For entrepreneurs whose business is also their family inheritance.
Articles and guides curated for founders on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
Ask a first-business founder about her estate plan and you will usually get a version of the same answer: the business is the plan. The shop, the salon, the workshop, the small company with its three contracts, that is...
Nobody works like a first-business founder. You open before the market wakes and close after it sleeps. You are the buyer, the seller, the accountant, the security guard, and the marketing department. And when your body...
There is a habit that kills more first businesses than any competitor, any tax, any bad season. It is the hand that reaches into the till.
Here is the test, and it is smaller and sharper than the big succession questions. You die on a Saturday. What happens at the shop on Monday morning?
Every week your business makes a small surplus, and every week two futures bid for it. One future says draw: the school trip, the better sofa, the weekend that feels earned. The other says grow: another bag of stock,...
The request comes earlier than you expect. The business is barely two years old, you are drowning in work, and a relative needs a job. Your sister's son just finished school, or your cousin lost her position in town,...
There is a day in the life of a small business that changes it more than the day it was registered, and most founders walk past it without noticing. It is the day the first stranger joins the payroll. Someone who shares...
The day you finally need capital, nobody will ask how hard you work. The loan officer will not visit the shop at dawn to watch you open, and the SACCO committee will not phone your customers to hear how they trust you....
Some of the strongest small businesses anywhere are run by two people who share a bed, a surname, and a till. The husband buys stock while the wife runs the counter, or she manages the salon while he keeps the books,...
The cheapest working capital in your town is not at the bank. It is not at the SACCO, and it is certainly not on the mobile loan apps. It sits behind the counter in Kikuubo, in the wholesaler's willingness to say six...
Ask a room of small founders why they have never gone near URA and the answers all reduce to one sentence: the tax man cannot tax what he cannot see. Staying invisible feels like a discount. No file, no forms, no...
Somewhere in your town there is a founder paying annual company fees for a business that a simple registered name would have served perfectly. Two streets away there is another founder running three contracts, a sibling...
Fifteen articles ago, this track began with a hard sentence: your business is not your estate plan, yet. The word doing the work was the last one. Yet. This is the capstone: the whole staircase at once, the ten-year arc...
Every business that lasts ten years survives at least one year it did not deserve to. The road gets dug up in front of your shop. A big customer collapses owing you money. The currency moves, the season fails, and...
There comes a point when the business is bigger than your two hands. The orders outrun your capital, or the work outruns your skill, or the next level of customer sits behind doors you cannot open alone. Someone...
In the Second Temple in Jerusalem, according to the Mishnah, there was a room with no ledger.
According to the tradition, a man once stood at a well in the Galilee and looked at a stone.
On the morning of June 12, 1994, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a movement lost the only leader most of its members had ever known. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the rabbi his followers simply called the...
At harvest time in ancient Israel, the first fruit of a farmer's land was spoken for before he tasted anything. The rule, as Rabbi Levi Brackman and Sam Jaffe render it in Jewish Wisdom for Business Success (AMACOM,...
The call from the school comes on a Wednesday morning in May, and the founder takes it standing in her own workshop, in the corridor between two rows of finished furniture she cannot sell fast enough to answer it.
In a study house in Roman-ruled Judea, sometime near the end of the first century, a group of scholars argued about an oven.
In November 1494, in Venice, a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli published a fat mathematics textbook called the Summa de arithmetica. Buried inside its six hundred pages of geometry and algebra was a short section...
A day laborer in the world of the Talmud finished work at dusk and walked home to a house with no food in it. That is not a novelist's flourish. It is the legal reasoning the Rabbis themselves gave, roughly seventeen...
The men who came to see Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson at his movement's headquarters in Brooklyn were Israeli veterans, wounded in their country's wars. Everyone who dealt with them had a category ready. Their files...