The Ones Who Don't Want the Business
Every founder eventually meets the moment. A daughter who answers questions about the shop with polite, escaping eyes. A son who studied something the business has no use for, on purpose. A niece who...
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
Every founder eventually meets the moment. A daughter who answers questions about the shop with polite, escaping eyes. A son who studied something the business has no use for, on purpose. A niece who...
Somewhere in America, a founder sold the business he had spent his life building, banked the money, and woke up the next morning with nothing to command. He reached for the only language that fit. "I...
The Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois in Chicago looks, from the outside, like a family's finest hour. Jim Liautaud, a self-made technology entrepreneur, endowed it...
Toward the end of his life, one of the richest men in America called his family together to read them a letter. Jay Pritzker, grandson of the Russian immigrant law clerk who founded a dynasty that...
Every family fortune, however large, is in a race against multiplication. The clearest statement of that race we have ever read is a single paragraph of arithmetic from Hap Perry, founder and...
A man retired at 41 with more money than most people earn in several lifetimes, and the first thing his freedom took from him was the weekend. "The weekend would come and I would wonder how I could...
For five generations, the Brown family of Kentucky has run Brown-Forman, the distillery behind Jack Daniel's, and for five generations its young heirs have grown up knowing exactly what the door into...
Dennis T. Jaffe spent his working life as a clinical psychologist advising families in business together, and at the time of the story he tells on himself in Working with the Ones You Love: Conflict...
Two brothers in their twenties, both in the family manufacturing firm, could not stop fighting. Dan, the engineer, ran production and was close to their father. Jerry, the marketer, ran sales, was...
A chief executive asks his accountant for a cup of coffee. In any ordinary company this is a small rudeness at worst, forgotten by lunch. But in the scene Dennis T. Jaffe sketches near the middle of...
"The members of the Chase family have been in the jewelry business for 92 years, and we want the benefits of the business, and the values of our family, to be perpetuated in the future." So opens a...
In January 2004, a salesman walked out of the industrial abrasives company where he had worked for years, and on his way out he told a co-worker exactly why. "I am tired of busting my butt so that...
Two myths circulate wherever families do business together, and they are opposites, which is how you know at least one of them must be wrong. The first myth says love is enough: we are a close...
There is a moment in the life of almost every family business that the founder never sees coming, because it arrives disguised as good news. Orders are up. The shop that started at one market stall...
In 1946, in Akron, Ohio, a husband and wife named Jerry and Goldie Lippman started a business in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie's parents' house. Goldie had worked in Akron's rubber...
In the spring of 2010, a founder named John Manuck was wrapping up a planning meeting with his executive assistant. He had built Techmer PM, a plastics additive company, from nothing since 1981; by...
At thirty-three, the young man was running his family's insurance brokerage day to day. His father, the second-generation owner, remained chairman. Wanting to grow into the job properly, the son...
A founder built a company and owned every share of it. He ran it well, and he ran it alone. Then one day his airplane went down, and he was gone. His two sons were not in the business. Each inherited...
In Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, two brothers run a family business founded in 1867. The Tengelmann Group is enormous: 4,346 stores, 83,826 employees, sales of 11 billion euros in the year the...
Say the word "audit" at a family business meeting and watch the room change temperature. Suggest that the books be checked by someone outside the family, that the person who sells should not be the...
A father asked his son to come home and run the family company, and the son said no. Not because the business was failing; it had been trading for over three hundred years. Not because the son was...
Somewhere in Germany, a family that has owned a steel business for around 130 years holds its annual owners' meeting. The company has had a good year. Around the table sit cousins from a consortium...
In Barcelona, two brothers owned a pharmaceutical company fifty-fifty. Jorge and Antonio Gallardo had built Almirall into a business with thousands of employees, and they worked together the way...
A founder once described his situation to a consultant in five sentences that deserve to be studied the way engineers study a collapsed bridge. "I have had my son working for me in the family...