Discussion and Conclusion
In this article, we explored the relationship between external accountant usage and family firm sales growth and survival. We find that the use of an external accountant has the potential to improve the sales growth and survival of family firms. This is in line with the RBV, which suggests that a firm may potentially fill an internet resource gap by using an external advisor. However, in this article, we show that simply hiring an external accountant in and of itself does not necessarily fill the internal resource gap, as we find that SP processes enhance the sales growth benefit. Furthermore, we find that a highly embedded advisor is a necessary condition for both sales growth and survival benefits. With respect to the role of SP processes in family firms, our results show that they strengthen the positive
effect that external accountants have on sales growth. However, we find that the issue of SP processes is more
complex than we hypothesize. For example, our results show that when it comes to survival, all firms benefit
from external accountant usage no matter the level of SP processes in place. Although not adhering to our
proposed hypotheses, the unexpected result can perhaps be explained by the contrasting needs of family firms
based on the stages of their life cycle (Klepper, 1996) In this study, we find that family firms that are characterized by low levels of SP processes are younger, smaller, more leveraged, and have a higher risk of failure. These firms may require advice on matters pertinent to the survival of the firm. The role of the external accountant may be very different when advising family firms that are characterized by a high level of SP processes. We find that these firms tend to be older, larger, less leveraged, and have a lower risk of failure. Such family firms may thus require advice relating to improving their existing sales growth. This effect of SP processes provides many opportunities for future research. Although the role of strategic planning in explaining financial performance has been extensively researched
in the past (Schwenk & Shrader, 1993), we provide a further contribution by demonstrating how it may moderate the relationship between external advice and financial performance in family firms. With respect to the role of advisor embeddedness in family firms, our results show that only family firms with highly embedded external accountants receive sales growth and survival benefits. From a theoretical perspective, this is important, as prior work that has
used the RBV to explain the benefits of using external advisors has not considered the concept of embeddedness. Interestingly, our results show that embeddedness is a necessary condition to receive the benefit of an external accountant. In other words, embeddedness captures the process of internalizing the external accountant
within the firm. Specifically, external accountants alone do not constitute a valuable resource; however, once
embedded, they become a valuable resource and a source of competitive advantage.