Exploring financing decision making in Swedish family firms : An outlook on crowd equity

Sammanfattning: Family businesses and financial decision making is a growing topic of research. It is of value given the impact family businesses have on many economies. Family businesses are regarded to have it more difficult to attain feasible financing and also being led by another logic compared to non-family businesses. Characteristics attributed to family businesses are that they take non-financial values in to consideration, and aims to preserve the so called Social Emotional Wealth. Therefore this thesis aims to explore financial decision making in the context of family businesses and extend current research by looking at a new financing alternative, crowd equity. The purpose aims to be met by a qualitative study, with the FIBER model as base. Interviewing family business owners and management, and explore their reasoning linking it to crowd equity as a financing form. The findings in this study is in line with much of existing literature, concluding that the reasoning behind financial decisions are to a large extent motivated by non-financial factors, such as ownership and control of the businesses. The risk of losing control over the business by raising capital via equity financing is one argument against that form of financing. If equity financing is an alternative, then crowd equity seems to have characteristics that could be of interest for family businesses.