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
In 2009, while most of the financial world was still sweeping up after the crash, Bloomberg Press published a book written not for families but for the professionals who advise them. Family Wealth Transition Planning,...
At about 3:25 on the afternoon of January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lifted off from LaGuardia Airport in New York with 155 people on board. Roughly two minutes later, climbing through 2,800 feet, the plane flew...
At Christmas in the year 1085, William the Conqueror held his court at Gloucester and asked a question that embarrassed an entire kingdom: what do I actually hold?
In September 2013, in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, lawyers began choosing a jury to decide what a woman none of them had ever met actually wanted. The woman was Huguette Clark, heiress to a Montana copper fortune,...
In November 2008, in St. Louis, Missouri, the shareholders of Anheuser-Busch gathered to vote on whether to sell the company to a Belgian-Brazilian brewer called InBev for about 52 billion dollars, at 70 dollars a...
In 2024, the Singapore academic publisher World Scientific released the second edition of a book called Family Wealth Management: Seven Imperatives for Successful Investing. Its authors are two of the most senior...
Sometime in the years before 2014, in one of the meetings that James E. Hughes Jr., Susan E. Massenzio, and Keith Whitaker held with the families they advised, a father made a confession that has traveled much further...
On the night of October 2, 2013, in the town of Ise in Mie Prefecture, on Japan's Pacific coast, a line of priests in white robes walked a short lamplit path between two wooden buildings. Under a silk canopy they...
In the fifth chapter of a book published in 2015 for families wealthy enough to keep their own investment counsel, a money manager named Jean Brunel stops writing about money and starts writing about an aircraft.
In the last week of July 1920, the Boston Post put a piece of plain arithmetic on its front page. Charles Ponzi, a Boston financier whose Securities Exchange Company was by then taking in roughly a million dollars a...
The Talmud's minor tractate Semahot preserves a story about a walk that went wrong.
In 1848, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, a thirteen-year-old Scottish immigrant took his first job as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, changing spools of thread for $1.20 a week. His family had just arrived from...
Two hundred and twenty pages into a book published by Bloomberg Press in 2009, in the raw months after the worst financial year most families had ever lived through, Bonnie Brown Hartley and Gwendolyn Griffith stop to...
Part of Family E, the LegacyPot persona anthologies. Fifteen guides, sequenced. A founder carries a risk most employees never face: the business and the family are tangled together, and a shock to one becomes a shock to the other. The same drive that builds a company can quietly ...
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 what the children will inherit. It feels obvious. You are...
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 starts sending invoices, the headaches, the blood pressure, ...
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, and the business gets something money cannot hire: two owners...
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. Not the thief's hand. Yours. School fees are due, so the till pays. A relative is admitted to hospital, so the till pays. The weekend needs...
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 second fridge, the deposit on the bigger space. Neither...
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. They will ask for paper. Statements, books, receipts. And in ...
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 words: take the stock, pay me Friday. Trade credit, stock...
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 suddenly the till that fed your family takes in less than it...
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, and here you are with a counter that needs minding and a till...
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 none of your blood, owes you no loyalty beyond the wage,...