Family business researchers widely investigated the loss or the threatened loss of socioemotional wealth. Another growing theme within entrepreneurship is the consequences of business failures affecting entrepreneurs. However, these two fields rarely overlapped. The aim of this study was to explore different challenging events' effects on the family entrepreneurs and to identify the factors that can determine the successfulness of the coping strategies. In this study, we present three case

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... es about family enterprises, which went through a challenging period and balanced between failure and success. In two cases the main challenges rooted in familiness of the enterprises and in the third case the challenge came from external regulatory change. The two inner challenges were generated by the retirement of the founder and the divorce between the two owners. We could observe both successful and partially successful coping strategies, but the common point was that all of them were strongly rooted in the socio-emotional wealth of family businesses.