever firms may give other ventures some pointers on how to stay in it for the long haul.

Most companies don't last very long. Fewer than half of publicly traded companies survive on the exchange more than 11 years – roughly the life expectancy of a big dog – and only a handful live longer than the average human being, according to statistics compiled by Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute. But unlike human beings and their best friend, there are exceptions to the rule. Consider Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot springs spa in Hayakawa, Japan, that has been treating guests to a satisfying soak since 705 CE. Or Staffelter Hof, for which 862 was a very good year – its vineyard in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate opened for business. And although rare, Nishiyama Onsen and Staffelter Hof aren't alone: A 2008 Bank of Korea study found the world had more than 5,500 companies over 200 years old – 56% of them in Japan, 15% in Germany and 4% in the Netherlands.

A decade ago, when employees were being encouraged to "move fast and break things," such long-term survival might have been viewed as just a slow-motion failure – a succession of opportunities left to rust. But now that sustainability and resilience have emerged as important goals for business, the lives of exceptionally old companies may be worth a closer look.

The sustainability experts

Old-old companies tend to have a few things in common beyond a lot of birthdays. While some, like Staffelter Hof, once belonged to monasteries, most of today's old-timers belong to families. They tend to grow very slowly and have fewer than 300 employees. Some have a sustainable comparative advantage, such as Nishiyama Onsen's hot springs, or a special relationship with their customers, like that of Marinelli Pontifical Bell Factory, a church bell foundry in Agnone, Italy, whose main customer is the Roman Catholic Church. The foundry, which was established in 1339 (at the latest), was granted the special privilege of using the papal coat of arms on its bells by Pope Pius XI a century ago.

Often, old-old companies are very risk-averse. "They're typically not ambitious," says Geoffrey West, author of the 2017 book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. A very old Japanese inn, for example, "doesn't want to become Best Western and have copies of itself all over the world. That's not what it has in mind. It just wants to go on providing the service they have ad infinitum, whereas that's not what most companies want to do." 

There is even an international association comprised of around 50 family companies which are more than 200 years old called Henokiens, named after Enoch, a Biblical patriarch who reportedly lived to the age of 365. One of its members is The Van Eeghen Group, a Dutch company founded in 1662. Its chairman, Duco Sickinghe, says that most of the other companies in this group "are very much focused on their core values, core business and persistence." 

Profit tends not to be top of mind for very old companies. This was true at least for Van Eeghen – the Amsterdam-based trading firm began trading in wool and linen, shifted to North American real estate in the 19th century and now deals in functional ingredients, such as nutritional supplements. According to Sickinghe, his family's company often gave away a lot of the money earned over the years. "Whenever they had too much money, they gave it away. They were Baptists, and Baptists don't like to keep money," he explains. "Money smells."

Not all these owner families are religious, but the old-old do tend to have some kind of strong commitment, according to Morten Bennedsen, a professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen. "They're loyal to something. Some of them are just loyal to the family or the business legacy. Some of them are loyal to their communities. Some of them are loyal to countries," he says.

New values are added from time to time as well. After seven years as a management consultant, Claudio Stefani returned to his family's company, Acetaia Giusti, a maker of aged balsamic vinegar in Modena, Italy. But after getting offers from private equity companies for his family's 400-year-old firm, suddenly he realized that he wanted to hang on to the company so he could make sure his employees were treated well. "I actually realized that my purpose was their well-being," he recalls. For Van Eeghen, one of those core values is taking care of their customers. "We don't own anything," Sickinghe says. "If you don't talk to your customers, they may forget you."  

The customer is sometimes right

Old-old Japanese companies, however, see their relationship with the customer differently, says Yoshinori Hara, a professor at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Economics. "In Western hospitality, the customer is superior, better than the service provider, but in Japan … the customer and the service provider are equal," he explains. "The service is designed to encourage people to know more about the value of the hospitality and understand the essence of the intrinsic value of the hospitality."

In Japan, old-old companies also tend to also have a very clear statement of purpose that helps them navigate, according to Hara. For example, he notes a traditional flower arrangement company that works under the motto "life is limitless," a philosophy that the company interprets to mean that whether it operates in Japan or a foreign branch, it only works with local plants and makes arrangements that last even as the flowers dry. Hara argues that such key values are one reason Japan has so many long-standing businesses and traditional cultural practices. Having this clarity enables a firm to decide which elements of its business are changeable and which should be unchangeable.

East or West, such a sense of legacy seems to be important to ancient firms. "All of these very old family businesses have idiosyncratic stories of their businesses, and many of them really think about their business strategy today in relation to what their forefathers or their foremothers did generations ago," Bennedsen says. 

Jim Collins, co-author of the 2004 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, agrees that stories can be a very important part of a company's identity. "Stories are not a form of marketing. They're a form of conveying the existential roots of a company and its highest aspirations," he says. "They can be enormously powerful and enormously useful for younger companies, for midstream companies, and then especially over the very long arc of truly enduring great companies."