After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (2018)

But, damn, what a fine piece of writing. A seamless connection of facts and reminiscences all taking me somewhere. The author tells his family's and their extended family's story, without all the contortions and schnookery involved in "telling a story" in our marketing-besotted culture.

"Touching the product makes it different" is a remarkable turn of phrase.

A few years out of school, I took a detour from tech/entrepreneurship to work in my family business (overseeing operations in a construction manufacturing facility, in Egypt), mostly with my Uncle. In my case, though I fully prefer tech as an industry, the deal-breakers were a dismal economic/political climate and an... interesting Uncle.

Apart from that, a lot of the article resonated. A few other things that stood out and made the transition hard for me were: corruption (in the construction industry, hard to avoid) and culture/hierarchy.

Great read, thank you to the author who took the time to write up all that, it was very insightful and must have been fucking difficult in many ways.

It seems like a very befitting word for the eponymous "hacker" ethos of this site.

* At times it felt like the true sons are the companies they started. They live and breathe in them. I have a strange detachment to my own family because of this.

* Thus, they have serious attachment issues and zero succession plans.

* My mom later passed away too soon and missed out much of the life experience she could have had. Glad that she did travel around the world before death.

* Even after all that, my old man still doesn’t have succession plan. Dunno what’s gonna happen to all the people working for him. And the clock is ticking.

* Like OP, I spent most of my life in the US, so I too would be useless in dealing with the businesses. Even the real estate company (something I know a bit in the US) is far too different back there.

Also, blatant corruption is simply not my cup of tea.

I tried to help them multiple times. I offered to sponsor them green card, but they consistently refused. I offered if they need help finding private equity to liquidate and just retire. Sometimes I wonder if my mom could have been saved with US quality healthcare.

Oh well, I did my best, there was nothing I could have done.

Like what happened to Wang.

Today they are technically bankrupt and reluctantly handed over control to seasoned management and they are spinning out parts of the company to raise capital to save the core business.

@asanwal thank you for sharing this.

First time, I visited, the company with my dad, I was surprised in how much things a fragrance is used. From perfume, shampoo but also cleaning products. It's a fascinating business.

It seems like an even more important qualification was that the founder's son was also a founder. Otherwise this would have been much less likely to work.

Let's say he was a software dev, no team lead, no manager, individual contributor. How would things play out?

"Growth is tangible."

Love the way he packaged this!

This was a pretty insightful story. Thank you for sharing it.

The day of his funeral, his wife begged me to look at his work laptop and help her out. She even mentioned us being partners in the company. I was already running my own successful company at the time and had almost no time do this.

I found the time and saved her probably close to $150,000 in customers pissed off because my brother stopped handling support due to his illness, forgotten about purchase orders, and a website that he pre-paid for $20,000 and was never delivered because he died and never told them he was sick. They sent over the entire amount within a few days of me explaining the situation.

I never expected any money for this work, I was just trying to clean up the business and get it back to a functional level. A few months later, when she had time to grieve and think about things, she wanted to talk partnership. Her first offer was to pay me $15/hour, which I rejected (and laughed about later with my wife).

Her second offer was to give me 10% of the company and when her kids turned 18 in 8 years, they would get full control over the company (including my 10%). I was personally offended because she essentially wanted me to maintain and build up the entire company, take a very low percentage along the way, only to hand over the entire company to her kids (my nephews).

When I explained this to her and rejected the offer, she told me that I had no skills beyond 'answering emails' and that I didn't 'understand how business worked'.

Shortly after this, she found an email from my brother's old friend who was very religious. She had also recently found god and as a result, convinced this person that he needed to help her for free. For the last 6 or 7 years, the business has been in maintenance mode with this person answering emails, for free. I know the technical capabilities of this person and most responses are basically re-installing the software or rebooting the computer. I am also in the tech industry and the job this person has is about the level I was at when I was 15 (I'm 45 now).

The result was as I expected: Most of his clients stopped re-purchasing licenses because there is no more support or bug fixes and you also just can't trust the security of software after it hasn't been updated in 10 years.

She now has to work a minimum wage job making meals for the elderly (which isn't a bad thing) and the company is close to bankruptcy. It was good we were never partners, because I probably would not have been able to start my next business.

It took my brother over a decade to build his successful company, and a few years for his wife to destroy it.

Why didn't you elevate someone from inside to the CEO position? Seems like a great way to maintain ownership (and take care of people) while also rewarding the best employees.

> - Reducing expenses

Good insights. I’m curious if there are other models of business that are just as simple and useful… :)

To me this just highlights the absurdity of capitalist ownership.

I'm not sure what the author means by this. Sad though it may be, most people will experience their dad dieing.

And inheriting control of a company sounds like a 1%'er problem if I ever heard one.

What is OP wishing to spare the rest of us from, exactly?