Capitalizing on your business heritage

Business history is vital in that it provides important insights into a company’s growth, challenges, and decision- making over time. Understanding where a company comes from—its origins, achievements, and challenges— helps to chart a more effective path forward. Business heritage may strengthen brand identity, foster loyalty, and connect companies with their roots, inspiring both employees and customers alike. Recognizing the importance of business history may help companies make informed decisions while honoring the legacy that shaped their current and future success.

The benefits of knowing your business’s past include:

• Identifying core values and foundational stories of a business
• Building cohesion, helping business leaders, employees, and others feel like they are part of something greater than themselves
• Providing important perspectives on the past and how the company approaches future planning and times of transition
• Leveraging a family business or corporation’s legacy to celebrate milestones and anniversaries

Below are five ways to start preserving your company’s history or enhancing what might already exist.

When building a business history, an important first step is to ask yourself: What do we already know? What are we interested in learning? The answers to these questions will help guide the process. First, check and see what, if any, historical records survive with the company itself. Is there a company archive in existence? Are there old files gathering dust in a storage room? Identifying and analyzing these sources can add a unique dimension to your business heritage.

Moving beyond the physical records already in the business’s possession, one must look at the personal, human angle. Speak to the company’s founders, leaders, and employees across various levels of the business. Record them sharing their past. If it is a family business, how does the family’s own history impact the company’s trajectory over time? Who made the business what it is today? What did they overcome to help the business succeed? What were some key events throughout the company’s history? How did the business adapt to changing times? Pay particular attention to the details—no matter how small—from interviewees. It is here that nuggets of information can often be found.

After assessing what you do know, or already have access to, it is time to branch out. Seek out researchers, public archives, libraries, governmental institutions, among other repositories or sources. Have any researchers or historians previously investigated your business history or the family history of its founders? What, if anything, has already been collected or written about your business history?

Throughout the discovery process, it is important to consider how to organize the materials. This can look different depending on the needs at hand. If a business does not already have a formal company archive in operation, organizing and cataloguing the research into a cohesive collection may be of interest. Old files, like financial records, correspondence, reports, photographs, business plans, among others, can be categorized by themes and then preserved in acid-free folders and boxes. Digitize any physical documents and store them in multiple formats, including hard drives and cloud storage. Oral histories should be transcribed, so that they are more easily accessible and searchable. Regularly update the archive with new interviews, findings, and documents. By following some of these steps, you will help ensure that the company archive is well-organized and preserved for future generations to come.

Business histories can offer valuable insights and a strategically competitive edge. Incorporate elements of your history into compelling brand narratives, including business and family origins, past challenges and successes, and moments of innovation or transition, that resonate with customers and foster community engagement. These brand narratives can also be used when celebrating milestones which, in turn, enhance marketing efforts and attract investors. By leveraging business history in these ways, companies not only preserve valuable lessons from the past but also inform more strategic, forward-thinking decisions.

Conducting a business history is essential for preserving the stories, experiences, and key moments that shape a company’s legacy. By gathering old documents and oral histories, organizing them effectively, and sharing this knowledge, businesses can learn from the past, strengthen their identity, and enhance decision-making for future growth.

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