From Father to Nothing · the second letter
Letting Go
Previously: My father died
Two years later, I was talking with a successor from the next generation. He runs a family office in Latin America with his father. We got to their manufacturing business. Alongside it they hold the usual, real estate, private equity, the stock markets. Sell the family business? My father would kill me, he says. And his father would turn in his grave. Out of the question.
For two years now I have been deep in the handover of businesses between generations. In the relationships between partners. In the disputes. Disputes between partners. Disputes inside families. Or rather the silence that is not peace.
I am a lawyer and a tax advisor. When I started an accounting firm, I did not even tell them at home. That was thirteen years ago.
I wanted to prove it on my own.
My father pulled me into the business from early on. In our apartment block I ran up and down the stairs with a screwdriver in my hand, fixing things. He did not much like the stairs himself. I changed the bulbs. I collected the rent. He used to say it would suit him to have sons who were a lawyer and an economist. So my brother and I both studied both.
But the deeper handover never came. From the outside, of course, I could see in. I can read financial statements, so I had a rough sense of how each company stood. I know the legal side too, so I know what it takes to vote things through, and what happens whether we agree or we do not. And I had a working, fairly large law and tax firm behind me.
But into the daily running of it, I could not see at all. For a simple reason. I did not want to take it over. I have my life, my brother has his, and we did not want to continue his business.
Nothing was prepared for the handover. There was no will.
My father had partners. Since the nineties, four of them had carried it together. He was the youngest. They all had one thing in common. None of them knew how to leave. They all held on until the end. None of them ever handed anything over.
I needed to clear my head. Or rather to sort the chaos. One thing my father did pass on to me is a love of the sea. He loved boats. We had our first motorboat back in the nineties. I got my motor licence as soon as I could. Only last year did I add the licence for sail. With respect for how much I cannot do, and how little I know about the sea. Let alone the ocean. As children we only ever took the motorboat out, in Croatia.
I have a feeling everyone the ocean draws in carries deep scars. And resilience at the same time. We were sailing the middle of the Atlantic on an expedition yacht, the Boomerang. Out near the Azores, where there is no phone signal. The Starlink did not work either. All that is left is the trust that you can manage on your own. No one is coming to save you.
Letting go. Surrendering to the current. To the wind.
The very first evening on the boat was filled with the things I had come to sail away from.
A partners' dispute. They had an agreement on a share of the profit, and the majority owner did not want to pay it out. But the other partner had access to the account, so he paid himself directly and called it even. Convicted of fraud. He did not accept the verdict. He sold everything, bought a boat in Italy, and for twenty-five years he and his partner crossed the ocean. In the end a routine smuggling check caught him at the border between Brazil and Argentina. He is free again now, and back on the water.
Another story. A business handed down between generations. The father had been a bon vivant, with political connections. Things went well for him. Then came the weight of how it had been under the father. Now it does not go well. The television came, and on camera the successor wore the face of a man for whom everything is in perfect order. Inside, ruin. How do you tell the world? And how do you make peace with yourself? I understand that smile, that calm on the outside, so well.
It is not only the ocean. Last year, on dry land, I spoke about my own experience in public for the first time, at the Family Business Week Summit. With a trembling voice, I took on one of the speakers before me. The founder of a successful company, a known one, a beautiful one. He talked about how the company runs well enough under him, but his grandson will take it to a hundred and fifty percent. I wanted to cry. It is so unlikely that the grandson, of all people, lifts the company even higher. And the weight that puts on the boy. If he cannot do it, everything around him falls apart.
That evening I was lucky to fall into a long conversation with Johannes Gullichsen. We talked several more times after. He is the fifth generation. In their family business it is now the sixth and the seventh. He has a background in the financial markets, and he knows the whole thing could be sold and held as a plain index. But Ahlström holds them together, even though it does completely different things now than when it began. Hundreds of family shareholders.
That day was strange. Different. For a moment I had the feeling I was putting something back together.
On Thursday I had a meeting with my father at our law office. We went through the structure of his companies. What works and what does not. One of them losing money. The balance of power between the partners is not simple. Real estate tied across by guarantees and operating debts. It needs cleaning up.
I had another meeting, so I moved him out quickly. We still managed a bowl of mushroom soup.
"This is really a lot of work. Who is going to carry it?" I asked, at the end.
"I will work it off," my father said.
We patted each other on the shoulder, the way men do. The next day he died. Friday.
Michal Hanych