For entrepreneurs whose business is also their family inheritance.
Articles and guides curated for founders on building a lasting family legacy.
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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 co-owner, and a delivery van through a sole proprietorship, ...
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 appears, a friend, a cousin, a supplier who believes in you, and...
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 deductions from money that is already stretched thin. It feels...
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? Not in five years, when the estate settles. Monday. Does the door open? Who has the key? Who counts the float, and is there a...
Fifteen articles ago, this track began with a hard sentence: [your business is not your estate plan, yet](/blog/founders-business-not-estate). The word doing the work was the last one. Yet. This is the capstone: the whole staircase at once, the ten-year arc by which a duka...
In most families, debt has a single moral color, and the color is shame. A loan is something you fall into, hide, and climb out of; the relative who borrows is discussed in lowered voices; the...
There is a sentence that has sold more courses, more webinars, and more disappointment than almost any other sentence in modern money culture: make money while you sleep. It arrives in your WhatsApp...
Every culture that has watched money move through families has coined the same proverb, and the fact that they all agree should frighten us more than it does. The Americans say shirtsleeves to...
Every family hands down more than land, money, and photographs. It hands down sentences. "Money doesn't buy happiness." "People like us don't get rich." "We don't discuss money at this table." Nobody...
The richest man in America drove to work in an old pickup truck with his hunting dogs' smell in the cab. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, could have bought any car ever manufactured, and...
There is a chapter in The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter (Harper Business, 2011) that opens with a sentence so blunt it is almost cruel. "Some people are just born...
In 2008, families who had never owned a share of stock in their lives watched the value of their work shrink anyway. A shop in Kampala that sold building materials saw orders stop because a bank in...
A layoff feels like lightning: sudden, personal, unfair. But almost no layoff is actually sudden. Months before the letter arrives, the overtime dries up. The Saturday shifts stop being offered. The...
There is an old joke on trading floors that copper is the metal with a PhD in economics. Simon Constable and Robert E. Wright open a chapter with it in The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators...
There is a warning light for recessions. Not a prophet, not a rumor, not an uncle who says he can feel it in the market. An actual, public, checkable gauge that has flickered before most American...
"You might feel that sometimes the bank doesn't trust you," write Simon Constable and Robert E. Wright in The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter (Harper Business, 2011)....
Picture a grown son on the day his father's will is read. For years he has quietly assumed an inheritance of about $500,000. Nothing was ever promised out loud; nothing needed to be. The family...
Somewhere in America, at a family reunion, more than 120 people from four generations gathered in one place. Among them were 60 great-grandchildren of a single man. One of them, a young woman of 21,...
Every parent with more than one child eventually meets the arithmetic of fairness, and most meet it first in small change. Ron Blue meets it, in his book Faith-Based Family Finances, over $300. He...
Every family business has a version of this scene. Two brothers, co-owners, standing in the shop. A supplier is at the counter, or a customer, or the one good employee they cannot afford to lose. And...
There is an argument running in family businesses on every continent, and it always sounds personal. The founder, or the child who inherited the founder's discipline, says: we know how to do one...
Picture the annual meeting of a successful family business. The relatives arrive, some from far away. The chief executive, who may be a brother, a father, or a hired professional, stands up and...
There is a moment in the life of every large family when someone looks around a gathering and quietly grieves. The cousins no longer all know each other's children. Two branches have not spoken since...
Somewhere in your family's future there is a meeting no one wants to attend. An offer has arrived for the business. It is a serious offer, from a private equity firm, a conglomerate, a foreign buyer,...