With the 2002 publication of their article, “The F-PEC Scale of Family Influence: A Proposal for Solving the Family Business Definition Problem,” Astrachan, Klein, and Smyrnios provided a needed boost to advancing our understanding of how family businesses are defined from an academic standpoint. Briefly, their article reviewed and critiqued not only the many academic definitions associated with family businesses, but more importantly provided a roadmap toward a theoretically derived empirical scale that could be used by future studies to test the relationships between the family, the business, and important theoretically-driven outcomes. At that time, family business definitions were often the result of the choices family business scholars wished to make, either from a research design or from a research question standpoint. For example, a family business research study may have examined or compared family versus nonfamily businesses, and thus an artificial or perhaps arbitrary dichotomy was created to categorize these firms, using some a priori definition. Alternatively, creating an overly complex definition to aid in a study of family firms created challenges associated with generalizability, or perhaps with the degree to which such a definition could be operationalized for empirical testing. Using these challenges as a guide, Astrachan et al. (2002) advocated for a parsimonious, multidimensional approach to aid family business research that emphasized the degree to which the family influences the business along three different continuous dimensions. These three dimensions are (a) the role of power (via ownership, governance, and management participation), (b) the role of experience (via the generational characteristics associated with the business), and (c) the role of culture (via the family and business value systems that permeate the business). Each of these dimensions provided added clarity to how the family’s influence within a firm can make it more or less associated with the concept of “a family business.” The F-PEC dimension of Power focused heavily on the degree to which the family’s presence within the ownership structure, or the degree to which the family was involved in the governance of the firm, gave it the structural or organizational authority and control to influence the strategic actions the firm engaged in. The dimension of Experience was more strongly related to the influence on the firm that is gained from long-term family engagement. As the firm moved from one generation to the next, the knowledge and experiences gained would translate to a stronger influence on family-centered aspects of the family business. Finally, the Culture dimension captured the deep and prevailing values, expectations, and goals associated with the family’s own value systems, and how those value systems influence the direction of the firm going forward. Each of these dimensions conceptually developed within the Astrachan et al. (2002) study were associated with particular measureable characteristics within the respective firm. Moreover, a subsequent study designed and validated these characteristics and scale items, using a large sample of firms, such that a theoretically useful empirical measure could be used to advance this concept of family business influence within firms (Klein, Astrachan, & Smyrnios, 2005). The impact of the conceptual and empirical development of the F-PEC was considerable, but perhaps more important the concepts behind the F-PEC have inspired numerous research streams within family business. In fact, it could be argued that the degree to which the three dimensions that comprise the F-PEC scale have been expanded upon is perhaps its most lasting contribution. 774979 FBRXXX10.1177/0894486518774979Family Business ReviewCarr et al. research-article2018