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There is a book that teaches consultants, step by step, how to win your family as a client. It scripts their first meeting with you, tells them what to say to make you feel safe, what to say to make...
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
There is a book that teaches consultants, step by step, how to win your family as a client. It scripts their first meeting with you, tells them what to say to make you feel safe, what to say to make...
Sara was, by every account, a gifted entrepreneur: competent, highly energetic, the kind of person who builds things. She started a temp agency and pleaded with her husband, Jeff, to join her. He...
A seventy-five-year-old widower owns eight jewelry stores doing about twelve million dollars a year in sales. His two sons work in the business and argue constantly, in the office, in front of the...
Stew Leonard ran a dairy store in Connecticut so successful that people wrote about it in business school cases. One day he called a son into his office. The son had been performing badly at work,...
Almost every budgeting book ever written makes the same silent assumption in its first chapter: that money arrives the way rain arrives in England, a steady drizzle, every month, in roughly the same...
Somewhere in your house, on paper or in an abandoned app, is a budget you built with real hope. Categories for food, transport, school fees, airtime, a modest line for enjoying your life. It lasted...
For three years, an accountant came home from work, ate his dinner, and sat down to a second job that paid him nothing. He wanted to become a software engineer, so he taught himself to code: side...
Somewhere today, an advisor is asking a client the financial industry's favorite question: what is your risk tolerance? The client will think for a moment, consult their stomach, and produce an...
In 1998, the smartest room in finance blew up. Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund run by John Meriwether, one of the most celebrated bond traders alive, alongside Myron Scholes and Robert...
The scene takes place at Nonna, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, sometime around 2010. Two investment writers are having lunch when a stranger approaches the table clutching a thick envelope from a...
Picture a family's wealth drawn as a pie chart, the way a bank brochure would draw it. One wedge is a plot of land in the village, held since the grandfather's time. One wedge is the family business,...
On paper, a small-business owner in South Africa is one of the best-supported entrepreneurs on earth. There is the Industrial Development Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa for...
In March 2020, when South Africa entered one of the hardest lockdowns on earth, the government did something governments rarely do: it opened the treasury. Business rescue packages appeared, real...
Before there was a store, there was a car. Before there was a brand, there was a trunk that opened, and inside it, sneakers. In the months just before the pandemic reached South Africa, a founder...
There is a country on Africa's west coast that, by one measure, is among the richest places on earth. Oil made it so. And there is a second fact about the same country that should not be able to...
Somewhere near the end of a two-hundred-page academic volume on African entrepreneurship, in the smallest type on the page, sits a footnote. Footnote 1, chapter 10. Academic footnotes are where...
Sometime in the depths of the pandemic, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, a researcher sat down with the owner of a small construction business and asked him how he was surviving. The man's answer...
In 1995, Kenya's Court of Appeal sat down to explain the limits of a dead man's freedom, and instead of citing precedent after precedent, the judges reached for two pictures. The case was Elizabeth...
Before a single strategy is discussed, before any fee is paid, before you have said one word about your land or your children, an estate lawyer will usually hand you a piece of paper. In the United...
William and Emma Banks bought land the way many of our grandparents bought land: early, cheaply, and long before anyone else could see what it would become. Their 3.4 acres sat on the beachfront in...
In 1936, in the princely state of Mysore in southern India, a man named Lachiah Setty died. He was the head of one of the wealthiest families in the state, with coffee estates, securities, and...
There is a myth most families carry about inheritance disputes, and it is a comfortable one: that the worst an unsettled estate can produce is unpleasantness. Cold greetings at funerals. A brother...
Picture a church fellowship hall somewhere in America, folding chairs in a circle, and a game in progress. Each family has been asked to bring one object that symbolizes who they are, and to explain...
A father is offered a new job. It pays better than the last one, and it will keep him traveling, away from home more. Flip the scenario: another offer pays less but returns him to his family's dinner...