My father died

My father died. Suddenly. He was young. Fifty-nine.

He loved his granddaughter most of all. Our daughter. They had only three years together. His third generation.

I am not someone who shares personal things. But on this, I feel I have to. We live nice lives on the outside. We show the good parts. We don't share what isn't working. And the real failures, never.

His death changed a lot. It came at the worst possible time. Though when is it ever the right time?

We were moving between cities for my wife's work. At my business, I was just drifting. But I had told myself I would not have to think about his companies for another twenty years. I had a weekend.

He had six of them. He built more than most. One was purely family. The rest had other partners. Five partners. Complicated relationships. I did not want to take them. My brother neither.

Operating companies. Retail. Kitchenware and bicycles. Losing money. A hardware store, small but profitable, and stuck in the middle of a deal, shares changing hands. Real estate. Some of it tangled up with the loss-making parts. A private high school.

I solved exactly these problems for a living. The structure of businesses. The structure of family wealth. I am both an attorney and a tax advisor, with a background in international tax law and structures. It was still very hard. And none of it was really about the money.

I wrote my way out of it. A Czech book about the unprepared handover of a business. My partner at smpl.cz, the law and tax firm I founded, said it sounded like therapy. It was therapy. But more than that, it changed me.

Before, I worked mostly with technology companies. After, my attention turned. How do you structure wealth so it lasts generations? What do you give your children so the family business is a gift and not a weight? What to do when we have no idea what comes?

So many complicated conversations.

No one plans for death. My father planned for it less than anyone. He avoided doctors. It was fast. An embolism. A few minutes, and it was over.

So there was no will. No handover. Nothing passed down on purpose. And honestly, I had not planned either. I was in no hurry to take any of it on. We both kept putting it off.

His companies owed each other. And they owed the partners, across all of them. Money moved from the left pocket that earned it to the right pocket that didn't. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the marriage between partners still works.

But only one founding partner was left. The others had died. Their children had taken their seats.

I sat in the chair and wondered if it was all just vanity. I looked out the window, across the meadow, at the trees swaying at the edge of the forest.

It was spring. The whole meadow was coming back to life. And I sat there certain that all of it, the companies, my father, me, would end in nothing.

From Father to Nothing.

That was the thought.

In the end there is nothing anyway.

Or is there?

But that is the thing. It is not true.

My father's life was not nothing. Mine will not be. And what he built will have a positive impact on the third generation. I promise.

The world is getting better, far more than the news will ever tell you. Far fewer children die. Poverty is falling. Progress does not stop.

So how do we pass it on without wasting it? Not the money. The whole of it. That is what the next pages are for.

Michal Hanych