Why access is the hardest currency

In the Mittelstand, a good idea rarely fails on its own merits. It fails because no one knows the person who could carry it forward — the partner, the buyer, the successor.

Those who have that access hold an advantage long before any numbers are discussed.

Collecting contacts is easy. A network is something else: a community in which each person is genuinely needed and in which trust circulates — not just business cards.

The difference shows when it matters: a mailing list stays silent, a network answers.

„Access is the hardest currency“ sounds like a claim that cannot be tested. In one field it can be: business succession.

According to the meta-analysis by the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn — 23 studies spanning some forty years — a good half of German family businesses are handed over within the family, around 17 per cent to employees, and the remaining 29 per cent to buyers from outside. Add the first two together and roughly seven handovers in ten are settled inside the existing circle. They never reach a market.

Anyone not part of that circle is therefore competing for less than a third. And that third is tight: in the succession advisory work of the chambers of industry and commerce in 2024, there were more than two companies willing to hand over for every interested successor, and 5,620 businesses had no candidate at all.

That is the evidence for the claim — but only for this one field. It does not show that access is the hardest currency across economic life; it shows that in one of the largest transfers of assets this country faces, belonging decides more often than the market does.

The real value of access lies in opening it. Whoever brings the right people to one table creates more than any single transaction.

That is what is meant by treating networks as a craft: setting the tables at which ventures begin to move.

Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn: Unternehmensnachfolgen in Deutschland 2026 bis 2030, Daten und Fakten No. 37 (2025), a meta-analysis of 23 empirical studies. Source of the family / employee / external split. Available at ifm-bonn.org.

DIHK-Report Unternehmensnachfolge 2025. Source of the ratio in chamber advisory work and the 5,620 companies without a candidate. Available at dihk.de.

Both qualifications still apply: the IfM values are pooled estimates across four decades with a considerable spread, not a count. The DIHK values come from the chambers' advisory work rather than a representative sample — anyone who never approaches a chamber does not appear in them.