Inheritance Is Not Succession

In 2024, I was in Kumasi for a project. After a training session, I needed to get back to Accra to finish some business. Since I schooled in Kumasi, I know my way around, so I headed to one of the popular bus terminals to get a car.

That day, I met a new manager. A young man, freshly given the terminal to run. And from the moment I stepped in, I could see something was off. He was commanding people up and down, speaking rudely and harshly to elderly passengers and drivers alike, moving here and there as if the whole terminal existed to prove he was in charge. People were just watching him. Observing. The drivers were visibly uncomfortable, and even the passengers already seated in the vehicles were unhappy, because you don’t provoke a driver before he moves his car. We waited almost two hours to get a vehicle, because it was peak season and everyone was trying to move towards Accra.

While we waited, the conversation in the bus drifted, as conversations do, to the young manager. Someone said, maybe he’s trying to be a fair man, trying to set standards. But it became clear that wasn’t it. He wasn’t being fair. He was being rude. He wasn’t managing properly. And then someone mentioned who he was: the owner’s nephew, handed the terminal to manage after finishing his tertiary education.

The Missing Link

Now, on the surface, that’s not a bad decision. Give the young one an opportunity. Let him learn the business, grow into responsibility. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But here’s what happened in practice: no proper training, no proper handover, mentorship, and systems. Just, “you’ve finished school, go and manage.” And a business that the owner had clearly built with some level of order and reputation was now being run by someone who didn’t understand how to treat people, how to lead, how to represent what the founder had spent years building.

This is not a small story about one bus terminal in Kumasi. This is the story of countless businesses across Ghana, across Africa. A father builds something for twenty, thirty years. He grows a name, a reputation, a system of trust with customers and workers. Then age catches up with him, or he simply wants to step back, and he hands it over to a relative. A son. A nephew. A niece. Someone he trusts by blood, not necessarily someone he has prepared by design.

And that is where I want to draw a line that I think every business owner reading this needs to sit with: inheritance is not succession.

The Inheritance Gone Wrong

Inheritance is what happens when you pass something down because of relationship. Succession is what happens when you deliberately prepare someone, or a system, to carry a business forward. One is about who you are to the owner. The other is about what you are equipped to do for the business. They can happen together, a relative can absolutely be the right successor, but they are not the same thing, and treating them as if they are is how businesses that took decades to build collapse within a few years of the founder stepping away.

Think about the young manager in Kumasi. He inherited a position. He did not inherit the wisdom, the temperament, the systems, or the standards that had made that terminal work before him. Nobody sat him down and said, this is how we treat our elders here, this is how we handle a driver who is under pressure, this is how we keep passengers coming back instead of avoiding this terminal for another one down the road. He was given authority without being given understanding. And authority without understanding is a dangerous thing to hand to anybody, family or not.

I think of the owner in that story, and I don’t believe he set out to sabotage his own business. I think, like many of us, he assumed that completing school was preparation enough. He assumed that trust was transferable, that because he trusted this young man as family, the market would trust him too. But the market doesn’t extend goodwill because of bloodline. Customers, drivers, passengers, they respond to how they are treated, not to who your uncle is.

Did you know this about GUCCI?

This brings me to a story that has been told in business circles for years, but that I think we still haven’t fully absorbed the lesson of: the story of Gucci.

Aldo Gucci was one of the men who took his family’s leather business and turned it into something the whole world recognised. He pushed it into America. He built the brand until the double-G symbol wasn’t just a logo, it was a statement, a mark of status that people around the world wanted to be seen wearing. Under his leadership, Gucci stopped being a regional Italian business and became a name spoken in the same breath as luxury itself.

But behind that glamour, there was a weakness that nobody in the family fixed. The business remained, at its core, a family entitlement. Shares and roles were distributed according to bloodline, not according to capability or preparation. There was no clear governance structure. No agreed way to separate who owned the business from who ran it, and who was simply entitled to benefit from it because of their surname. And when a business has no structure to govern how decisions are made, control eventually becomes the thing everyone fights over.

That is exactly what happened. Control, ownership and leadership within the Gucci family turned into open warfare. There were legal battles between relatives. There was betrayal. There was scandal that spilled into public view and became as much a part of the Gucci story as the fashion itself. By the 1990s, a business that had once defined global luxury was losing millions of dollars and standing at the edge of bankruptcy. The family that had built the name could not hold on to the company that carried it. They had to surrender control to outside investors just to keep it alive.

Today, the name Gucci is still powerful. You will find it in the most prestigious stores, on the most recognisable bags and shoes, in the wardrobes of people who may not even know the family’s history. But here is the point I want you to sit with: no member of the Gucci family owns or runs the company today. The name outlived the family’s hold on it, but the family did not outlive the absence of a proper plan.

Now put these two stories side by side in your mind, not to compare them, but to notice what they are both trying to tell us. A bus terminal in Kumasi and a fashion house in Italy have almost nothing in common in scale, industry, or geography. But they share the same root failure. Somebody built something valuable. Somebody assumed that handing it to family was the same as preparing family to carry it. Nobody built the systems, the governance, the training, the structures that would let the business survive the transition from the founder’s hands to the next generation’s hands.

Beyond You, What Else

This is what I want every business owner reading this, especially those of us building in African markets, to take seriously. If your business has grown over the last five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, and you are aging, or simply beginning to think about stepping back, this is the moment to put structures in place. Not the moment your health fails you. Not the moment you’re forced to step back suddenly. Now, while you still have the strength and the clarity to build it properly.

What does that actually look like? It starts with a proper handover document, not a verbal instruction to “go and manage.” It means training that goes beyond a tertiary certificate, training in how the business actually runs day to day, the relationships it depends on, the standards it was built on. It means mentorship, where the founder or an experienced hand walks alongside the successor for a season before fully letting go, rather than disappearing and leaving a young person to learn everything by trial, at the business’s expense. It means governance, a clear structure for who decides what, who owns what, and how disagreements get resolved, so that control does not become a battlefield the moment the founder steps aside.

And it means being honest with yourself about whether the person you are handing your business to is the right successor because they are prepared, not only because they are related to you. That is not disloyalty to family. That is loyalty to everything you have built, and to the family itself, because a business that collapses because of poor succession does not just hurt the founder, it hurts everyone who depended on it, the workers, the customers, and yes, the very relatives it was meant to benefit.

Most of the businesses that are thriving globally today are the ones that found a way to grow beyond total reliance on the founder. They built systems that could run the business even when the founder wasn’t in the room. They separated the person from the process. And because of that, they were able to survive transitions that would have broken a business still standing on the founder’s shoulders alone.

If it’s not done, the pattern repeats itself. Businesses rise, and then they fall, right around the time the owner or the key people exit. We see it in small businesses like that bus terminal in Kumasi. We have seen it play out on the world stage with a name as big as Gucci. The scale is different. The lesson is the same.

We are trying to grow African businesses that last beyond the first generation, beyond the second, into institutions that outlive the people who founded them, the way the strongest global brands have done. That will not happen by accident. It will happen because founders decided, deliberately, to stop confusing inheritance with succession, and to start building the structures that make continuity possible.

So I leave you with this to think through. Look honestly at your business, at where it stands today, and at where you are in your own journey as a founder. What structures do you need to put in place now, so that whoever takes over after you, family or not, inherits a business that is ready to be led, not just a title to hold?

I invite you to join us at the upcoming workshop, check www.bkc.name/rebrand, where we will go deeper into these measures.

Remember, I’m your brand and publishing consultant.

The best is yours.